From: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!dmmartindale Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: Gas Prices in Canada Article-I.D.: watcgl.161 Posted: Thu Feb 3 14:27:18 1983 Received: Fri Feb 4 00:10:31 1983 References: grkermit.290 My understanding of Canadian gasoline pricing goes something like this: Once upon a time (before OPEC started jacking up prices) the cost of fuel in Canada and the USA was pretty much the same. Fuel for the Western two-thirds or so of Canada came from Canadian sources, and fuel for the rest came from imported oil, since it was cheaper to import it than increase Western production and send it east. When OPEC started raising prices, taxes were juggled so that we paid more for Canadian-produced oil and this was used to subsidize the price of foreign oil, evening things out across the country. Since Canada is much closer to being self-sufficient in oil than the USA (we have one tenth the population) prices did not rise here as much as they did in the States. A few years ago, though, the government decided that complete self-sufficiency would be a good idea, and started a planned, continuous increase of oil prices to provide the profit that was supposedly necessary to open up new sources - Arctic oil and tar sands, for example. There is also a tax on all oil which goes to help finance the government's nationalized oil company, Petro-Canada. Now, if OPEC prices had continued to rise, this probably would have been a good plan even for the fairly short term. But they didn't - they dropped, and as long as we're committed to trying to become self-sufficient, we can't take advantage of this drop in world prices to let our own fuel prices drop. Thus it's a fair bit more expensive here than in the U.S., at least for the moment. Who knows what will be the case in 20 years? Note that I haven't been following all this too closely, so there may be errors in the above. Also, the figure I gave several days ago of Canadian prices being 50% higher than American ones is probably misleading because it ignored the exchange rates. If you are buying fuel in Canada but earn your money in the US, it's 20-25% more expensive for you. However, since salaries for similar jobs seem to be about the same in Canadian dollars in Canada as they are in US dollars in the US, I probably spend something like 50% more of my income on fuel than I would if I were working at the same job in the US and using the same amount of fuel. I'm glad I drive a 4-cylinder car. Dave Martindale