Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague for bringing this matter forward in the informed way that he has.
There are certain constituencies that are calling simply for the government as a short term measure to reduce the federal portion of the tax, somehow suggesting that this will lower the retail price.
I want to quote the member for Okanagan—Coquihalla who, while he was the finance minister in Alberta, was under a great deal of pressure to do just that, to reduce a portion of the tax with the assumption that it would reduce the price at the retail pump. At the time he said:
If we look at lowering the gas tax, what kind of guarantees do we have that the gas retailers will also drop the price, or are they just going to fill in the ditch?
That is a direct quote; it is not a term I would have used, but I think he was on to something. When we cannot determine what supply and demand factors would dictate the retail price to be, either the federal or provincial government's vacating tax room with the understanding that the retail price would go down is probably a very misguided approach.
There is a better approach. The Liberal task force on gasoline pricing looked at the Competition Act and looked at structural reasons within the industry. One of them is the chain of ownership. We proposed divorce legislation. There is Bill C-249 which is presently in the other house. The Liberal members supported it. We did not get similar support from the opposition.
There is no easy fix here, but I want to assure my colleague that we will continue to work extremely hard to minimize the negative aspects of the spike in gasoline prices.