Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, for appearing before us again.
My friend and colleague, Mr. McTeague, offered me a formula a few years ago. I keep it in the back of my book. That reminds me, I haven't transferred it to this book yet, but I keep it there. It's a formula that explains the cost of fuel. It's quite clever, and it makes sense time and time again if you want to know why fuel is charged at a certain amount. You just follow this simple formula and you come up with the end results. I keep it there because inevitably I'm going to run into somebody who tells me again that there is a conspiracy going on and prices of fuel are the result of a vast network of clever schemes by oil companies.
I don't want to belittle that because if that were the case we'd certainly need to do it. But we've had so many inquiries into this. And in particular I have a friend who...every three months we get together and he tells me again. So I explain the situation and I settle him down. Inevitably, three months later I have to have the same conversation. I've quit the conversation now because this has become an urban legend, I think. It's kind of like J.F.K. I don't think there are too many people in the United States who believe that Mr. Oswald really shot J.F.K. It's that smoking gun. But we come up with this time and time again.
I say that too because really this bill is about oil companies. This bill is about the fact that there's this perception that we're being cheated at the pumps. If this would result in proving that, I'd be the first one to stand up in front...but I've just seen so many cases tried and we've gone through this so many times that I guess I'm a skeptic as to whether or not this is the solution.
Mr. Janigan, I think we've asked this question, or it's been stated: has this bill been tried in other countries? Are there other countries that have used this type of legislation?