I recently took a crash course called, Bucket Lists for Dummies.
My preliminary list included meeting the guy/person who came up with the idea and ultimate design of the unicycle. Requirement number one is, I guess, to have a really good sense of balance if you plan to get anywhere on this thing without ending up in a hospital.
Let’s play jump the metaphor. It is painfully obvious that when it comes to the petroleum industry our politicians are still trying to find the training wheels on their unicycle.
Everything is out of balance.
Prices of gasoline, and especially diesel, have reached the point where oil companies are being hauled in front of pods of politicians (new word: polipods) and are being asked to explain themselves and these high prices. This is a direct result of the voting consumers who want to know what the polipods are doing about it.
After much humming and hawing (a universal political trait), the drift I get is that they agree that they can’t directly control crude oil prices because, “Aw, heck! Don’t you know that’s the domain of OPEC and… umm… Russia?”
So, we have a supply of crude problem because we have a problem with Russian President Vladimir Putin? We have high crude prices because we are restricting crude exports from that same person/country.
Is this right so far?
One solution being dangled to people out there is to get a global agreement to release crude from various reserves. The latest let-them-eat-cake offering is for a 60 million barrels release to go along with President Biden’s offering of one million barrels per day for the next six months.
As the global consumption rate is 100 million barrels per day then pardon the pun, but this is just a drop in the bucket. This is only theatrical background music.
Let’s get closer to home.
What have the people in our plethora of government levels offered the consumer to soften the pricing blows to the head and wallet?
Well, some of the provinces have done something that they have control over, namely tax structures. Alberta dropped 13 cents per litre off the pump prices by cutting off the provincial road tax.
Now that’s called action.
Ontario is looking at a drop of over 5 cents per litre but only from July 1 to December 1 because, well, the provincial election is on June 2. If the incumbent should lose, then fill in the blanks.
Blank is the stare we got from our federal leader Prime Minister Trudeau recently, and his across the floor new best buddy, NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh when asked if the April 1st carbon tax increase would stay or go.
Nothing doing as the carbon tax we were told is the cornerstone of the fight against climate change.
We do, however, look forward to continuing the fight undaunted because we just approved a $12 billion project to bring 200,000 barrels per day of new crude production in from the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, along with the seats in Parliament that go with it.
You see everything must be in balance. We just have to be careful not to break a spoke.
– Roger McKnight – B.Sc., Senior Petroleum Analyst
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