{"id":539654,"date":"2026-03-16T07:28:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T07:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/539654\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T07:28:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T07:28:10","slug":"the-war-comes-home-in-the-form-of-higher-energy-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/539654\/","title":{"rendered":"The war comes home in the form of higher energy prices"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Esso gas station at Mount Pleasant Road and Merton Street in Toronto. Even for countries far from the hostilities in the Middle East, including Canada, there\u2019s collateral damage.Fred Lum\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Outside the gas station at the corner of Cook and Geary streets stands a sign of the times. It says: $5.89<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the price in U.S. dollars for a gallon of gasoline here, an increase of about 62 U.S. cents in a week. Signs like that one stand as a drive-by reminder that the toll of the Iran<\/a> conflict is occurring far beyond the theatre of war, where the cost in American lives is at least 13.<\/p>\n

Now, for the first time in decades \u2212 perhaps for the first time in generations \u2212 Americans at home are being asked to make wartime sacrifices, just as John F. Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address, urged his fellow Americans to ask, in times of peace and war, not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country. <\/p>\n

Though the escalating costs of the Vietnam War are often blamed for late 1960s and 1970s inflation, few if any of the most recent U.S. military campaigns prompted much sacrifice on the home front \u2212 in fact, there arguably wasn\u2019t even a home front for the U.S. engagements in Panama, Kosovo, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Grenada and perhaps even the two Iraq wars.<\/p>\n

David Shribman: Trump may have had more support for war in Iran if he took a cue from history<\/a><\/p>\n

Even for countries far from the hostilities, including Canada, there\u2019s collateral damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we pay $1.75 a litre for gasoline in Montreal, we\u2019re paying a price for this war,\u201d said Rafael Jacob, a fellow at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair in Strategic and Diplomatic Studies. \u201cThe media portrays this as involving Iran, Israel and the U.S., but it also involves costs for other countries, including next-door neighbours like us.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, the costs in the U.S. are far less onerous than the exigencies of the Second World War, when, in the first year of U.S. involvement, rationing cards and coupons limited purchases of gasoline, tires, clothing, meat, sugar, butter and produce.<\/p>\n

Steven Sidebotham, a University of Delaware professor who conducted oral histories of the Second World War, said gasoline rations depended upon \u201cwhether or not that person even owned a car, how close to work and grocery stores each person lived and each one\u2019s respective income.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, war privations created \u201cthe hidden inflation of lower quality, diminished choice, reduced services, and inconvenient shopping,\u201d John Jeffries wrote in his Wartime America: The World War II Home Front. He argued that, in wartime, \u201csocietal values and priorities, sometimes even basic ones, are often secondary, at least for the duration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why Canada\u2019s energy superpower status can\u2019t fully protect us from the oil crisis<\/a><\/p>\n

As in all wars, including the Second World War, which for Canadians began in 1939 but for Americans did not begin until the last month of 1941, there are no assurances about the duration of hostilities. And though in the Second World War the stakes and purposes of the combat were clear, U.S. President Donald Trump has not issued a comprehensive explanation for U.S. goals in what he\u2019s described as only \u201ca little excursion.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s led to low support for the conflict and to the spread of early political opposition \u2212 rare in a country where people generally have backed any president at the beginning of a U.S. military engagement. Partisan divisions emerged within the first few days of the bombing of Iran, some of which pointed to the costs of the war at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump\u2019s Iran war is costing Americans $1.5-billion more at the pump this week alone, and what are Americans getting in return?\u201d asked Governor Gavin Newsom of California, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. \u201cNot better roads. Not cleaner air. Just higher prices, as corporations pocket the higher prices and cash in on Trump\u2019s chaos. \u2018Drill, baby, drill\u2019 was always a lie to enrich Trump\u2019s Big Oil donors \u2212 not a strategy to keep prices low, because oil is a global good with a global price.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gasoline prices have risen about 20 per cent in the United States since the first air strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. <\/p>\n

David Shribman: When it comes to the Iran war, Trump has no clear goal or answers<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump told Reuters earlier this month that he didn\u2019t \u201chave any concern about it,\u201d saying, \u201cThey\u2019ll drop very rapidly when this is over, and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.\u201d Still, he said over the weekend that \u201cmany countries\u201d should join the U.S. in keeping the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 per cent of the world\u2019s oil travels, \u201copen and safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gas prices rose about 1 per cent after the beginning of the 2003 Iraq War. By way of contrast, the expectations of warfare, and thus gasoline prices, climbed for months before the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, so gas prices actually dropped when combat began.<\/p>\n

Oil prices are a special worry in the American farm belt. Mr. Trump swept Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, states now facing challenges as planting season approaches. And with a third of the world\u2019s fertilizer supply moving through the Strait of Hormuz, the American Farm Bureau Federation sent a letter of distress to Mr. Trump last week.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe recent energy production halts in the Middle East will affect the price and availability of many downstream products farmers depend upon,\u201d the group wrote. \u201cThese supply chain shocks are expected to drive already record-high input prices even higher at a time when farm margins are already extremely tight and many farmers are underwater.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The Esso gas station at Mount Pleasant Road and Merton Street in Toronto.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48,22158,135829,9257,3277,33221,2393,1971],"class_list":["post-539654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-democrats","tag-gop","tag-republicans","tag-trump","tag-us-politics","tag-washington-dc","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}