The system works, but not for us

Well, I filled up a little Honda Civic the other day and it came to almost 50 dollars. You have to appreciate the effectiveness of the gas price regulation system we have here in Nova Scotia. That is, it’s effective for the large gas companies – but not for the consumer.

Premier Rodney MacDonald said the other day he wouldn’t be following the lead of New Brunswick and now Prince Edward Island in reducing the taxes the province takes from gasoline, thereby reducing the cost for the buyer. He’d already done a tax reduction, he said, on the cost of heating oil, which they hadn’t done in New Brunswick.

I appreciate the argument that Nova Scotia needs the tax money to repair our highways, but tax money is tax money, and I don’t want to pay any more to a government that was willing, for example, to let my internet service die while it ploughed money into an unproven service closer to the premier’s own riding.

The board that regulates gas prices may have learned its lesson, not long after it got going a year ago. Gas prices went down after one two-week period and it seemed to me that the oil companies went on strike, Wilson’s Fuel refusing to deliver to various smaller gas stations. Prices shot back up and they haven’t gone down significantly since. (I know, I know, we really should pay more for gasoline, because it is a disappearing commodity and higher prices might make us drive less, or at least turn to electric vehicles, et cetera. But we live in the present and it hurts at the pump.)

Nova Scotians were hoodwinked when gas price regulation was introduced a year ago. There was the thought that finally the government was stepping in to protect consumers from apparently unreasonable oil company profits. It only dawned on people later that the government was actually moving to help make things easier for the oil companies.

A study issued several weeks ago showed that in the first nine months of the price regulation system Nova Scotians paid $11-million dollars more than they would have if prices had not risen. And rural Nova Scotians paid more of that than their urban cousins, on a per capita basis, since the provincial government zoned the province and put places like Queens in the highest-price zone – as if rural people were rolling in money and didn’t really need to use their vehicles.

Gas prices in the province on the day this was written show that some of the highest prices in Nova Scotia were in the stretch from Liverpool to Barrington.

Both the federal and provincial governments take their share of the cost of a litre of gasoline. Nova Scotia takes 23 cents, while Ottawa takes 16.5 cents. All told, the two levels of government get almost 40 cents out of every dollar spent on gasoline. By comparison, in Ontario the two levels of government get a littlie more than 30 cents.

It is instructive to look at the price of gas in Nova Scotia compared to that in Canada as a whole and other provinces in particular. These charts can be created through a website known as www.novascotiagasprices.com. When I ran a comparison between Nova Scotia and Toronto, the difference was startling. We were paying $1.20 for gas last week while Toronto people were paying $1.04. Our brothers in New Brunswick were paying $1.13.

A friend from Toronto, when I was arguing about high speed internet and reasonable gas prices, thought I should move to the city. No thanks, I said. While federal policies seem to be strangling Nova Scotia, and provincial policies strangling rural Nova Scotia, the problem with larger areas ganging up on smaller is not the core issue.

What we have to come to terms with in this federation is how equal we want Canadians to be, no matter where they live. This business of allowing each region or area to have only as much as the numbers in their population can pay for is relatively new to Canadian political life. - Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppar@ca.inter.net