The price of gas decreased overnight for all three Maritime provinces.
Nova Scotia
The price of regular self-serve gasoline in the Halifax-area decreased by 5.9 cents. The minimum price is now 157.1 cents per litre.
Diesel prices decreased by three cents. The new minimum price is 188.6 cents per litre.
In Cape Breton, the minimum price of regular self-serve gasoline is now 159.1 cents per litre and the minimum price of diesel is 190.6 cents per litre.
Prince Edward Island
The price of gas on P.E.I. decreased by 6.3 cents. The new minimum price for regular self-serve gasoline is 164.1 cents per litre.
The price of diesel decreased by four cents. The minimum price on the island is now 196.8 cents per litre.
New Brunswick
In New Brunswick, the price of regular self-serve gasoline decreased by 3.6 cents. The new maximum price is 163.2 cents per litre.
Diesel decreased by 1.4 cents overnight, bringing the maximum price to 194.4 cents per litre.
Dan McTeague, president of Canadians for Affordable Energy – an advocacy group – says they are seeing decreases across the country.
“If you look at Quebec, it went from $1.66 down to $1.62. Ontario went from $1.55 or 56 down to $1.51. They have dropped about four cents a litre, even Vancouver saw $1.87 down to about $1.81 or 82, although those are very different markets,” says McTeague
Many Maritimers were pleasantly surprised when they saw the prices at the pumps on Friday.
“I’m very happy to see prices coming down, every little bit helps,” said a man filling up gas at a gas station in Halifax.
McTeague says the drop in price has a lot to do with oil, as it dropped around $4 a barrel, but he believes there are other reasons why Nova Scotia saw an addition two cent drop in gas prices.
“Some of it has to do with taxes but a lot of it has to do with the formula that the Nova Scotia utilities board has used in order to determine what the price of gasoline should be,” says McTeague. “At the end of the day, it kept prices much higher than it ought to have given that we saw a substantial decrease, much of that signalled by the market, three or four cents but certainly not six cents a litre.”
McTaegue points to the Canadian dollar as another reason.
“While the Canadian dollar has not strengthened, it’s weakened. It’s also meant that gasoline future would also come down a little bit as well. All of this means that the anticipated price that we saw across the country, most in fact in Nova Scotia are a reflection of the fact that prices are starting to come down a little bit as a number of the important issues are taking place, of course including the commitment by the Trump administration to drop gas prices even by mentioning it seems to have an effect as it did many years ago,” says McTeague.
Colin Macdonald, operations manager of Community Courier, says fuel prices have a big impact on them.
“All we can do really is just plan for optimal operations so we really focus on route operations to ensure they have the optimum amount of deliveries, collapsing routes and make sure that they are eliminating as much empty miles as possible,” says Macdonald.
Macdonald says they track from a fuel perspective.
“And obviously how we can find ways to mitigate that. And again partnering with our customers to make sure that they understand, you know, that this is something that we do our best to control and make sure that we are transparent so they understand the impact and we don’t want that to impact our service or the deliveries that we are doing,” says Macdonald.
As we head into March, McTeague says, despite gas prices dropping now, this is the last month before we will see gasoline prices rise again.
“One because the federal government and its carbon tax levy will increase prices here in the province by four cents a litre so no matter what the price is you will have to add another four cents a litre, which will bring it from 17.61 cents a litre to about 20.6 cents a litre, plus HST being 15 per cent,” he says.
McTeague adds another increase will take place when we switch from winter gasoline blends to summer gasoline blends on April 15.
