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Speak Up

It was predictable from the beginning when the New Brunswick government hired a Halifax consulting firm to review our gas price regulation formula, but it is nevertheless outrageous that the firm is recommending the price of home heating oil should increase by 2.77 cents per litre and gasoline by 2.3 cents per litre so wholesalers and retailers can make more profit.

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New Brunswickers are seriously hurting because of skyrocketing prices caused by world market forces beyond provincial and individual control, even with recent slight declines in the price. Today citizens are paying considerably more per litre than the last time the world oil price was at the same level, surely an indication profiteering is occurring somewhere.

Citizens have watched with dropped jaws as our major oil companies reported record shattering profits -- not revenues, profits -- of $54 billion in one quarter alone. To expect people to then believe that these companies and their retailers (often arms of the companies) are losing money and not making enough profit is beyond any definition of reasonable. And it is time, if retailers need any relief at all, for some of that profit to trickle down from the oil companies rather than to gouge consumers.

Gas stations have not been disappearing; the New Brunswick regulatory formula already allows for the addition of a reasonable transportation cost; credit and debit card fees have been declining, not rising; and the system was set up to make the industry pay the cost of regulation rather than the consumer as the new report suggests should be done. Little has changed since regulation was brought in. This recommendation must be seen for what it is -- a further attempt to squeeze money out of consumers who have little choice but to buy gasoline and heating fuel. All the while the industry is reporting obscenely high profits.

Add the potential increase from this recommendation to the potential increase of a provincial carbon tax, a federal carbon tax, and a proposed increase in the HST in New Brunswick and it soon becomes clear that New Brunswickers are in danger of seeing gasoline and crucial heating fuel prices artificially inflated to the point it will literally cost people many hundreds of dollars per year -- on top of high prices dictated by world markets.

The New Brunswick government must not allow this to happen and cannot afford to politically. Voters, who are the same citizens being gouged at the pumps, have had enough. Scrap the report.