Taxation ramble

A quick blog today. I hate to ride on the coattails of the Toronto SUN, knowing full well how many in Canada view the SUN chain as a sort of FOX NEWS with nearly-naked women. But their editorial today was pointed and timely. It's on gas taxes.
But wait, Ken! You don't drive!
True. But my wife does, and my job is very much dependent on fuel. After all, a grocery store can't exist without products shipped in from afar, and our customers can't buy many of those products without the means to ship them home.
As I write this, gas is hovering around C$ 0.90/litre. Big Oil's smartened up a bit: they realize they can't hold prices down and suddenly jack them up twelve cents a litre just before a long weekend. They used to do that, and consumers noticed and demanded unwelcome political scrutiny. So now they tend to hold the line until after a long weekend. I predict the average price in Waterloo region will be at least 95.5 cents a litre come Tuesday.
The politicians have been unable to prove collusion at the pumps--then again, they haven't tried very hard. For instance, they've obviously never interviewed anyone who's worked at a gas station. I have, and I can assure you that every station keeps a very close eye on the price at every other station within a few blocks of them. Two visual checks a day is the absolute minimum, and it's quite common for gas bars to call each other to announce a price change. Courtesy, they call it.
No matter. In order to reach either set of parents, we need to travel through cottage country, and you couldn't pay us to make the trip on a long weekend, especially this one. The traffic is simply insane. There's no other way to put it.
But the issue of gas taxes still irks me to no end. Being at least somewhat senstive to environmental concerns, I don't take issue with the price the oil companies set for their product. After all, even at today's rates, our gas is quite cheap. A litre of just about anything else costs more...including bottled water. Bear in mind, too, that our prices are only expensive in comparison to those in the States; in Europe, gas is cheap at twice our price and some places charge three or four times what we do.
Of course, Europe is conveniently compact. Ontario has counties the size of some European nations. So Canada must rely on long-haul shipping and getting people out of their cars and on to our meagre public transit system is no easy task.
So gasoline is essential. It's food, quite literally, for the economy. But unlike a can of soup or a jug of milk, gasoline is taxed, and quite heavily at that. The average amount of tax, per litre, on Canadian gasoline is about 24 cents. Not counting the GST, which in this case is tax on tax.
Paul Martin, as Finance Minister, levied a 1.5 cent/litre surtax on gasoline "to eliminate the deficit", a decade ago. He's run obscene surpluses for eight years running now, yet the surtax remains.
I could accept this--I really could--except that almost none of this money finds its way back into fixing our transportation infrastructure. Last year it was 7.2 percent: only just a little more than the feds collected in GST on gas. No, the lion's share is siphoned into 'general revenues', which is Liberal code for 'nya-nya-nya-nya-nya, we can't tell you'.
Martin's made a big to-do about giving municipalities some of that gas tax money. Well, most of them are spending their windfall on...public transit.
Hello? Did I miss the invention of hoverbuses, or is public transit still earthbound. forced to travel on decrepit roads with the rest of us?
Y'know, I spent yesterday's entry being all fuzzy-wuzzy liberal (not Liberal, please!) regarding the social values we have here in Canada. Today it's the flip side of the coin: I just want to rant about the liberal (and Liberal) fiscal policy. There's no sense, common or otherwise, to it. I mean, here's a country where it's okay to spend close to the average annual wage on each homeless person in Toronto, without doing anything to get them off the streets; where we pay a king's ransom in salaries and perks to a number of politicians whose sole goal is to break up the country; where voters fully expect to be bribed with their own money each election, and react with disdain when they're not. We actually allow public service strikes to cripple our economy and threaten our safety and health. In my world, public service workers would be perfectly free to strike: they'd just lose an dollar an hour for each day they struck. I've no doubt I could find people willing to do their jobs for the money they make. Garbagemen in Toronto are not paid a pittance. Neither, for that matter, are Hydro One engineers.
We're actually looking at forming a national daycare system: one more senseless boondoggle in a nation filled with them. We've wasted billions of dollars re-registering the guns of law-abiding citizens, while criminals shoot up the streets with aplomb.
No, here's how asinine this country is: we've spend hundreds of thousands of dollars housing a psychotic woman for twelve years. We've given her special rights, freedoms, and protections accorded few other prisoners, despite the heinous nature of her crimes. We've fed, watered, sheltered, and educated her at taxpayer's expense. A single bullet, carefully placed, would have been ever so much cheaper.