Squamish’s Fight for Fair Fuel Prices: An Example of Community Advocacy
For years, residents and business owners across the Sea to Sky corridor have asked the same frustrating question: why does gas in Squamish so often cost as much — or more — than gas in Metro Vancouver, even though our community doesn’t pay the TransLink fuel surcharge that funds transit in the Lower Mainland?
That question hasn’t gone unanswered by our community leaders. Over the past several months, the Squamish Chamber of Commerce, our Member of Parliament, and our MLA have each taken concrete steps to push for answers — and together, their efforts tell a story of advocacy moving steadily up the chain, from local business concern to federal and provincial regulatory bodies.
Step One: The Chamber Sounds the Alarm
This has been an ongoing concern in the Sea to Sky corridor for years. Past community organizations, business leaders and elected officials have all done work to try and achieve transparency and regulatory oversight. Picking up the thread of this work in October 2025, the Squamish Joint Engagement Committee — representing the Squamish Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Squamish, and the Downtown Squamish BIA, and by extension over 750 local business members — picked up this work and wrote directly to MP Patrick Weiler.
The letter laid out the core puzzle plainly: Squamish isn’t serviced by TransLink and shouldn’t carry its fuel surcharge, yet local gas prices routinely match or exceed those in TransLink-serviced areas. The committee pointed to Squamish’s position along the Sea to Sky Highway as a possible factor in what looked like demand-based pricing detached from actual supply and infrastructure costs, and asked for a federal investigation into how fuel prices are being set in the region.
Step Two: MP Weiler Takes It to the Competition Bureau
MP Weiler followed through, raising the issue directly with the Competition Bureau’s Cartels and Deceptive Marketing Branch. A meeting summary from that discussion offers a useful, if sobering, look at how federal competition law actually works.
The Bureau explained that it’s a law enforcement body, not a regulator — its job is to investigate criminal cartel behaviour like price-fixing, and doing so requires proving an actual agreement between competitors beyond a reasonable doubt. Persistently high, hard-to-explain prices, on their own, aren’t enough; the Bureau needs evidence of collusion, typically surfaced through whistleblowers, insiders, or competitors coming forward. “Conscious parallelism” (stations simply tracking each other’s prices) isn’t illegal, even if it feels that way at the pump.
Importantly, the meeting also clarified something many residents may not have realized: the Bureau cannot compel fuel pricing data on its own, and the Province has never shared the data needed to support a federal review. The Bureau pointed to one agency that can compel that information: the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC), which has authority under the Fuel Price Transparency Act and has already studied Sea to Sky pricing before.
Step Three: MLA Valeriote Goes to the BCUC
That’s exactly where the advocacy went next. In June 2026, Jeremy Valeriote, MLA for West Vancouver–Sea to Sky, wrote to the BCUC’s Registrar requesting that the Commission prioritize renewed monitoring of fuel prices from Squamish to Mt. Currie.
His letter built on the BCUC’s own prior findings from 2020–2021, when the Commission determined that the Sea to Sky functioned as a single integrated market with Metro Vancouver, that local prices were slower to respond to wholesale price drops, and that retail margins ran higher in less competitive markets like Squamish and Whistler. With renewed price volatility and active discussion of a new regional transit fuel tax, MLA Valeriote argued that updated analysis is now more important than ever, both to protect consumers and to properly assess how any new tax would interact with an already opaque pricing structure.
Why This Matters
Taken together, these three steps show local advocacy working the way it’s supposed to: a business community raising a concern with credible, ground-level evidence; an MP escalating it to the agency with the legal tools to investigate collusion; and when that path reached its limits, an MLA redirecting the effort to the regulator actually equipped to compel the data needed for real answers.
No single letter or meeting has cracked the mystery of Sea to Sky gas pricing yet. But the throughline from grassroots protests, the Joint Engagement Committee’s October letter to the Competition Bureau meeting to MLA Valeriote’s request of the BCUC shows sustained, coordinated pressure across every level of government — and it builds the public record that the Competition Bureau itself said would be valuable for prompting further review.
The Chamber will continue to monitor this issue closely and will keep our members and the broader Squamish business community updated as the BCUC responds to MLA Valeriote’s request. In the meantime, we encourage residents and businesses who want to see this addressed to keep raising their concerns directly with the BCUC — building the kind of public record regulators need to act.