Two decades ago, Mike Harris’ Conservative government bought into a feeble environmental fiction.

That testing cars for emissions problems would lead to significant reductions in smog-producing pollution.

It hasn’t.

In fact, apart from siphoning millions from the pockets of drivers annually and subjecting them biannual inconvenience, Drive Clean, at best, delivers miniscule environmental benefits.

Like all bad ideas, it made sense at the time.

Announced in 1997, Drive Clean served the Conservatives as a political shield against growing accusations the big, bad Tories didn’t care about the environment.

Toronto was experiencing record smog days, prompting alarm from environmentalists, opposition politicians and public health officials over “killer” smog and anguished calculations about the death toll caused by cars and other sources of pollution.

Not that passenger vehicles, especially older, dirtier ones from the 1970s and 1980s, weren’t a problem.

Unlike today, it wasn’t uncommon to see “junkers” on the road belching black smoke from their tailpipes.

But Ontario’s smog problem, overwhelmingly, was the consequence of smoke from coal-fired power plants south of the border migrating north in the prevailing breeze.

However, the facts did little to deter environmental activists or the provincial Liberals and NDP from going after the perceived soft environmental underbelly of the Harris Conservative government.

Growing environmental sensitivity and advocacy made clean air a hot political issue and Drive Clean offered some shade.

EVERYBODY PAYS

However, like many policy decisions rooted in ideological ambition and self-serving political goals, Drive Clean was riddled with shortcomings, false assumptions and in the end, fundamentally failed in its core purpose – to significantly reduce environmental harm.

And now in the latest twist to this now 20-year-old tale, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government announced that as of April 1, Ontarians who own cars, vans, SUVs and pickup trucks will no longer pay a $30 biannual Drive Clean emissions test fee.

The tests will continue, but Drive Clean will transition from a cash cow to a cash drain for government.

Instead of drivers paying fees to support the program – about $75 million annually to tests some 2.3 million vehicles – the provincial government will now pay the private sector garages that conduct the tests, as well as the private sector firm that manages part of the program.

That means everybody, drivers and non-drivers, pay for Drive Clean.

Meanwhile, the government has also doubled down on the program, eliminating a loophole that allowed back-to-back “conditional” passes for polluting vehicles that failed the test, and loosened caps on repairs, which for the tiny percentage of vehicles that actually fail will mean more costly repairs.

All, according to the government’s press release, to strengthen the program, reduce household costs and combat air pollution.

“The fee elimination and other changes to the program will help make life easier for vehicle owners, while ensuring Drive Clean continues to target polluting vehicles and protect Ontario’s air quality,” environment minister Glen Murray said in the release.

The problem with this latest political fiction, is that Drive Clean does none of that.

FEW VEHICLES FAIL

Plagued with problems even in the beginning, Drive Clean took two years to get up and running in 1999. When first proposed by then-Environmental Minister Norm Sterling, government testing suggested 20% of all vehicles on Ontario roads failed to meet emissions standards.

Hence the justification for the need to test everybody.

But what the government actually found when it started public testing was a 14% failure rate, and those numbers were marred by fraud and controversy over the accuracy of the testing equipment.

Shockingly to some, a small number of garage owners used failed emissions tests to bill owners hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars for questionable or unnecessary repairs.

The government responded by imposing a $200 cap on repairs and in time addressed testing issues with a new generation of testing machine.

Pass rates soon hovered around 98%, and in the years since, almost all tested vehicles have met emissions standards.

Nevertheless, successive governments have annually attributed significant environmental results for Drive Clean – boasting in 2003, for example, that the program had removed the equivalent of 600,000 cars and small trucks from Ontario roads.

Such claims were, and remain, exaggerations based on wishful extrapolation.

THE FACTS

In 2012, then-Ontario auditor Jim McCarter issued a damning assessment of Drive Clean that revealed “ministry emissions estimates showed that more than 75% of the reduction in vehicle emissions since the Drive Clean program’s inception was actually due to factors other than the program.”

McCarter was arguably being generous with that figure.

But in any case, determined emissions from passenger vehicles had declined significantly between 1998 and 2010 and were “no longer among the major domestic contributors to smog in Ontario.”

Stricter federal standards for fuel and new vehicle emissions equipment were making cars drive cleaner, not the Drive Clean program.

And it was fleet turnover – owners trading in and junking older dirtier cars from the 1970s and 1980s for newer, cleaner ones – that drove improving auto emissions, not Drive Clean.

Meanwhile, Drive Clean itself remained full of problems and loopholes that undermined any good it might have done.

The oldest, worst-polluting vehicles, those built before 1988, were exempt from testing;

The repair cap meant polluting vehicles were not taken off the road. Owners could spend a few hundred bucks to try fix the problem and keep driving;

Resale vehicles had to pass, but many that couldn’t were shipped and sold in other Canadian jurisdictions, including northern Ontario, that had no emissions testing program.

Fraud, also identified as a problem by McCarter, dogged emissions testing programs everywhere. Garages found ways to fool and cheat the system, so those gross emitters never got taken off the road.

In the end, Ontario ignored, exempted or shipped its worst emissions headaches elsewhere, but the planet itself was little better off.

THE ACID TEST

It should have been clear from the beginning that emissions testing programs looked green, sounded green but didn’t act green.

In 1999, the same year Ontario implemented Drive Clean, Minnesota cancelled its emissions testing program after finding it was unpopular and didn’t work. State air quality testing revealed carbon monoxide levels decreased at virtually the same rate for five years before their program began as they did during the program.

A Fraser Institute report here in Canada cited broad U.S. evidence emissions testing programs were unlikely to work well.

American programs had a “sorry record,” Fraser found, and purported benefits were based primarily on computer modelling, not scientific evidence.

But Ontario had also looked to British Columbia, where in 1992, B.C. instituted Canada’s first-ever “AirCare” emissions testing program.

B.C. officials, like Ontario, saw an early 14% failure rate among vehicles in that province and believed the program would help.

And like Ontario, failure rates improved with newer cars and technology.

However, a Fraser report on B.C.’s AirCare program, in addition to questioning the environmental good the program did, found it actually generated pollution.

Fraser estimated Vancouver drivers put 70 million kilometers on their vehicles during a seven year study period, burned an extra 7 million litres of fuel and added 685 tonnes of air pollutants to the environment – driving to get the test and back home again.

In any case, B.C. shut down AirCare at the end of 2014, at a point where testing showed failure rates dropping below 8%. They effectively did so because new vehicle emissions equipment made the program obsolete.

Ontario’s failure rate currently sits below 4%.

If the Liberals cared about the environment, they would junk the program and use the money where it would do actual good.

None of their proposed changes to the program will bring any tangible benefit to the air we breathe.

“Put the whole thing on hold to prevent more motorists from being gouged and screwed,” the late, great Hamilton Liberal MPP Dominic Agostino said when the Tories first struggled to get Drive Clean out of the garage.

“The whole concept (behind Drive Clean) is 10 years out of date,” he said.

Dominic was right then, and is still bang on 20 years later.

jawallace@postmedia.com