Chrissy Sgourakis drives her delivery truck, often filled with colourful balloon creations for customers across Montreal, toward the gas station. She sighs as she pulls in.
"It used to cost $50 to fill up," says the 25-year-old owner of Haute Balloon. "Now it is a hundred, this is ridiculous."
The price of a litre of gas hovered above $1.90 in Montreal on Wednesday.
For Sgourakis, that means delivery fees for her custom balloon arrangements are now sometimes higher than the creations she drops off.
"Ballooning inflation," she jokes.
According to Statistics Canada, gasoline prices rocketed 6.9 per cent higher than just last month, and sit at nearly 40 per cent more than a year ago.
A spike that follows Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has thrown global supplies into chaos.
That cost has a significant impact on many sectors of the economy, driving up overall inflation.
The price of plane tickets, furniture, groceries has risen significantly. Canadians are now facing the largest annual increase in dairy and egg prices since 1983.
Sgourakis' father, Manny, is also an entrepreneur, running a flower business for anything "from baptisms to, unfortunately, funerals," he says, "and every event in between."
The supplies he buys and his shipping costs have risen substantially, though he insists for now he has not passed on the increase to his customers. However, he is not sure how long he will be able to do hold off.
"Everyone is talking about rising prices," he says.
And financial planner Zainab Williams says it is time for Canadians to get down to the business of figuring out their plan to weather the financial storm.
"It is a matter of us shifting our mindset and figuring out how we keep that dollar in our pocket at the end of the day," she says. Williams suggests families sit down and discuss changes in spending habits. "We will have to start behaving as though credit cards don't exist," she says. "Because we need to start thinking about how long we can carry on with higher prices."
