Rising gas prices making it hard to live on pension

By Lethbridge Herald on March 10, 2022.

Editor:

 I started driving when gasoline was measured at the pump in imperial gallons. When I first started driving gasoline was around 30 cents a gallon. Yes, 30 cents a gallon. When Justin Trudeau’s father switched to the metric system for everything, I found it totally confusing.

I could no longer understand how far distances were. how much a gallon was anymore compared to a litre and the list goes on with all the things that needed to be converted from imperial measurements to metric measurements. I still have trouble remembering how many litres there are in an imperial gallon.

I recently did some figuring on how much the governments of Alberta and Canada are raking in from the taxes on gasoline in Canada. 

Now I converted all my numbers to what these taxes would be if we were still using gallons as the measure when you purchase gas, presently using $2 per litre as that is where the price of gas is heading and in some instances is at already. 

As of the first of April the carbon tax is going up significantly from the current 6.5 cents a litre to 11 cents a litre. So I converted litres to gallons to give a better picture to myself as to what the taxes I will pay per gallon of gasoline.

Provincial gas tax 13 cents per litre or 59.1 cents per gallon. Federal sales tax and excise tax is 9.2 cents per litre or 41.8 cents per gallon. Federal carbon tax as of April 1 will be 11 cents per litre or 50 cents per gallon. So if I add up all the taxes we will be paying as of April 1, on a Canadian imperial gallon it adds up to $1.509 a gallon. 

So gasoline at $2 per litre will be costing me $9.10 per imperial gallon. 

If you subtract the taxes you will find that the oil companies are also taking a huge chunk of the price of gasoline themselves, something like close to $7.60 per gallon – a far cry from the 30 cents a gallon I paid when I first started driving, taxes included. 

Asa pensioner now it is getting harder and harder to pay for light and heat for my house and to put fuel in my vehicles to get around to getting groceries and to attend to medical appointments. 

The minimal increases to my Canada pension does not even come close to the increases I have to pay just to live. 

It keeps getting harder and harder every year.

Bernard Tichler

Lethbridge