MOTORISTS don’t understand the first thing about gas prices — except that they climb more often, and faster, than they fall, and that the pump price seems increasingly decoupled from the price of crude.
You can’t blame people for being confused and conspiracy-minded.
But it’s another matter for the federal industry minister to feign ignorance in an effort to strike a populist note. "All I know is that prices are going up and down and sideways and no one really knows why," Tony Clement said last week at a news conference staged in the driveway of a Toronto family that’s feeling squeezed.
Mr. Clement’s decision to summon Big Oil executives before a parliamentary committee next month so they can explain volatile gas prices to Canadians will only succeed in proving one thing — that electioneering continues long after elections are over.
Surely Mr. Clement knows much more than he lets on. Unlike ordinary Canadians, he has staff and expertise at his disposal to provide the real answers. He knows the effect any number of factors have in fixing the price — lack of refining capacity, instability in the Middle East, growing demand on the domestic scene and in the developing world, market speculation, severe weather, etc. He also knows there is no evidence of collusion on the part of Big Oil — half a dozen probes by the Competition Bureau over the past two decades have come up empty.
Yes, the gas-pricing game is opaque, but no more opaque than the process that determines the cost of other commodities. The problem is there’s no easy answer the public will accept.
As for refiners, distributors and retailers who will field questions at the committee hearing, they already know the drill: Any answers they provide — whether or not they are true — will be dismissed as excuses. They also know that such exercises are meant to deflect attention from who is really gouging you at the pumps: the taxman. For perfectly sound reasons, governments are reluctant to lower gas taxes.
The only other practical thing they can do to lower gas prices is to approve the construction of new refineries or penalize the purchasers of gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, which drive up demand and prices for everybody. Perhaps we should have a real discussion about that instead of a mock trial in Ottawa.
