Venezuela, Sanctions and Canadian gas pump horror

 

 

What have Canadian sanctions on Venezuela oil got to do with the rise in the price of Canadian gasoline?  Isn’t this rise just a normal kind of pre-summer scalping that we endure every year?  No, this time is different.  This time the price gouging has to do with the very nature of oil, and the nature of the oil sanctions imposed by the US.

 

There are two kinds of oil: light sweet and heavy sweet crude.  The US has lots of light sweet, but must import the heavy sweet crude to mix with their own lighter crude to meet IMO (International Maritime Organization) standards.  Guess who formally supplied the US with most of this valuable mix. Why, Venezuela and Iran, of course.  Iran is also considered in drastic need of a regime change by the US war hawks and may not have to wait long for their turn of the screw.  In the meantime, because of the difficultly of the existing sanctions already put on Venezuela by the US and by Canada, heavy oil is at a premium.  This puts pressure on the price of gasoline and Canadian gas pumps, as well as American ones, will increasingly reflect this pressure in the coming months. In my opinion Canadians are going to pay in more ways than one for slapping sanctions on Venezuela.  There is another irony…we are sitting here in Canada with an enormous amount of heavy crude (the oil sands) but no delivery systems. If so many people weren’t suffering by these sanctions on Venezuela, and increasingly in Canada, I would almost laugh at the pompous, arrogant US war hawks. As both US Republicans and Democrats agreed to these sanctions I think the “Land of the Free” as a whole is nursing vipers in its bosom. And Trudeau is trying his very best to join that club of vipers.