An Ontario family filling up a Dodge Caravan and Honda Accord once every two weeks ends up paying just shy of two grand in gas taxes over the course of a year. Photo Credit: iStock.
Two thousand dollars. That’s how much the typical two-car Ontario family spends on gas taxes every year.
Big numbers can sometimes be hard to process. But the feeling of dread Ontarians get as the gas metre ticks up sure isn’t.
Go to the gas station and you’ll see moms filling up the minivan before soccer practice, praying the metre doesn’t tick past $100 so she can afford to take the kids to Wendy’s after an hour of drills.
Or dads fueling up after a week of long commutes to the office, who might choose to only fill the tank halfway in order to have enough money left over to pick up groceries on the way home for family dinner.
Too often, folks will throw up their hands when they see the gas bill, not knowing who to blame. But the truth is a lot of the fault for high gas prices lies at the feet of our politicians. Especially those in Ottawa.
The average price of gas in Ontario late last month was $1.66 per litre. Out of that total per litre cost, a whopping 56 cents was taxes.
That means that more than a third of the price of gas is taxes, money going out of the pockets of hardworking families and into the coffers of big government.
A family filling up a Dodge Caravan and Honda Accord once every two weeks ends up paying just shy of two grand in gas taxes over the course of a year.
That’s the equivalent of two months’ worth of groceries for a family of four.
Yes, gas taxes have been around for decades. But politicians today, particularly those in the Trudeau government in Ottawa, keep driving the tax burden higher and higher.
The Trudeau government’s carbon tax now costs 17.6 cents per litre. For that family filling up the Caravan and Accord once every two weeks, over the course of a year, the carbon tax bill alone will reach $604.
And it’s a cost that wasn’t charged at the pump just six short years ago.
If a 56 cent per litre tax bill sounds bad to you now, just wait until you see what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has in store for Canadians.
Trudeau plans to keep raising his carbon tax each and every year until 2030.
Today, the carbon tax costs 17.6 cents per litre of gas at the pumps. In six years, with Trudeau’s two carbon taxes fully implemented (the second one coming through fuel regulations), that number will be 54.4 cents per litre.
And that will bring the total per litre tax bill to $1.04.
By 2030, that same family filling up the Caravan and Accord every other week will be paying over $1,800 in carbon taxes. And the cost of overall gas taxes per year will hit $3,570.
This is a future Canadians can’t afford. And the federal carbon tax is making that future unaffordable.
The Trudeau government has tried to argue that somehow, by charging a carbon tax, paying bureaucrats to collect the carbon tax, charging sales tax on top of that carbon tax, and then using a magic formula to send some of that money back to taxpayers, Canadians will be better off.
Anyone who buys that should be looking for a beachfront property in Regina.
And there are no refunds for Trudeau’s second carbon tax.
Yet, there are politicians out there willing to cut fuel taxes to make life more affordable at the pumps.
Provincial governments of all stripes, from the Ford PCs here in Ontario to the Furey Liberals in Newfoundland and Labrador to the Kinew Dippers in Manitoba, have cut fuel taxes, saving families hundreds of dollars.
Trudeau’s scheduled carbon tax hikes over the next six years will literally take a wrecking ball to family budgets. It’s time for the feds to learn from the provinces and lower costs at the pumps.
That means putting scrapping the carbon tax at the top of the agenda.
Jay Goldberg is the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. He previously served as a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
