Rising fuel costs

by BRIAN LOCKHART

When was the last time you decided to throw a barbecue, invite a bunch of friends over and toss some steaks on the grill?

If you're like a lot of people, it was burgers and hotdogs because you didn't want to go the bank to take out a “barbecue and steak” loan to afford the cost of buying quality beef for ten people.

I've noticed a lot of posts on Facebook lately from people complaining about the prices in certain grocery stores.

The grocery stores have to maintain a margin to stay afloat. If you notice the cost of food is rising it's not because the grocery stores have suddenly decided to increase prices.

It's because the cost of distribution is going through the roof. All those shelves aren't filled by cargo arriving by hot air balloon or horse drawn buggies.

All that food arrives by truck through a huge network of transportation that stretches across North America and beyond. They don't grow pineapples in P.E.I. or bananas in Newfoundland.

With fuel costs again on the rise, it costs more to run the millions of trucks across the continent and that cost is passed directly on to you. According to Ontario.ca, on July 26, the average price of a litre of regular gasoline in Ontario was $1.37.4.

Woe to you if you drive a high-performance car – the average price for premium was $1.61.3.

The average price 13 months ago was .80 cents per litre. They blamed that on the pandemic and “demand” saying fewer people were driving.

So here we are, still in a pandemic with a lot of people still working from home, and yet the price of fuel has increased 58 per cent over a year.

The public would not stand for an increase of that amount for a loaf of bread, and in Ontario, there would be a huge outcry if that 24 from the Beer Store went up that much.

Whether you like it or not, we are still a nation, in fact a world, that relies on petroleum-based fuel to power cars, trains, ships, aircraft, and your lawnmower.

There is a push to switch to electric powered cars. People seem to think that will create some kind of idyllic world where we are all buzzing around silently in environmentally happy cars for free.

Except electricity isn't a free and it's not a naturally occurring resource like some people think. You still need fuel to turn the turbines that create the electricity. Wind and solar power is only an option – they do not have the capacity to create enough power to supply the country.

Add to that the fact that in a few years there is another environmental disaster just waiting to happen when the world is suddenly faced with several million used lithium-ion batteries that need to be disposed of.

So we are still reliant on petroleum whether we like it or not.

Oil companies claim that their prices are based on many different factors – a lot of which are influenced by politics in the Middle East where they get their crude oil.

It's too bad that we are so reliant on places on the other side of the world to get crude oil because they have what we need.

But wait a minute – oil in Canada?

Canada has the third largest proven oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Proven oil reserves are defined as the “amount of crude oil located in a particular region that can be recovered with current technological constraints and at a cost that is financially feasible at the current price of oil.”

In other words, we have the oil, the technology to get it, and at a decent cost.

It's time to ramp up Canada's oil production and start using fuel that is obtained and refined on Canadian soil instead of relying on unstable countries from half way around the world.

With the increasing cost of fuel, you can expect everything else to go up as well – everything else that is except your salary.

The federal government places huge taxes on fuel because they know you have no choice but to buy gas for your car. It's your government – they are supposed to be working for us, not against us.

If you think it's expensive to feed your family now, wait to see what happens if fuel costs continue to rise.