Canadian Personal Finance Place

Not surprisingly we are already being warned that gasoline prices may start to jump this summer (again), which is a little late, given gasoline is now above $1.30 in Ottawa, and does not look to be dropping any time soon.

With this in mind, this may mean a continued increase in Inflation. The arithmetic is quite simple:

• Shipping prices will need to increase which means an across the board price increase
• Food prices will increase as it will cost farmers more to plant and harvest
• etc., etc., etc.,

How do I write that in a more sarcastic way?

Given the news in Ottawa has a section where they publish “the price of gas tomorrow”, how is this possible without price-fixing?

The Competition Bureau (yes that is really a part of our government) has fined Mr. Gas, Canadian Tire, and Pioneer Energy up to about $2M for price-fixing in 2007.  The accused fixers plead guilty with the following being reported:

Costco just made the question about whether folks should pay for a membership or not much more interesting, because in Ottawa they are now selling gasoline.

You can buy a membership for you and your spouse for $55 (according to this page), so you need to save at least that much every year to justify buying the membership. If anyone cares to argue this, please comment.

So the full farce that is the price of gasoline in Ottawa is driving me insane these days.The Ottawa Gas prices web site tells me that this morning (Wednesday) the price of gas is between 98 cents and $1.02 a litre, yet I know tonight as I come home from work (in less than 12 hours) the price will be down to 92 cents a litre (or liter if you prefer). I drive a ’94 Accord, so I need about 25 litres a week to get around and do what I need to do, so depending on when I buy my gas, I could “save” up to $2.50 on my purchase.

I will even state that 50 cent per litre gasoline in Canada is entirely possible.

How can I make this outlandish a statement? First a lot of Canada’s gasoline price is actually TAX so we only really need to cut the price of Gasoline in half to reach this lofty goal, but that is not the only reason.

In keeping with yesterday’s helpful post about how we get into debt, here are some very helpful hints on how to save some money, by saving some gas this summer (I also reviewed an interesting book on 75 ways to Save Gasfyi).