Long Time Passing.
My apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary.
And, anyway, there are still lots of flowers.
But not so with gas stations… especially in the near north Ontario !
This past weekend we stayed at my brother’s cottage in the Haliburtons and I first realized the crisis when we drove to Coboconk, the closest village to his property.
No gas station – this despite the fact that this area – at this time of the year – is teeming with cottagers and tourists. Indeed the local Independent is open 24 hours a day – 7 days a week.
But of course it does not sell gas … maybe it should. You will also find there a large Home Hardware and a Rona.
But not one gas station.
According to my brother, not that many years back there were 6 stations in total – all apparently doing okay.
But their tanks got old and to replace them, they had to adhere to new Environmental Regs of the Province, that were, and are, prohibitive for small dealers.
To compound the problem – there are numerous such villages surrounding Coboconk and they too are all sans stations.
When we left my brother’s place we travelled cross country through Bancroft - one of the few cities in the region- and when we started out had a little over a quarter of a tank of gas. Bancroft is some 60 miles from Coboconk !
By luck, on route to Bancroft, we came upon a gas station that had recently opened. It was owned by a husband and wife team and the wife told me that they were barely scraping by and feared that they would be forced to abandon their new venture.
He husband had been forced to take outside work since there was not enough business to support them both at the station.
They had really old pumps and old storage tanks and she said they needed to upgrade but the Environmental Regs made that financially impossible. (she also mentioned that their hydro costs were out of sight)
I told her about our experience in Coboconk and she nodded understandingly.
And one must keep in mind that the gas station owners get but pennies per gallon whereas the Oil Companies and Government reap in $ billions.
No wonder they cannot compete.
But we are talking about the lunacy of Ontario’s Environmental Demands but those demands do not stop with small town gas stations they also pertain to the following:
- saw mills closed for creating pollution …that is to say ‘sawdust’;
- cheese factories closed for creating pollution …that is to say ‘whey’;
- farmers not allowed to butcher their own animals and provide it to free to family;
- property owners having their lands deemed to be environmental protection (aka confiscation) without compensation.
As Paul Newman famously said in Cool Hand Luke … “what we have here is a failure to communicate” just as he was about to be killed.
To me, our failure in communication stems from the fact that Queens Park runs the Province of Ontario as if we all live in the City of Toronto.
Maybe we should consider separating..
As I see it…
‘K.D. Galagher’
