CANADA: Use Less Gasoline

Its first two weeks of gasoline control found much of Canada baking in a heat wave. So eager were Canadians to go driving in the evening that they did not let the closing of filling stations at 7 p.m. upset their plans. Motorists simply filled up before closing time. Between 6 and 7 the stations did a gold-rush business.

On the first “gasless” Sunday a steady stream of cars lined the roads; traffic was in its normal Sunday jam. Most drivers had filled their tanks on Saturday, but some set out with drums of gasoline strapped to their luggage racks. Few drove more slowly, as the Government had asked them to do, to save gas. Many guessed wrong on the day’s consumption, abandoned their cars beside the road. Those who tried to bribe service stations to slip them a little bootleg were turned down: the rumor was out that the Government had spotters on the roads.

So disappointing was Oil Controller George Cottrelle’s half-way-to-rationing experiment that Canadians fully expected real rationing before long. To give voluntaryism one last chance, one oil company advertised, urging consumers not to use its product. Sign on a billboard flanking a service station in Toronto:

MOTORISTS!

Tankers are vital to Britain

The more you drive here

The fewer tankers go there

USE LESS GASOLINE

Courtesy Shell Oil Co., of Canada