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
15-14
OMG – I didn’t know there are still people whingeing about the Metric System?
What are seniors going to do when Kenney dumbs his privatized health care system upon us? Lawyers and doctors have been pointing out for years nothing will financially destroy seniors and their families faster than an American Style Health Care System that Kenney wants to give us. My American relatives agree. You would have to be a damn fool to think this well know liar has any intention of paying for it out of public funds.
energy – gasoline, oil, natural gas – should not be owned by profiteers. it is a part of the commons and must be owned by the public. the single greatest driver of inflation are energy prices, as they affect the production/movement/cost of our needs, let alone wants.
Agreed, biff. Revenues should be used to pay back-taxes, clean up the toxic liabilities, upgrade buildings and renewable alternatives and, afterward, wind down production equitable to salvage a livable future.
Or we can stay with the status quo and wait for handouts from royalty payments while letting United Conservatives lower corporate taxes and throw some of the largesse around to grease the wheels of the runaway train to the next election. Sure, lets ignore the price gouging of utilities, the obscene subsidies to the fossil industy, and then throw a couple hundred dollars back in another Kenney-style empty gesture.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/fossil-fuel-subsidies-expaliner-1.6371411
each of your comments here are practicable and preferable to how things presently operate. it is confounding that people so support the gouging, and the profiteers – even those that complain about prices.
If you want to nationalize the energy sector, ok. But if you think it’s going to make any difference in prices you’re dreaming. look at the countries with state owned energy, for the most part they’re either charging more or their infrastructure is falling apart because of less maintenence(Venezuela). For those who say what about the NEP, the NEP was designed to bring more money into federal government coffers. It was never about helping the consumer or making Canada more self-sufficient according to Marc Lalonde the minister of energy at the time.
despite being shorted and less than ideally managed, our state run health care system is really quite good. compare that to the usa, where even people that have been led to believe they have coverage through private insurance tend to get bankrupted, as the insurance cos have all sorts of “outs” and disclaimers built into the extensive fine print.
your example of venezuela is a poor one for your position. they nationalised, and then in came massive outside interference by the the multinationals, with the usual backing of the usa secret, sanctions, service and industrial military complex. recall iraq used to be a good usa buddy, even with hussein, until they nationalised the wealth there, oil and energy. venzuela never had a chance – they would get ripped off and poisoned by rogue int’l mining allowing them to steal the wealth and plunder the land, or they get clobbered by sanctions and foreign meddling.
some things just cannot be in private hands, especially needs. this is our undoing. tell me the masses are not taking the biggest beating they will have taken in quite some time, and the uppermost of the top 1% are not raking it in at our expense. and tell me that this is not now happening due to profiteering via oil/gas/energy. the massive profits the oligarch sleazes are pulling our from under us would cover so much of the costs associated with our collective needs, such as health and education and infrastructures. that money would reduce the massive, massive tax hits we take – taxes compounded on taxes is where we are at – and in so doing, would increase the flow of money that greases the wheels of our suffering economy.
i also, however, want to acknowledge your general point, that govt is inefficient…i would even say, corrupt. we will likely agree that nepotism is a significant factor that contributes to the waste and inefficiency. the solution i suggest would be audits, and audits with teeth; the agencies would further need to be arms length from politics and govt per se, and the solutions put forth by the audits would need to be enacted.
I understand your frustration as we are all going through it. The prices you state are over 50 years old though. Gas was 39 cents a gallon in Alberta in 1970(minimum wage $1.40/hr). When I started driving in 1983 gas was 36 cents a litre(minimum wage $4.00/hr). The 1st house I rented was $150/month. The point being you can compare prices in the past to now but they’re still prices in the past and will never go back. There are many things I could afford with no problem 5 years ago that now I consider more carefully. I could pay all my bills with less than $200 in the 90’s, now that maybe gets one out of the way. But it’s not the 90’s is it?