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Gas was $3.50 a gallon on Sunday in Buffalo, N.Y. That’s $4.87 a gallon in Canadian currency. Divide that by the 3.8 litres in a gallon and Americans are paying $1.28 per litre for gas in Canadian currency.

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Gas in Toronto is $1.87. It is less in some places and more in Vancouver. Why are we paying 59 cents or 46% more?

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A lower Canadian dollar makes purchasing oil more expensive. A smaller, more spread-out population in Canada makes transporting refined fuel more expensive, but you’d hope large population areas would get a break for volume.

But let’s talk tax.

At $1.87, the tax is about 52 cents. That’s about 28% tax.

Calls for temporary pause in Canada

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wants to temporarily pause federal taxes on gas and diesel for the remainder of the year. He said government could make up for the $5.25-billion cost of such a tax cut by cutting wasteful spending.

“The recent increase in gas prices is the result of the war in Iran, but the long-term high costs in Canada are the result of Liberal taxes,” he said.

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When asked, Mark Carney said, “We’re following it closely in the context of fiscal realities, other measures we’ve taken to improve affordability, the persistence of the potential higher gas price … so we have to take all of that into account.

“We’ll have a fiscal event in the spring with a spring update and that would be the right time to fully answer that question.”

That’s using political speech to say no.

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Corporations hiking prices in response

Amazon is applying a 3.5 per cent delivery surcharge in response to elevated oil prices.

The Toronto Sun reported that Air Canada is adding a $50 charge per passenger and it has also been reported that Calgary-based WestJet says it will be introducing a “temporary $60 surcharge for certain bookings and has consolidated numerous flights due to skyrocketing fuel prices.”

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Those sorts of charges and added fees, along with price increases, will happen all across the board, while you pay a high price for gas as well.

Would you like a starter list of where to get the $5 billion some say dropping the gas tax would cost the government in revenue?

Other places feds can cut costs

Cut the post office loose. They should have planned better than they did for the future. Force them to cut back to once-a-week delivery or whatever they have to do to stop losing $1 billion a year.

Stop the corporate welfare programs governments seem addicted to. Justin Trudeau put taxpayers on the hook for $30 billion in subsidies to multinational corporations like Honda, Volkswagen, Stellantis and Northvolt.

Let the market decide which companies should survive rather than having government pump money into the ones they like.

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Stop the gun buy-back program, which to anyone other than the public safety minister is a quantifiable failure. If it proceeds, it will cost more than $2 billion.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation said shutting down the federal government’s seven regional development agencies would save taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion annually because they don’t actually accomplish what they are supposedly there to do.

Average compensation for a federal bureaucrat is $125,300. Cutting back the bureaucracy to population growth would save taxpayers $9 billion every year.

Some of that is happening but at a very limited rate. Is it not time for the government to help by immediately dropping the gas taxes?

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