MOTOR MOUTH
Drivers are still being gouged at the gas pumps.
How low can it go? The price of oil, that is. It’s the question on everybody’s mind: Is US$ 30 a barrel really the floor to what, it must be remembered, was once predicted to skyrocket to US$200?
It has become a national — nay, international — obsession, every twist and turn in oil arbitrage a front- page headline or Situation Room highlight. We may not know exactly what West Texas Intermediate ( WTI) is, but we sure as hell know when it dips below $30 a barrel.
What we once thought would be an economic bonanza has turned out to be a wrecking ball. The world economy is in tatters, Canada’s GDP gets downgraded with every tumble in crude and our loonie is so low it feels like a peso. If Canadians were unsure that we, too, were a petro- economy, the collapse of our dollar in concert with Western Canada Select — now trading at about US$ 17 a barrel — is proof that we still haven’t broadened our industrial base beyond commodities. At least, we console ourselves, there’s some small comfort in the knowledge that we’re no longer getting ripped off at the pumps. Or are we? Just about this time last year, I wrote my first investigation into the crude- versus- pump divergence. Oil was trading at a smidgen below US$ 50 a barrel and a litre of gas was about $ 1.08, the former about a 50- percent drop in raw materials, the latter representing only a 23- per- cent reduction in retail pricing. The problem — the ripoff we all complain about — was in the extremely high taxes levied by seemingly every level of government and the enviable profits the oil companies were skimming off the top.
Almost exactly 12 months later, things aren’t any better. In fact, when you factor in what oil companies are now paying for raw material, you can’t help but feel we’re getting gouged more than ever.
For one thing, at current prices crude accounts for less than a third of the cost of a litre of gas pretty much anywhere in Canada. It’s fairly easy to calculate; just take the current price of oil — WTI, for instance, was trading at US$29.64 the day I wrote this — factor in the U. S. exchange rate ( currently $1.38) and then divide by 159, the number of litres in every barrel. Do the math and that works out to about 26 cents a litre, about 30 per cent of the average price of a litre of regular gas in Ontario. The numbers are even worse in Montreal and you really do have to pity those poor schmoes in British Columbia. In Vancouver, the cost of crude represents less than a quarter of the $ 1.05 Left Coasters are paying for 87 octane. So, where does the rest go? Well, crude — bituminous or otherwise — needs to be refined and, thanks to some fairly onerous federal environmental laws, there’s a dearth of refinery capacity in Canada (we used to have 30 refineries four decades ago; there are only 14 now). Therefore, we Canadians pay about seven cents a litre to transform heavy oil into combustible gasoline. Oh, and that doesn’t include the refiner’s profit. Because of the refinery shortage, Dan McTeague, senior petroleum analyst for gasbuddy. com, founder of tomorrowsgaspricetoday.com and a former member of Parliament for Pickering- Scarborough East in Ontario, estimates the oil companies take about an eight- cent cut off every litre of refined gas before it even gets to gas stations. At current crude prices that represents about a 25 per cent markup.
But wait, they’re not done. Many of the gas stations where we fill up are owned by — you guessed it — those very same oil companies. Indeed, in larger metropolises such as Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, they own a significant portion of the gasoline retailing business, allowing them to add, says McTeague, another 10 cents a litre to their corporate coffers. Factor that in — minus transportation and operating costs, the oil companies will be quick to point out — and they enjoy a healthy markup all the way from crude to pump.
Then there are our various governments’ greedy little mitts. Factor in local, provincial and federal taxes (only Alberta and the Yukon take less than a 20- cent cut from every litre of gasoline you pump). Meanwhile, the highest levies are in Vancouver, where a 17-cent-a-litre municipal TransLink tax is added to 25.17 cents of federal and provincial levies, for a whopping tariff of 42.17 cents on every litre of gas Vancouverites buy. Montreal, with its own three- cent Agence metropolitaine de transport transit tax, slots in just behind, with 32.2 cents added to every litre les habitants pump into their tanks.
And, ever opportunistic, governments are taking advantage of our low pump prices to pack on some extra tariffs. Along with Alberta’s Rachel Notley, Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne just announced a province- wide cap- and- trade carbon tax of 4.3 cents — 4.8 cents when you factor in HST, says McTeague — on every litre of gas Ontarians consume. Even in provinces that don’t impose their own carbon tax, the government’s take may increase.
Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is considering implementing a nationwide carbon tax — reportedly a minimum of $ 15 a ton, or at least four cents on every litre of gasoline, says McTeague — which she says is necessary “to move to a lower- carbon economy.”
Add it all up and, even if Saudi Arabia started giving away its oil for free, we’d still be paying at least 50 cents for every litre of gas we consume. More importantly, when crude prices go up — and you know they will — that $ 1.40 a litre we used to think was so expensive will seem cheap. Whichever way oil prices go, it seems, we’re still getting taken to the cleaners.