Madam Speaker, those are very excellent questions. I want to explain to the hon. member that although I and many members on the committee held much promise that the conference board would do a thorough and independent job, it became apparent to us that much of its methodologies were in fact wrong and flawed. For instance, it compared that wholesale market that I was talking about, the refinery level, to 1% of the U.S. market, mostly the market of Plattsburgh and Buffalo, New York, which of course are trailers to the Toronto and Montreal markets. There was an asymmetry in terms of comparison. The board was literally comparing watermelons to apples, with the apples in the U.S. following the situation here in Canada.
However, if the board had taken the whole of the United States and compared it to the whole of Canada it would have found, as I and many others have discovered in any objective review, that the two are very different. In the U.S., in many respects, one will find that its refineries do not even sell gasoline at retail so there is real vibrant competition at the wholesale level.
The second part of the hon. member's question was a very good one. It dealt with the question of why investigations have not turned up conspiracy collusion. I want hon. members to really understand this. Collusion is not illegal in Canada. The burden of proof to discover collusion and price fixing under section 45 requires not only the establishment of the fact that it has happened and not only the intent of the individual, but that it had an undue impact or an undue standard on the market.
Can anyone believe this? Our Competition Act is similar to someone going in, knocking over a bank, having the intent to knock it over, carrying it out, pistol-whipping whoever is there but not being proven as having committed a criminal act unless the effect of their act is to bring about the collapse of the Canadian monetary system. It means it is a burden of proof not beyond reasonable doubt but a burden of proof that can never be proven.
The hon. member would probably have the chairman of Imperial Oil, Shell or any of those companies, which I am sure they would not do nor should they do, come before the Supreme Court of Canada and swear under oath that they had committed a conspiracy and of course done that by way of affidavit. Therefore the problem is with the Competition Act.
Again, I beg the hon. member and all hon. members in the House to remind themselves who wrote the Competition Act in 1985. If they do not like the way it was written and they do not like the high, unjustified costs of energy that have been fleecing Canadians, then I beg them to ignore the fact that the media has locked the issue down and to start discussing it because their constituents are doing it.