Power Play over the Strait of Hormuz
Iran makes demands on USA. Tehran wants an end to sanctions, the release of frozen assets, compensation for war damage, tolls on passage and control of the waterway after the war. Fifty-one countries said in April they would accept no toll. China and Russia vetoed the Security Council resolution to protect the shipping, and China is the strait's largest user, taking 37.7 percent of the crude that moves through it. Washington's answer, in the president's own words, is to wait. This is a contest over who sets the rules on the world's most important waterway, and it is being reported almost everywhere as a fuel price.
The United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026. Vivek Lall, writing for Stanford's Hoover Institution, records that those strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and destroyed military and nuclear sites, and that within hours the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz closed to international shipping. It has not reopened.
For five months since, the strait has been reported almost everywhere as a disruption, something happening to shipping and to prices. Over the weekend of 8 and 9 August it was described by the people holding it as something else.
“Our current strategy is to maintain this strait until the enemy accepts all our conditions... the strait is now actually a theatre of war for us and not just a waterway.”
Confirmed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Sunday 9 August 2026, carried by agency reporting. A statement by an armed force about its own strategy, which makes the statement a fact. We are reporting what was said, not endorsing the characterisation.
That is a claim about what the strait is for. Everything below follows from taking it at face value.
Iran's price list for the Strait of Hormuz, in five points
Iran's Supreme National Security Council set out a list of conditions for reopening the strait on Saturday 8 August, reported by the Iranian news agency Tasnim. The list has five elements.
| Condition set by Iran's Supreme National Security Council, 8 August 2026 |
|---|
| An end to the war on all fronts |
| Lifting of the United States counterblockade of Iranian ports |
| An end to sanctions |
| Release of frozen Iranian assets |
| Compensation for wartime damage |
Confirmed as a list issued by that body on that date, attributed to Tasnim by agency reporting of 10 August 2026. The wording of each item is as carried by that reporting, not as published by Iran.
Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi added compensation and an end to sanctions and military threats when speaking on Sunday, and said talks with Oman on managing the strait were approaching their final stages. Separately reported accounts of the same weekend add withdrawal of United States forces from the region.
Why the body matters more than the wording. A demand voiced by a spokesman is a position. A list issued by a supreme national security council and carried by the state news agency is an instrument of policy. The significance of the weekend is not that Iran wants things. It is that the wanting has been given an institutional form and a public address.
Iran wants tolls. Fifty-one countries and Iran's own June memorandum already ruled them out.
Beyond the five-point list, agency reporting states that Tehran insists on retaining control of the strait after the war and wants to charge tolls for passage. Those two are different in kind from the others. Sanctions, assets and compensation are bilateral questions between Iran and the United States. A toll on passage and control of the waterway are claims against everyone who uses it.
Unconfirmed The toll demand, which is the hinge of this article. It reaches us from two independent places rather than one. Agency reporting states that Iran wants to charge tolls for passage. Separately, Vivek Lall, writing for Stanford's Hoover Institution on 9 June 2026, records that Iran has designated new shipping lanes closer to its coast, published naval maps suggesting mined waters, and reportedly demanded transit fees exceeding one million dollars per vessel.
Two sources agree there is a fee demand, and neither is an Iranian document. Lall writes reportedly, so the figure is second hand in his account too. No Iranian official is quoted by name naming a price in the reporting cited here. We are keeping the label because the amount is unverified, and reporting the corroboration because it materially strengthens the existence of the demand.
They also collide with two documents, and one of them has Iran's own signature on it.
The June memorandum, the instrument mediators have urged both sides to return to, provided that Tehran and Muscat would settle future arrangements for administering the strait in discussion with other Gulf countries and, in its own words, “in line with the applicable international law”. Agency reporting notes that such law generally forbids tolling in waterways of this kind.
The second document is one this publication has already reported. On 17 April 2026 France and the United Kingdom convened 51 countries, Canada among them, who stated their opposition to any restriction on passage through the strait. President Emmanuel Macron was specific about what was being rejected.
“We all oppose any restriction, any agreement regime that would amount to a de-facto attempt to privatize the strait, and obviously any toll system.”
