The Eastern Townships autoroute, running southeast from Montreal, opened to traffic in 1964. The New York Times called it “Canada’s newest superhighway,” and gushed about it as “good news for skiers.”
The article noted that the speed limit was 70 miles per hour in summer (this was a decade before Canada adopted the metric system) but only 55 mph in winter. It also wrote that, as part of a “master plan,” a final stretch of the autoroute still under construction would soon meet up with the U.S. Interstate system – bringing more Canadian tourists to New England, and more Americans to the Expo 67 World’s Fair.
One thing The New York Times did not find remarkable? That the highway was a toll road. The drive from Montreal to Sherbrooke cost $1.50, plus 25 cents to cross the Champlain Bridge. That’s $16.75 in today’s money.
A road paid for by drivers, not taxpayers, isn’t an unusual thing in Europe. Toll highways aren’t even uncommon in the United States, from the 423-kilometre Florida Turnpike to the 146-kilometre Sam Houston Tollway in Texas to the nearly 800-kilometre New York Thruway. New York is about to start charging cars to drive into the most crowded parts of Manhattan.
But in Canada? There aren’t many things that Canadian parties of the right, left and centre can agree on, but “free” roads – by which I mean taxpayer-subsidized driving – is one of them.
The Eastern Townships autoroute lost its tolls in 1985, courtesy of a Parti Québecois government. The new Champlain Bridge, completed in 2019 at a cost of $4.4-billion, is toll free, courtesy of the federal Liberals. In Ontario, highways 412 and 418 in Durham Region east of Toronto were opened a few years ago as toll roads, but the Progressive Conservative government ditched the tolls last year – a move long called for by the local New Democratic MPP.
In British Columbia, tolls on two relatively new Vancouver-area bridges were a key issue in the 2017 election. The Liberal provincial government promised to reduce the tolls; the NDP one-upped that with a pledge to remove tolls entirely, transferring all costs from drivers to taxpayers. The NDP has been the government ever since.
And in Toronto, former mayor John Tory once upon a time proposed tolling the Gardiner and Don Valley expressways, rather than maintaining them with property taxes. The idea was shot down by a Liberal premier.
In theory, the left opposes policies that promote pollution and urban sprawl. In theory, the right rejects burdening taxpayers with unnecessary government spending and favours user fees. In many countries, left and right have put these principles into practice when it comes to the cost of roads and driving. In Canada, not so much.
That’s why Canada is also an outlier on gas taxes.
Ours are among the lowest in the developed world. Yes, really.
A recent paper from three academics at the Université de Sherbrooke points out that not only are Canadian gas taxes low compared with peer countries, their relative weight has fallen.
Long before carbon pricing, provinces already had gas taxes – Quebec’s dates back to 1924 – while the federal excise tax on gasoline has been around since 1975. But the 10 cents-a-litre federal tax hasn’t gone up in 28 years. Most provincial gas taxes have similarly failed to keep pace with inflation. In 1981, Quebec’s gas tax was worth 1 per cent of the provincial economy; today, it’s worth less than half that. Relative to the size of the economy, the federal excise tax has been halved since the mid-1990s.
But don’t take some egghead professors’ word for it. The Canadian Fuels Association, representing “the companies who process crude oil into essential products like transportation fuels and get those products to market,” also says Canadian pump prices are far below other developed countries. Why? Lower taxes, mostly.
Canada’s levies – gas taxes, sales tax and carbon pricing – are higher than those in the U.S. But CFA data from last January shows that a litre of gasoline in Britain includes an extra 98 cents of tax. Drivers in Germany and Italy paid an extra $1.12 per litre in taxes. The French paid $1.30 more.
All of which helps explain why Canada is the world champion of gas-guzzling cars. Own the podium, Canada.
According to the International Energy Agency, Canadians are driving the planet’s least fuel-efficient personal vehicles. In 2017, the average Canadian ride got 8.9 litres per 100 kilometres. That compares with 8.6 litres/100 km in the U.S., 7.9 litres/100 km in Australia, and less than six litres/100 km in Germany, Britain, Italy and France.
Canadians were also driving the planet’s biggest personal vehicles in 2017 – and 61 per cent of new cars sold that year were not cars, but rather trucks, namely SUVs and pickups.
“Consumer preference for large vehicles,” the IEA says, “has offset the impacts of technical improvements on average fuel consumption.” Engineers keep figuring out how to move more mass with less gasoline; consumers, particularly in Canada, keep offsetting those engine improvements by choosing ever-larger vehicles.
The trend shows no signs of ending. Last year, according to Statistics Canada, 82 per cent of new Canadian light vehicles were trucks.
See you out on the highway.
The EU dodged a bullet.