Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I believe I misspoke earlier when I talked about pretending to take action or something along those lines. That is not what I meant. We can take some concrete steps. The Competition Bureau is an organization that exists, and we can ask that organization to take certain specific actions.
In my opinion, that is something that is done and that we can do. There is a bill. I don't know whether Mr. Arthur read Bill C-454 or whether he has looked at the references to the Competition Bureau. Mr. Arthur will be the first to ask why we, in Canada, are not capable of doing things on our own. The impetus always comes from the United States. I have regularly heard him serve up that line to this Committee. Today, however, he is making the opposite argument, saying that we should wait to see what they do in the United States before jumping on the bandwagon and taking action on our own. Are we not capable of doing something ourselves? Are we not capable of deciding something by ourselves? Why do we always have to wait for someone else to do it?
At the present time, we have a major problem, and when we find ourselves faced with that problem, all we do is sit around the table and wait for the price of gasoline to go up again, saying that it's a terrible thing and that we really don't know what to tell the people we represent. So, we just sit and wait until the price goes up to $2 a litre. And we wonder what caused that increase. But whether it's Peter, John or Jack, it won't change a thing in our own lives, because the price of gas is going to continue to go up.
The point is not to find out who is responsible for the rising price of gasoline, but rather, to look at what we can do to stabilize the price.
Can it be stabilized? Would it be possible to bring down the price of a barrel of oil? Could we do something to ensure that, at the refining stage, at the very least, the price does not go up further, so that a litre of gas at the pump does not cost even more? The only way that could be accomplished is with the Competition Bureau. It simply isn't possible for the price to increase by 28¢ a litre overnight. That's my own view, and I think the most effective way of dealing with this would be to work with the Competition Bureau. That is the only concrete tool we have at our disposal, and yet we are not using it, because there is no interest in doing so.
Thank you.