FOOD PRICES

     Obviously the price of food and the price of everything else is affected by taxation. In a sense businesses don’t pay taxes. Business tax, property tax, the carbon tax, company’s share of U.I.C and C.P.P. the added cost of regulations and on and on are simply passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. But there is an added cost and it’s a major cost that no one seems to mention – the effect of pipelines or more precisely the lack of pipelines.
     Seven or eight years ago you could buy four oranges for let’s say four dollars. Today four dollars will get you only 3 oranges. Seven or eight years ago the Canadian dollar was at par with the U.S. dollar. Today it’s trading around seventy five cents (You can’t build a strong country on a weak dollar) which means we pay a third more for all imported goods including a lot of our food. So the question is why did the Canadian dollar fall in value?
     Canada has what is often referred to by currency strategists a petro dollar. As the demand for Canadian crude goes up so does the value of the Canadian dollar; as demand goes down so does the Canadian dollar. Because we have not built the pipeline capacity we need to keep up with production, crude production exceeds demand and thus the price falls – we not only sell less crude than we could, but we also get less for the crude we do sell. And what accounts for the lack of pipeline capacity? Of course it’s the environmental movement.
     So the next time you throw your orange peels into the green bin, remember that the lack of pipeline capacity, the environmental movement plays a major role in the price of food – and virtually everything else.

     NOTE: It’s the poor that will have the hardest time absorbing the higher cost of food. So whatever environmentalists care about, it sure as hell isn’t the poor.