For motorists in rural Ontario, the high cost of gas is bad enough.
Many have no choice but to drive. But they also have no choice but to pay the 14.7-cents-a-litre provincial gas tax, even though they don’t see a dime reinvested in their communities.
“The gas tax should benefit everyone, but it does not,” said Perth-Wellington MPP Randy Pettapiece in the Ontario legislature last week.
That’s why he supported the Gasoline Tax Fairness for All Act. That legislation would have given rural municipalities a share of the provincial gas tax. The bill was defeated on April 5, when every Liberal MPP present in the legislature voted against it.
“Many municipalities are left out,” said Pettapiece. He told the legislature that in Perth-Wellington, the Town of Minto and the Townships of Mapleton, Wellington North and Perth South are all left out from receiving their share of the gas tax.
“The government leaves them out because it says they don’t have any mass transit systems,” said Pettapiece. “In fact, they do. Our mass transit systems are the roads and bridges we use every day.”
Pettapiece also noted that unlike the Dalton McGuinty government, the federal government does share the federal gas tax with all municipalities, large and small, urban and rural.
He is disappointed not only by the Liberals rejection of what he calls gas tax fairness, but also by their unwillingness to share information about where the tax is going.
“We called the Minister of Finance for details on this and we were told to go to the Minister of Transportation, but they told us to go back to finance,” said Pettapiece. “So we went back to finance, but the minister’s office still hasn’t returned our calls.”
The Liberals’ vote on the gas tax was not the first time they have ignored rural Ontario, said Pettapiece.
He cited the government’s recent flip-flop on the risk-management program for agriculture, as well as its energy policies, which have led to wind turbines blanketing many parts of rural Ontario even where municipalities would reject them.
