Affects of Gas Prices on Cdn Economy

[KJK]

Now if only I had a tanker truck and a place to store the fuel and share it with my buddies - Imperial Oil's wholesale rack price in Toronto is $0.8770/L.

Yes but rack price does not include the taxes, that is only the cost of the fuel.

KJK

 

[Redeye]

Ahhh - I was wondering about when all the taxes kick in.  Makes sense, since someone I know who retired from Imperial told me there policy is $0.02/L profit off the rack.

 

[George Wallace]

Ahhh - I was wondering about when all the taxes kick in.  Makes sense, since someone I know who retired from Imperial told me there policy is $0.02/L profit off the rack.

That is the Oil Company's profit.  The Province and Federal Governments' profit (TAX) is ..........what?............75% ?

 

[a_majoor]

While the arguments that oil prices are pretty constant when adjusted for inflation are economically correct, you and I don't purchase fuel in inflation adjusted dollars, so it becomes easy to fire up people's emotions over the issue. (Hey, I get pretty cranked looking at the pump prices too, and I studied economics!)

What will have to be looked at is how politicians and other scaremongers might try to manipulate this sort of discontent. Silly plans to impose caps on prices have already backfired in the Atlantic provinces, as gas stations simply refused to sell gas at below cost. The next big thing will probably be attempting to manipulate prices for the purposes of social engineering:

http://mesopotamiawest.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-are-liberals-really-up-to.html

What Are the Liberals Really Up To?

We've been talking about the Liberal 'carbon tax' for weeks now, but not about what the Liberals are really up to. What is it, precisely, they want to do?

Yes, yes, global warming and all that; but put aside the rhetoric, what is the objective of such a tax? If You say to reduce Canada's carbon footprint, sure, but again; what would happen if what the Liberals are going to propose was actually adopted and implemented?

Firstly, a carbon tax would hit car owners hardest as well as individuals who heat fully-detached homes. If you put that together; the most seriously affected would be suburban, two-car families living at the edge of suburbia. Since this is where the most reasonably-priced homes can be found, the first victims of the Liberal social engineering master plan would be young, middle-class families.

Besides the cost, how else could Liberals make living 60 miles from the city intolerable? One way would be to not build any more expressways (the B.C. example). Another would be to impose draconian speed limit enforcement policies (the Ontario example) and yet a third would be to have car makers install speed governors as has been proposed for trucks.

Put enough pressure on, and the flight from suburbia will become a flood. These same young families will do two things: they'll buy a condo in the city and they'll sell their car and take public transit and bicycles to get around. This has already happened in Vancouver where young people vastly outnumber old people in the downtown core.

But even if you see all this happening, what is the point of making the outer suburbs unlivable? Who benefits from what would be a modern day expulsion from the land, similar to what happened in Ireland and Scotland in the 19th Century?

Aside from creating large pools of low cost land for accumulation into vast estates, I think the point of the program would be to make the public more malleable, more receptive to other social engineering projects. Once you have people in the battery-hen complex of a modern apartment building, once you have them at the mercy of public transportation, once you have them living as if in a commune.

Why then any kind of social manipulation is possible. Eh Comrade Stéphane?

Remember, this is only a scenario, but manipulating taxes and regulations is well within the power of governments to achieve almost any outcome, no matter how perverse.