Confirmed President Emmanuel Macron, Paris, 17 April 2026, published by the French foreign ministry under the open etalab-2.0 licence. Read by us 7 August 2026 for an earlier article and re-read for this one.
This is the finding, and it is a comparison of documents rather than a judgement. In April, 51 states named a toll system as the thing they opposed. In June, a memorandum Iran was party to required that future arrangements follow international law, which on the reporting we have forbids such tolls. In August, a toll on passage is reported as one of Iran's requirements for reopening.
We are not saying Iran has breached either instrument. The June memorandum's terms and the toll demand both reach us through agency reporting rather than Iranian documents, and whether a particular charging arrangement is lawful under the law of the sea is a question this article leaves open. What is on the record is that the objection was stated in advance, in public, by 51 governments, and that the thing now being demanded falls in the category they named.
Who actually uses the Strait of Hormuz? China, more than anyone.
The question of who is harmed by a closed strait is answerable from published data, and the answer is not the United States.
| Crude oil and petroleum liquids through world chokepoints, million barrels per day | 1H 2025 |
|---|---|
| Strait of Malacca | 23.2 |
| Strait of Hormuz | 20.9 |
| Suez Canal and SUMED pipeline | 4.9 |
| Bab el-Mandeb | 4.2 |
| Turkish Straits | 3.7 |
| Panama Canal | 2.3 |
Measured United States Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints, Table 1, last updated 3 March 2026. Read by us 10 August 2026. Hormuz volumes over the full series run 19.2, 19.7, 21.9, 21.8, 20.7 and 20.9 from 2020 to the first half of 2025.
Where that oil goes is the part that reframes the story. On analysis of the same EIA data, China took 37.7 percent of Hormuz crude oil and condensate flows in the first half of 2025, more than any other country. India took 14.7 percent, South Korea 12.0 percent and Japan 10.9 percent. Those four together took 74 percent, and Asia as a whole took 89.2 percent.
Confirmed as reported The destination shares are from published analysis of EIA data; the volume table above was pulled directly from the EIA series. The distinction matters and we are marking it.
So the country with the most oil at stake in this strait is China, and the country whose navy has historically underwritten passage through it is the United States. That is the shape of the thing. It is why this is a contest about who sets the rules and not only a contest about a price.
China and Russia vetoed the Security Council resolution to protect Hormuz shipping
On 7 April 2026 the Security Council voted on a draft resolution on the Strait of Hormuz. It failed.
| Security Council vote, 7 April 2026 | Count |
|---|---|
| In favour | 11 |
| Against, both permanent members holding a veto: China and Russia | 2 |
| Abstained: Colombia and Pakistan | 2 |
Confirmed UN News, official United Nations reporting of the meeting, 7 April 2026. Read in full 10 August 2026.
The text was submitted by Bahrain alongside Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It sought to encourage states using the strait to coordinate defensively to help ensure the safety of navigation, including escorts for merchant and commercial vessels, and it demanded that Iran immediately cease all attacks on shipping and any attempt to impede transit or freedom of navigation.
Every party stated its reasoning on the record, which is unusual enough to be worth setting out plainly.
Bahrain. Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani said the Council had failed to shoulder its responsibility in relation to illegal conduct requiring decisive action with no delay, and that failing to adopt the resolution sent the signal that a threat to international waterways can pass without decisive action.
United States. Ambassador Mike Waltz said Iran was taking the strait hostage and with it attempting to take the world's economy hostage, and that the strait is too vital to the world to be choked or weaponised by any one state.
Russia. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said the resolution presented Iranian actions as the sole source of regional tensions while attacks by the United States and Israel were not mentioned at all.
China. Ambassador Fu Cong said the draft failed to capture the root causes and the full picture of the conflict in a comprehensive and balanced manner.
Iran. Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani said the draft sought to punish the victim for defending its sovereignty and vital national interests, while providing cover for further unlawful acts by the aggressors.
Confirmed All five positions as recorded by UN News from the Council meeting of 7 April 2026, stated here in our own words except where the phrasing is the speaker's own.
