Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for those comments. It enables me to expand a little on the price of gasoline and how that relates to these taxes.
During the summer I visited Ottawa a number of times and I noticed that the gasoline price was consistently between 63¢ a litre and 68¢ a litre, while at the same time in Vancouver it was close to 80¢ a litre for that entire time. Every time I came back, I was shocked to see that it was still 76¢ to 80¢ a litre while here in Ottawa it was 65¢ a litre.
At one point during the SARS crisis in Toronto there was that special sell off weekend when gasoline was being sold at 35¢ a litre. Ours shot up to 90¢ a litre that weekend and I suspect we were subsidizing that effort.
What is really important about the price of that gasoline in Vancouver is the huge amount of federal taxation we are paying, not only the excise tax but the GST on that excise tax. We paid $360 million a year a few years ago. It is probably more now. That should have been sent back to us for our infrastructure.
The member is quite right about the difficulties that we are having. British Columbians are getting angry with their local governments, however, their focus should really be on the federal government because the high price of gasoline is related to these federal taxes which suck huge amounts of money out of British Columbia.
That money is rightfully ours. It should be put into the highway system and other transportation systems. This government has to smarten up and do something about it.