PJ The Belt - March 28, 2026


$8 a Gallon Even in Alberta — Carney’s Canada...


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

157.64386

Word count

1,389

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The price of oil has hit an all-time high, and it's only going to get worse. Gas prices have risen more than 88% in the past 18 months, and there's no reason to think it won't continue to rise.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 For long-haul truckers, frequently fueling up is part of the job.
00:00:04.300 Well, it's $1.99 right now, probably $1.86 our cost.
00:00:09.380 Too high to keep us running, that's for sure.
00:00:14.480 This B.C. man has been trucking 50 years.
00:00:17.600 This year, he says, will likely be his last.
00:00:20.420 A lot of guys have $3,000, $4,000 payments, you know.
00:00:23.340 But mine's an older truck, it's paid for, so I haven't got that cost.
00:00:28.320 But it's still a burden when that feels way high.
00:00:45.540 That's only the beginning.
00:00:47.120 That's not a one-off.
00:00:48.520 That right there is just a start.
00:00:51.040 And if you think it's going to stop there,
00:00:53.000 if you don't think it's going to get much worse,
00:00:55.220 you're not paying attention.
00:00:56.520 this right here is going to destroy the canadian middle class not slowly not quietly this is going
00:01:04.620 to hit everything from food transportation to your daily life literally everything will get
00:01:11.360 hit by this every single thing in the world runs on fuel so when the price of oil goes up this fast
00:01:18.700 everything else follows gas prices in canada especially here in british columbia
00:01:24.840 are completely out of control.
00:01:27.380 I'm in Vancouver, where prices have soared as high as $2.22 a litre over the past few days,
00:01:33.320 an increase of more than 88% from just 18 months ago.
00:01:37.700 You can see it's $2.09 at the gas station I'm currently at.
00:01:41.480 These are now the highest gas prices in the history of North America.
00:01:46.820 But while politicians will try to blame the price of oil
00:01:49.860 and what's been going on in Ukraine for these sky-high prices,
00:01:53.200 That's not exactly the entire story.
00:01:56.020 In fact, oil prices have been this high before, back in 2008.
00:02:01.560 But since then, gas taxes, including carbon taxes, have exploded.
00:02:06.720 Increased by politicians with the sole purpose to increase the price of fossil fuels to punish you for driving.
00:02:13.420 It was hoped the pain would only be temporary, but analysts say we should prepare for it to last.
00:02:19.600 Because we haven't been able to get the Strait of Hormuz operating again.
00:02:23.440 So 15% of global petroleum supply is not there.
00:02:28.340 You see that?
00:02:29.900 They're telling you straight up that it's going to get more expensive.
00:02:33.120 This is not the peak.
00:02:34.680 This is only the beginning.
00:02:36.400 And here's the part that should really make you stop and think.
00:02:39.860 Canada is an oil country.
00:02:42.280 We're not supposed to have these kinds of prices.
00:02:45.160 We should be completely self-sufficient.
00:02:48.400 Alberta, which is still a part of Canada, last time I checked,
00:02:51.600 though a referendum on independence is coming down the pipes,
00:02:54.960 is sitting on one of the largest oil reserves on Earth.
00:02:58.840 A resource that should make energy in this country not only cheap, but stable and reliable.
00:03:05.180 We shouldn't be importing oil from the other side of the world, 0.93
00:03:08.740 especially from countries that don't even share our values.
00:03:12.540 But instead, Canadians are getting hit like we don't produce any oil at all.
00:03:17.640 How does that even happen?
00:03:19.780 It happens when you spend years blocking pipelines, killing energy projects over and over again, choking the industry that actually powers your country.
00:03:30.460 A new report came out today from studio energy and ATB economics, and it indicated that a new pipeline that would see an additional 1.5 million barrels a day moving oil out of Western Canada would have some pretty significant economic benefits, more than $30 billion of GDP over the next decade and 110,000 jobs.
00:03:51.160 How does this compare with the analysis that your government has done?
00:03:54.300 And how do you think that this should, I guess, impact how these projects should be viewed by the federal government?
00:04:01.160 Well, that's pretty close to what I would have expected.
