How Much Extra Money is Ontario Getting from the HST Taxes on Gasoline

One aspect of the recent implementation of the HST is the extra 8% tax levied on gasoline in Ontario (compared to the 5% from GST previously). One nice thing about the HST on gasoline is that it keeps rising with inflation. If the base price of gasoline goes up, so do the revenues from the HST with no need for a messy legislated rise in taxes. The other excise taxes don't have this property and haven't changed much recently (the provincial fuel tax is 14.7 cents per litre and the federal excise tax is 10 cents per litre).

I'm going to make a real half-assed guess as to how much extra income the Ontario government gets from the HST on gasoline. I'll say the average Ontarian pays $500 a year on gasoline (that's average over everyone, not everyone who has a car and this I think is a conservative estimate). That's $37.04 in extra HST taxes in Ontario per person. Looking at wikipedia, there's an estimate of Ontario's population as 13,210,667 people, which works out to $489323105.68 or close to half a billion dollars per year. That's pretty sizeable and begs the question as to whether the HST was as revenue neutral as the provincial government claimed it was.

The $500 number is just an educated guess. If I can get a number on the amount of gasoline sold in Canada or Ontario, I can make a better estimate, although it will fluctuate pretty wildly with the price per litre. In any case, I think it's an interesting number and I never really saw it reported much in the press, which is a little surprising, considering it isn't particularly hard to break out.