With long commutes and medical trips, high gas prices have hit rural N.L. hard
Brandon King's weekly trips from Bay d'Espoir to Grand Falls-Windsor are getting more and more expensive — and his family is feeling the pain.
The trip is 180 kilometres each way. With gas at $1.98 per litre — ahead of Friday morning's 9.6-cent drop — he says, the trip costs $100 each week, much more than it used to.
It's money that he just doesn't have to spare.
"The money is going into the gas," King said. "And if the money's not going to gas, the prices of the food is going up because of the gas."
"My children aren't getting the food that they really deserve because we're not able to afford it"
He's cut back wherever he can — ditching cable, and any extra travel. But these trips are important: his wife is 38 weeks pregnant, and there is no closer specialist.
As the due date comes closer, money is getting tight.
"We've had to cut back on our groceries," he said. "What we used to be able to get for $300 or $400? We now have less than that to put it into groceries, and the amount of money that we're putting into groceries doesn't get us as much."
"So quite literally, my children are going hungry."
For residents of the Bay d'Espoir area, medical appointments, work and even children's sports can be a two-hour drive away. Commutes are a fact of life, the rising price of gasoline and diesel is hitting hard.
David Howse, a contractor in the region, has seen the profit of his work plummet — because his work site in Hermitage takes an hour to drive to every morning.
His commute has spiked in recent months, and now costs him about $50 each day, even in his relatively small Hyundai Elantra.
"You need to take it, more or less, rob Peter to pay Paul," he said.
"It's impossible to try and save, right? And if you put it on the customer, the customer's not going to get you to do the job. It's damned if you do and damned if you don't."
Owen Savoury also makes trips for medical appointments in Grand Falls-Windsor, escorting his wife for treatment there for a back injury.
Aside from tinkering at the margin — making sure your tires are properly inflated — he says there's really nothing to do but bear the cost of the pump.
"The big thing comes down to the government on what they can do for us citizens," he said.
As the cost for essential travel rises, residents of these communities are cutting where they can. Many are cutting back on recreation — Savoury anticipates fewer trips to go swimming this summer, and locals say weekend traffic is way down — but others in the area are making very dramatic choices.
"The concerning piece is that people are having to choose whether or not they can afford to go to appointments," said Kelly McDonald, the mayor of Milltown-Head of Bay d'Espoir. "We have to head up over the highway for everything, it's either to Grand Falls-Windsor, Gander or a lot of times it's St. John's for these specialist appointments."
"Then we've got the cost of food and if you are travelling any further … you've got the cost of hotels and accommodations, it becomes very inaccessible to many residents."
For King, appointments to check on his wife during pregnancy must be kept — but he wonders how people with colds or sprains feel.
And because he can't stop that cost, he says trips to the region's new food bank are likely on his family's horizon.
"I moved here when I was young and I moved here because I thought that it would be better off for my family and my children. And it's starting to look like it might not be that way."
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