00:04:03.160 The numbers I often use is that if we had built Keystone XL and Energy East and Northern Gateway, we'd have two and a half million barrels per day of additional production today, which would be generating about $55 billion worth of additional GDP, of which about 40% goes to various levels of government.
00:04:19.920 Do you know what solves all our problems? Let's start getting a pipeline built across our country. Let's bring it down to Sarnia. Let's get the pipeline over to the Irving refinery in New Brunswick. That would relieve it. Right now, we're relying on people from around the world, and some of those people don't even like us.
00:04:40.740 And you know what? They know what the problem is. They've been talking about it for years, decades, and it's still not fixed. And why is that? Because they don't want to fix it. That's why.
00:04:53.740 Here's what's crazy.
00:04:54.960 Canada has all this oil, right?
00:04:56.460 But Canada can't even move its own oil across its own country.
00:05:01.300 So what happens?
00:05:02.520 Eastern Canada ends up relying on imported crude from Saudi Arabia in a country with
00:05:08.540 some of the largest oil reserves in the world, which makes absolutely no sense.
00:05:14.140 While the West, Alberta specifically, is sitting on a massive supply.
00:05:19.380 but that supply can't even reach the rest of Canada
00:05:22.820 because there are no pipelines to take it there
00:05:25.460 in the same country
00:05:27.200 think about that for a moment
00:05:29.200 we import oil while we have an abundance of energy in this country
00:05:34.240 the war continues to push gas prices here in Canada even higher
00:05:38.680 today the average price across the country
00:05:41.180 hit $1.70 per litre
00:05:43.180 that's about 50 cents higher than it was at the beginning of the year
00:05:46.560 and as you can see in some of the major cities
00:05:48.660 the price of gas still ranges quite a bit.
00:05:52.020 Here in Vancouver, just extraordinary, even if you live here.
00:05:56.180 Prices at some places topping $2.21 a litre,
00:05:59.340 adding an even bigger burden to the cost of living.
00:06:03.600 It's pretty awful.
00:06:04.780 I mean, it's hard for people who have to spend so much money on fuel, I'm sure.
00:06:10.140 I like everything cost of living.
00:06:11.720 How much more money are you spending at normal?
00:06:13.520 I think more than 40.
00:06:15.220 40 before i am my fuel tank full 80 dollars now 115. i'm not thrilled let's put it that way
00:06:23.460 it's i i have a fleet of vehicles so the cost of gasoline has put my fleet
00:06:30.500 cost for fuel up probably by a couple of thousand dollars over the last two months per month
00:06:36.160 and now after more than a year of mark carney and after 10 years of justin trudeau
00:06:42.420 where's the fix? Where's the solution? He said it was going to fix this in record time. Where's the
00:06:49.520 national energy strategy that's actually delivering results? Where are those pipelines that should
00:06:54.780 have been greenlit on day one? Where are the shovels in the ground? Nowhere. That's where
00:07:01.100 they are. Instead, Canadians are being conditioned to accept this. Higher prices, saying things like,
00:07:08.180 we all have to sacrifice more pressure, less relief in a country that is one of the most
00:07:14.500 resource rich on the entire planet. Apparently, this is supposed to be the new normal.
00:07:21.100 That's what they want. They want you to get used to this. But this ain't normal. This is the result
00:07:27.220 of many years of bad decisions, whether that's purposeful or just pure negligence.
00:07:33.680 we're talking about defense related infrastructure yeah and gas prices here are spiking because of
00:07:40.340 the war in iran um what are you doing to fix that and especially considering that the largest oil
00:07:47.100 refinery in our country is in new brunswick is it time for the west east pipeline you packed a lot
00:07:54.100 in there um okay that's good that's good uh the um the first thing is that uh you know very aware
00:08:02.020 of the sharp increase in gas prices.
00:08:07.100 You know, it varies a bit, as you know, geographically,
00:08:10.800 but, you know, on average, it would have been sub-130 a litre.
00:08:14.160 It's going up, you know, it's in 180 to 2,
00:08:16.980 a bit higher in Quebec, a little over $2 a litre.
00:08:21.240 So that is a big shift, and that's a real squeeze.
00:08:24.680 And absolutely recognize this.
00:08:26.220 We're following that closely.
00:08:27.800 It depends, of course, as your question indicated,
00:08:30.420 how long this conflict goes on um and um um and um what how does a country this rich in energy
00:08:42.500 end up paying prices like this and more importantly who benefits from keeping it this way