Pakistan abstained on 7 April, and on 7 August signed a mutual defence treaty with Saudi Arabia, a co-sponsor of the resolution it had declined to support. Two government records, four months apart.
Before reading that as a reversal, read the reason. Vivek Lall records that the early April ceasefire that halted the strikes was brokered by Pakistan. A state acting as mediator has an obvious reason to abstain on a resolution that names one side. We are not calling this a change of sides, and the mediator reading fits both facts without strain. We are recording the sequence because it is checkable.
Does this help China in power politics? We are putting the question, not answering it.
This is the question underneath the whole story, and it is not ours to settle. What we can do is set out who has said what, on the record, and let a reader weigh it.
Vivek Lall, writing for the Hoover Institution's Caravan on 9 June 2026, put the precedent argument in terms.
“If that challenge succeeds, the precedent will travel. It will reach the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and every contested waterway where a state with shore based missiles calculates that closing a chokepoint is cheaper than confronting a navy.”
Confirmed as a published argument by a named author, 9 June 2026. Disclosure, because it bears on weight: Lall is Chief Executive of General Atomics Global Corporation, a defence company that manufactures unmanned systems, and his article recommends unmanned maritime systems as the answer. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The argument is his and the interest is real, and a reader is entitled to both.
Lall also records what the closure achieved by his account: Iran shut down roughly twenty percent of global seaborne oil trade using sea mines costing a few thousand dollars each and shore-launched anti-ship missiles, war risk insurance rates became prohibitive before the shipping stopped, and Gulf fertilizer exports amounting to roughly thirty percent of internationally traded supply were disrupted. The chief executive of Abu Dhabi's national oil company is quoted in the same piece saying the strait is not open, that access is being restricted, conditioned and controlled, and that this is coercion rather than freedom of navigation.
The legal frame, stated as the disagreement it is. Lall records that Iran is not a party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and that transit passage through straits used for international navigation is nevertheless widely understood as customary international law binding regardless of treaty membership. That is his reading of the law. No court or tribunal ruling on this closure has been published.
Unconfirmed A reported United States and China alignment against tolls. Published accounts state that the US Department of State said on 12 May 2026 that American and Chinese officials agreed no country may extract tolls in the strait, following a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and separately that China may be paying Iran service fees for its own vessels. If both were confirmed they would sit awkwardly against the April veto, which is precisely why we are not asserting them.
The question, put plainly and left open. A state has closed an international strait, named conditions for reopening it, and asked for a fee. The Security Council did not act, because two permanent members declined. The largest user of the strait is one of those two. A named analyst says the precedent reaches the Taiwan Strait. Whether that outcome strengthens China in power politics is a judgement, and it is the reader's to make, not ours. We have given the documents and the addresses to check them.
Washington and Tehran both say they are not negotiating with each other
Araghchi said on Sunday that Tehran was only exchanging messages with the United States through intermediaries, and that there are no ongoing negotiations. On the same day President Donald Trump described his own approach to Axios.
“We are low-keying it... We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
“It will work out. It's like a chess game.”
Confirmed President Donald Trump, in an interview with Axios, Sunday 9 August 2026, as carried by agency reporting of 10 August 2026.
Read the two statements together and they are not a contradiction, they are a description of the same method from both ends. Iran holds a waterway and names a price. The United States declines to pay it and states that its own instrument is Iranian inflation and Iranian insolvency. Each side has publicly identified pressure as the mechanism it is using, and neither has described a table.
That is what a stalemate of this shape looks like when both parties are candid about it. It is also why no date can be attached to a reopening, and we are not attaching one.
Thirteen attacks inside the strait in thirty days. We counted them ourselves.
This is the first piece in this publication to carry our own count from the UKMTO incident board.
| UKMTO Voluntary Reporting Area, 30 days to 10 August 2026 | Incidents |
|---|---|
| All incident types, whole reporting area | 24 |
| Logged in the Strait of Hormuz itself | 13 |
| Logged elsewhere, from the Gulf of Aden to the northern Arabian Gulf | 11 |
Measured Our own count from the UKMTO incident feed, read 10 August 2026. The feed carried 30 records, numbered 77 to 98 and 101 to 107, plus one stored under an eight-digit identifier carrying warning 108-26. Attacks, advisories, suspicious activity, illegal boardings and hijacks are all counted. The count reconciles with our own front page instrument.
