Armine Yalnizyan: Enbridge has hiked gas prices again — and heating prices for some could double this winter
It was the summer the Enbridge pipeline stopped being in service and the price of gas shot up to $6 a gallon before the company announced it would return, with a new capacity.
“That was probably a good decision because the company needed to do something,” said Enbridge pipeline system manager Michael Hough, who is among those asking for gas prices to be hiked back. “If the gas line was in service, they could just keep operating it, and we’ve had to be very careful that the infrastructure isn’t affected by the gas line being turned back on.”
But a new winter is set to hit the country hard and so far this year, the prices have gone up more than most Canadians have spent on gas.
That’s part of the problem, Hough said.
“We have a long way to go before we want to put our customers through the agony of having to drive or drive around or park farther so that they can get gas,” he said.
Hough said the most recent price spike, which followed an announcement Enbridge had decided to halt the pipeline’s service, wasn’t “truly” a hike.
“It’s sort of a misdirection,” he said of the announcement that said the company had no intention of reopening the line. “We actually thought that we’d had to suspend the pipeline, that it would take a few weeks, that the price would start going down, and it didn’t go down, and we were prepared to resume, but not that we have to restart the pipeline.”
The company said that the gas prices would go up again in May, but not �