Gas prices shot up overnight Tuesday for much of Greater Victoria, and by Wednesday a fill would cost $1.53 a litre.
“I am seeing it more and more and more all the time… it’s just like a year or two years ago it was 1.30 and I though that was crazy,” said Justin Beddington, as he filled up his truck in Saanich.
Outside of the City of Victoria, drivers still saw a spike, it was still sitting high at $1.49 a litre — a jump that has drivers feeling helpless.
“I am just accepting 1.50 is crazy, and soon it will be 1.80 and two dollars…. don’t feel like there is much I can do,” said Beddington.
It’s still less than the whopping $1.64 drivers were hit with back in April.
The high prices may not last. Experts say prices usually drop this time of year due to less demand.
But like any price change, there are several factors at play.
“[It could be] The interruption of Saudi supply and potentially downstream threats,” said Lindsay Meredith, from Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business.
“We rely on the United States for a lot of our gasoline supply on Vancouver Island and Vancouver, the fact [is] we have no refining capacity of our own in B.C.. We rely on the stuff coming in from Alberta… if you had that sufficient supply [locally], that price of gas would come down.”
Last month a massive attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities saw five per cent of global crude supplies impacted, sending oil prices soaring in the U.S. and Canada.
But even Meredith admits, west coast wallets seem to be once again getting hit the hardest.
“We seem to have margins in British Columbia which seem to be out of wack with the rest of the country…. why are these margins a little steeper than elsewhere?”
It was something B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission discovered too, saying back in August that there was an unexplained difference of 13 cents per litre.
For now it looks like the gas mystery will continue, as another spike took all day to level out — with drivers feeling the worst of it.
Julian Kolsut