Two records state the outcome rather than the incident. Warning 105-26 records a vessel attacked by an uncrewed surface vessel nine nautical miles southwest of Al Mukha, Yemen, on 4 August; the crew were rescued and reported safe, and the record states the vessel has been reported as sunk. Warning 108-26, the most recent, records a vessel struck by an unknown projectile 18 nautical miles east of Khasab, Oman, on 8 August, fire extinguished, crew safe.
The United Arab Emirates stated on Saturday 8 August that Iran had attacked a vessel owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company with a missile. Oman's foreign ministry condemned the repeated attacks without naming Iran.
What the count is and is not. It measures incidents UKMTO logged. It is not a transit count and not a measure of oil moved. Thirteen incidents inside the strait in thirty days is a rate of enforcement, and it sits underneath the sentence about a theatre of war as the practical content of it.
Saudi Arabia now has both of its sea routes under attack at once
Hormuz is not the only waterway under pressure, and for one country the two are connected.
Iran's Houthi allies in Yemen have declared a maritime blockade on Saudi ports in the Red Sea, which is Saudi Arabia's only other maritime export route. The Houthis stated on Sunday 9 August that they had struck a Saudi oil facility on the Red Sea coast, after the kingdom said it had extinguished a fire at the site. In the Yemeni city of Mokha, a medical source reported three civilians and eight military personnel killed and 32 people wounded on Sunday, with the civilian casualties resulting from strikes on the city's port.
Stated plainly: a country with two sea outlets has pressure applied to both at once, by two forces that are allied. That is a different proposition from a single blocked strait.
We are not claiming coordination. What is on the record is that both routes are under attack, that the two forces are allied, and that the effect on Saudi maritime access is cumulative.
A NATO member and a nuclear power just guaranteed Saudi Arabia. Nobody has published the treaty.
Three days before the Guards described the strait as a theatre of war, the country on the other end of that strait acquired allies.
On Friday 7 August 2026, at Al-Safa Palace in Makkah, Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement. Two of the three governments published a statement about it: Saudi Arabia through the Saudi Press Agency at 10:54 GMT, and Pakistan as foreign ministry press release 204/2026. We read both. The operative paragraph is identical in each, and this is it in full.
“The agreement is intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression, and stipulates that any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all. It further provides for the enhancement of all aspects of defense cooperation among the three states.”
Confirmed Quoted from the Saudi Press Agency release of 7 August 2026. Pakistan's foreign ministry release 204/2026 carries the same sentence word for word, differing only in capitalisation and the spelling of defence. Two governments publishing identical text is what makes this an agreed joint statement rather than one country's account of a meeting. Turkey has not published it.
That statement is not the agreement, and the agreement has not been published by any of the three governments. This publication reported that on 7 August and it is still the case on 10 August. What is public is a four-paragraph summary of a mutual defence treaty. The operative text, its thresholds, its exceptions and its geography are unread.
Turkey's foreign minister Hakan Fidan stated that the agreement is not aimed at any specific country, said he expected Egypt to join, calling it a natural partner on all issues, and said the parties already act toward one another as if they were alliance members. A Saudi analyst quoted in the same reporting, Faisal Al-Shammari, cautioned against reading too much into the agreement.
Set the dates in order and add nothing.
| Date | Event, as recorded |
|---|---|
| July 2026 | Iran's Houthi allies declare a maritime blockade of Saudi ports in the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia's only sea route other than the Gulf |
| 7 Aug 2026 | Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign a mutual defence agreement in Makkah. The text is not published |
| 8 Aug 2026 | Iran's Supreme National Security Council issues its conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz |
| 9 Aug 2026 | The Revolutionary Guards state the strait is a theatre of war held until the conditions are met. The Houthis state they struck a Saudi oil facility on the Red Sea coast |
Confirmed Each row is separately sourced below. We are not asserting that these events are connected. They are placed in sequence because they occurred in sequence, within four days, in the same theatre. The reader draws the line or declines to.
