Alright, what’s with this gas price situation?
Campbell Riverites are now paying amongst the highest prices on Vancouver Island for gasoline. We’re paying as much as Port Hardy – $1.39.9 – which defeats the argument that it’s the price of shipping the fuel that accounts for the differences. Only Gold River’s gas is higher than Campbell River’s.
It’s always been a mystery how the oil companies price their gas. It can be so arbitrary. One community – the Comox Valley, for example – can be significantly different, allegedly because of a competitor moving into the market. But you’ll remember that a few years back, Campbell River used to have cheaper gas than the Valley.
It’s also a mystery how prices can leap up by as much as a dime but they only “drop” by a cent or two. It all points to the fact that there’s some oil company executive sitting in his high Alberta tower cackling away playing, “let’s set the gas prices on Vancouver Island.”
Okay, we’re being facetious, there isn’t really a malevolent oil executive having fun with gas pricing at our expense – we think. How else we’re supposed to explain the way princes bounce up and down at a seeming whim is beyond us though.
The only way we can wrestle control of this situation away from the oil companies is to not use their product. But we’re not going to do that are we? We’re not going to get out of our cars and walk more or take transit, are we? Not yet anyway because the convenience of an automobile is still worth what we’re paying to fuel them.
Maybe we need to fuel them with something else.