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A $450 repair cap on the relative handful of cars failing the test increased the amount of pollution coming from them in many cases.

Few drivable cars that failed were taken off the road.

They were simply sold and shipped to other jurisdictions, without testing regimes.

“Drive Clean was intended to be a time-limited program, and as the years passed, so did its usefulness” Environment Minister Rod Phillips said in a statement announcing the end of the program.“It has provided less and less value for taxpayer dollars.”

While the former Liberal government cancelled the $30 fee charged to drivers for Drive Clean testing last year — it was supposed to be revenue neutral, but by 2014 had amassed a $23 million surplus — it continued to require drivers to waste their time having older cars tested.

Prior to Ford’s announcement on Friday, Ontario was the only province still requiring emissions testing.

British Columbia’s “green” provincial governmentcancelled its program, that began in 1992, at the end of 2014, for similar reasons as Ontario’s today.

In a 2012 examination of Drive Clean, then auditor general Jim McCarter found that by 2010, vehicle emissions were no longer a major contributor to smog in Ontario and that more than 75% of the reductions had nothing to do with Drive Clean.

Rather, they were the result of tighter manufacturing standards for emission-control technologies, federal requirements for cleaner fuels and the retirement of older vehicles.

McCarter found although one of the key goals of Drive Clean was to maintain a high degree of public support, the provincial government never developed performance targets to measure or achieve this and stopped surveying public attitudes shortly after the program began.

The bottom line is Drive Clean over its 20-year lifespan wasted over a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money, to say nothing of their time, on a tax that did little to nothing for the environment.

Good riddance to it.