What makes this a Canadian story rather than a distant one, stated as instruments and nothing more. Turkey is a NATO member, and Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty expressly includes the territory of Turkey within the geography for Article 5 purposes. Canada is party to that treaty. Turkey has now also taken on a mutual defence commitment to Saudi Arabia whose text no government has published.
An attack on Saudi Arabia or on Pakistan is not an Article 5 event for Canada, because neither is inside the Article 6 geography. That reading is ours, from the treaty text. How a Turkish obligation under an unpublished agreement interacts with a Turkish entitlement under a published one is a question no reader outside the three governments can answer, because the agreement is unpublished. We are not predicting anything and we are not saying Canada has been committed to anything. We are saying a document that bears on Canadian treaty obligations exists and is being withheld.
What this does to a Canadian fuel bill, and the only date anybody has
This is the question this publication exists to ask, and here the honest answer is narrow.
Our own Brent instrument reads 88.90 United States dollars a barrel on an observation dated 3 August 2026, from the official Energy Information Administration spot series. The figure circulating in coverage on 10 August is 84.43 dollars, which is Brent futures for October delivery quoted at 04:30 GMT and carried by a news organisation. Those are different instruments on different dates and we are not merging them into one price. The EIA series lags by several days by design, so the authoritative number is never the current one.
Trump's own remarks name the transmission chain for an American reader: agency reporting states the closure has raised prices for American voters ahead of November's midterm elections. For a Canadian reader there is one number with a date on it, and it is not an oil price.
The federal fuel excise tax in Canada currently sits at 0 cents per litre on gasoline and diesel, under a measure whose founding document names global oil disruption related to the Middle East conflict as the reason it exists. That measure has a stated final day.
| Fuel | Federal excise now | From 8 September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Gasoline, and unleaded aviation gasoline | 0¢/L | 10¢/L |
| Diesel fuel, and aviation fuel | 0¢/L | 4¢/L |
| Leaded aviation gasoline | 0¢/L | 11¢/L |
Confirmed Department of Finance Canada backgrounder, 14 April 2026, and Canada Border Services Agency Customs Notice 26-11, Ottawa 17 April 2026, updated 22 June 2026. The suspension runs from 20 April 2026 to 7 September 2026 inclusive. The leaded aviation gasoline line is from the customs notice only, which records that the suspension was extended to that fuel on 18 June 2026. Finance Canada put the value of the measure at over 2.4 billion dollars.
The asymmetry is the point. Ten cents a litre of the price a Canadian pays for gasoline is currently not being charged, and the documents name 8 September 2026 as the day it is charged again. Iran's conditions have no date attached to them at all. One clock is published and the other is not.
We are not forecasting a pump price. What a driver pays in September depends on crude, refining margins, the exchange rate, provincial taxes and retail margins. The excise line is one component and it is the only one carrying a published date.
There is a second transmission chain in this story and it does not run through a fuel tank. Lall records that Gulf fertilizer exports, roughly thirty percent of internationally traded supply, were disrupted by the closure. Fertilizer is a grocery bill input on a lag of seasons rather than weeks, named here because it is the chain this publication would follow next.
The same Finance document also decides who was never inside the measure. It states that heating oil is exempt from this tax and that there is no federal excise tax on natural gas or propane. A household heating with any of those three received nothing from the suspension and loses nothing in September, because the tax was never charged on those fuels.
Sources and verification
Addresses below are printed in full so you can copy one and check us. We do not link out.
