Submission from Andrea Peart.

A recent leaked document has exposed that before this year’s federal budget, Environment Minister Jim Prentice sent a letter to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and PM Harper proposing that we end oil subsidies.

Many of you might not have even known that your money and my money goes to subsidize each barrel of oil, both one of the most valuable products and most profitable industries in the world. But unfortunately it’s true.
So back to Prentice. In a secret memo sent to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (and obtained by Canwest News Service), the top bureaucrat in Environment Canada, with the the support of Environment Minister Jim Prentice, recommended it was time to end the tax incentives (aka. Subsidies) as part of a move toward a balanced federal budget. Guess what happened? Our oil-loving, tar-sands-hugging PM said flat-out “no”.
The interesting part of all this is that we still don’t know how much we are paying each year in subsidies to profitable oil companies. The Pembina Institute has calculated the amount to be an estimated 2 billion dollars per year. Whoa, that’s a lot of money. So how much is 2 billion dollars? How much is 2 billion?

2 billion dollars is double the astronomical amount of money Canada is spending on security for the upcoming G8/G20.
2 billion dollars is more than the total operating budget (including teacher salaries, books, utilities…) for all school boards in Manitoba (1.6 billion for over 180,000 students)
2 billion seconds ago; it was the year 1910.
If you were to count to 2 billion, and you counted one number a second without stopping it would take you 63 years, 153 days, 3 hours, 33 minutes, and 20 seconds.
2 billion dollars is way too much of our money to be spending on oil subsidies. Oh wait, 1$ is way too much of our money to be spending on oil subsidies.