Industry committee  Regulating the wholesale price of gasoline, in other words. There is some intervention there that's possible, I would say. The big danger of regulating at the wholesale level...perhaps you recall electricity regulation in California. Intervention has to be done extremely carefull

Industry committee  Yes, absolutely. I would go as far as saying there's a level of irresponsibility by not having that. I think it's reprehensible that we don't have consistent, or at least the ability for consistent specifications with our bordering states.

Industry committee  I've recently undertaken a study of the four Atlantic provinces that have regulated, and every province, including Quebec, has a different form of regulation with different purposes. From my research, I would say that none of the provinces undertook regulation with the intent of

Industry committee  No, absolutely not. The specification is the same on sulphur, which is a very critical specification for gasoline. It's the same specification. It only varies in the administration, so during the fuel shortage we found that when we went to the tank to get the fuel, it was of a di

Industry committee  I can't speak for the refining side of the industry; I speak for the independent marketers. I completely agree with you that there is no accountability in Canada and very little, although more, in our neighbour the United States. I would also agree with you that on a world scale,

Industry committee  Rather than mandating a certain amount of refining capacity or refinement of our own crude oil, I think the level of intervention we would like to see is one that would address the accountability issue. We could go further if necessary, but I would say the first step, as a minimu

Industry committee  Sure. It's a good question, and members of our association certainly would look at that, like others in Ontario, just to use that example. More product could come into Ontario, for example. we twinned the pipeline, built a new terminal in Toronto, and those sorts of things. This

Industry committee  Thank you. If we use Michael J. Ervin data, which are the data that are generally used on the Natural Resources website, statistically there is no difference between regulated markets and unregulated markets. Those who are pro-regulation will cut the data to look like it is bett

Industry committee  I don't think it's a fair comparison. As an example, because of the specification issue and the fact that we could not import gasoline into Ontario during the fuel shortage, there was a 12¢ a litre discrepancy—which is huge in our industry—between the Toronto rack and the Detroit

Industry committee  As I mentioned, there'll be two benefits from tracking of inventories, our association and members feel. The first is that it would increase the level of accountability. This is not an interventionist move; there are other more interventionist moves. This would at least report

Industry committee  There are two main reasons. In the short term, product should be flooding into Ontario and the Prairies right now, and certainly should have been during that fuel shortage. But there are some restrictions on the ability to get product in, not just because it's landlocked and we

Industry committee  Yes, thank you.

Industry committee  First, thank you for the invitation to address this committee on the subject of gasoline prices and refining margins. I represent independent fuel marketers in Canada. Independent fuel marketers are those who purchase fuel at the wholesale level. Independents do not refine crud