The Revolutionary Guards quotation, the Supreme National Security Council list attributed to Tasnim, the toll and post-war control demands, the June memorandum's international-law clause, the Trump quotations to Axios, Araghchi on exchanging messages, Oman's condemnation, the Houthi blockade of Saudi Red Sea ports, the Mokha casualties and the Saudi, Turkey and Pakistan defence agreement. The New Arab and agencies, “Iran Guards say won't reopen Hormuz without US meeting Tehran's demands,” 10 August 2026. Facts stated in our own words, not republished. Read in full 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://www.newarab.com/news/irgc-wont-reopen-hormuz-without-us-meeting-tehrans-demands
The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement: the signatories, the venue, the date, and the operative sentence quoted in full. Saudi Press Agency, “Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan Issue Joint Statement of the Makkah Al-Mukarramah Summit for Joint Defence,” Makkah, 7 August 2026, 10:54 GMT. Read in full 10 August 2026. A government primary source. Confirmed https://www.spa.gov.sa/en/N2649227
Independent confirmation of the identical operative sentence, and the release number. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Pakistan, “Makkah Al-Mukarramah Summit for Joint Defence,” press release 204/2026, Makkah, 7 August 2026, dated 24 Safar 1448H. Read in full 10 August 2026. A second government primary source carrying the same text. Confirmed https://mofa.gov.pk/press-releases/makkah-al-mukarramah-summit-for-joint-defence
The Article 6 geography relied on for the Canadian point. The North Atlantic Treaty, Washington D.C., 4 April 1949, official text published by NATO. The reading of Article 6 is ours, taken from that text. Confirmed https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm
The 7 April Security Council vote, the sponsors, the content of the draft, and the five ambassadors' stated positions. UN News, “Security Council: Russia and China veto resolution on Strait of Hormuz,” 7 April 2026. Official United Nations reporting. Read in full 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/04/1167261
The chokepoint volume table, including 20.9 million barrels per day through Hormuz in the first half of 2025. United States Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints, Table 1, last updated 3 March 2026. Pulled and read by us 10 August 2026. Credit the U.S. Energy Information Administration. No endorsement implied. Measured https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/special_topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints/
The 28 February strikes and the death of Ali Khamenei, the Guards' closure of the strait within hours, the Pakistan-brokered April ceasefire, the reported transit fee above one million dollars per vessel, the twenty percent of seaborne oil trade, the thirty percent of traded fertilizer supply, the ADNOC chief executive's quotation, the customary-international-law reading, and the Taiwan Strait precedent argument. Vivek Lall, “Freedom of Navigation in an Age of Precision Disruption,” The Caravan, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 9 June 2026. A signed argument by a named author. Lall is Chief Executive of General Atomics Global Corporation, a defence manufacturer of unmanned systems, which his article recommends. Read in full 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://www.hoover.org/research/freedom-navigation-age-precision-disruption
The 51 countries and the Macron quotation naming a toll system. France-UK joint statement on the Strait of Hormuz, Paris, 17 April 2026, published by the French embassy in the United Kingdom, English text sourced by that ministry from the UK Government website. Published under the open etalab-2.0 licence. Read 7 August 2026 and re-read 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://uk.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france-uk-joint-statement-strait-hormuz
Araghchi's conditions on 9 August and the 84.43 October futures quotation. Al Jazeera, John Power, “Oil prices climb as Iranian demands cloud outlook for Strait of Hormuz,” 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/8/10/oil-prices-climb-as-iranian-demands-cloud-outlook-for-strait-of-hormuz
The 24 and 13 incident counts, warning 105-26 and warning 108-26. UKMTO incident feed, read by us 10 August 2026 and counted over the 30 days to that date. Published under the Open Government Licence. Measured https://sccd.royalnavy.mod.uk/api/ukmto/all
The 88.90 Brent spot observation dated 3 August 2026. United States Energy Information Administration petroleum spot price series, pulled through our own instrument and read 10 August 2026. Credit the U.S. Energy Information Administration. No endorsement implied. Measured https://api.eia.gov/v2/petroleum/
The excise rates, the 7 September end date, the 8 September return, the 2.4 billion dollar figure, and the heating oil, natural gas and propane exemption. Department of Finance Canada backgrounder, “Temporarily suspending the federal fuel excise tax,” 14 April 2026. Read in full 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2026/04/temporarily-suspending-the-federal-fuel-excise-tax.html
Independent confirmation of the same dates and rates, and the 18 June extension to leaded aviation gasoline at an 11 cent return rate. Canada Border Services Agency, Customs Notice 26-11, Ottawa, 17 April 2026, updated 22 June 2026. Read in full 10 August 2026. Confirmed https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/publications/cn-ad/cn26-11-eng.html