Another insane spike in the price of gas at the pumps leaves us with only one logical conclusion. It is time to break the oil monopoly and Nationalize our oil like Norway. Corporate monopolies are never a good thing. Global is reporting that 7 Canadian companies committed indictable offences in bread-price fixing scandal. Yet not a word is said about the criminality of price fixing within the oil industry which is far worse. The onlty time a corporate monopoly can be a good thing is when the consumers are shareholders in that monopoly. Norway is a successful model of this.
When John D. Rockefeller used hostile take overs to obtain a monopoly on the oil industry the US Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil Company, ruling it was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Letting ownership of Canada's oil rights be controlled by a monopoly was a bad idea. Letting a foreign country own our oil rights was insane. Letting a Communist dictatorship profit from our oil is just plain evil. Stephen Harper is more of a Communist than Pierre Elliot Trudeau ever was. Breaking Communist China's monopoly on the ownership of our oil would be in every Canadians best interest.
BC has oil reserves. We could quite feasibly set the example by nationalizing our oil like ICBC. We would keep all the Canadian contractors. We would just nationalize the ownership of the oil and take it back from Communist China. If Alberta wants to extort us we should simply buy our oil from Russia. We do have a port here. That is supply and demand in a free market.
Everyone likes to complain about ICBC but we need to see though the fraud the BC Liberals created. The BC Liberal government extracted a $1.3 billion dividend from ICBC to balance Christy Clark's fake fudgeit budget. Now they are saying ICBC needs to be restructured because they are $1.3 billion in debt. We're not that stupid. As Peter Rose said ICBC is breaking even. There is no emergency. There is just another fraud created by the BC Liberals.
On the issue of privatizing ICBC I have always been neutral. It you want to do it, do it. If you don't want to do it, don't. However, I will point out that comparing insurance prices in BC with Alberta is not a fair comparison. You can't compare urban areas with rural ares. A more realistic comparison would be with Toronto who have much higher car insurance rates than we do.
The private insurance companies in BC are struggling. Many of them are running deficits. In response what do they do? They dump high risk clients and raise their rates. ICBC is forced to insure the high risk clients. The high risk clients should pay higher rates not everyone else. Aside from the insurance fraud, lotus land has a lot of luxury vehicles. When those cars get in accidents it costs a lot more to fix them. Luxury vehicles should pay a higher rate not everyone else.
Consequently ICBC is not in as bad shape as the Neo Cons are trying to trick us into believing. The current price fixing within the oil industry is a much more urgent matter to confront. What we have now is NOT a free market. What Canada and Alberta could learn from Norway.
they ought to be required to give two weeks notice when they increase the price of gas. You drive by a gas station and an hour later the price is up 4 cents a litre. Their underground storage tanks have not been filled with more expensive product, no they got an email from head office.
ReplyDeleteThey blame it on all the refineries under going whatever. By now you would have thought they would have gotten a schedule together which prevented a "shortage". On the other hand its still a lot cheaper in
Washington state and its not just taxes. No its just a cash grab.
its one of the reasons I do not see a need for the new pipeline. The tar/oil is not for our use, its going over seas. We will still have the same high prices.
What we need is a more refineries here in Canada, either in B.C. or in Alberta and if big business won't build them, let the government do it, so we can at least use our own gas.
We could perhaps put a new tax on those oil companies, which recovers their annual grab for money.....but it into the road system so we don't have to pay for it. The oil companies are simply taking what they can because no one is stopping them. Its time for it to end. No pipeline through B.C. until we get a better price on gas at the pump.