Mr. Speaker, I do not disagree. If the member were to reflect on a couple of the comments I made in my speech, he would see that there has been investment made in a special office to review anti-competitive behaviour and also to strengthen the Competition Act to achieve similar results.
Hurricane Katrina was not just a one day affair. Hurricane Katrina left some devastation behind it where we had oil rigs floating around in the Gulf of Mexico. The supply situation was in jeopardy with other hurricanes coming along.
His colleague mentioned that we should just get rid of the GST on fuel. Let us do a little calculation here. A one penny reduction in the taxes of gasoline costs $400 million. The GST would be about six cents, so we are talking six times $400 million, which is $2.4 billion to get the price of gasoline today down to about 90ยข. It is still not enough.
At what point do we say the government cannot cut the taxes enough to get gasoline prices to the level that they should be at? What is the reality of the price of a barrel of oil? Two years ago the price of a barrel of oil was around $10. Today it has been hovering around $67. It is correcting itself a little bit, but we have to understand that in the reality of the commodity of energy, particularly of oil, we are not price makers in Canada. We are price takers.
The world price of oil is what it is. We are going to have to deal with it. That is why Bill C-66 does not only deal with a small fix for low income Canadians. We also have to continue taking steps to be energy efficient through the retrofit portion and make further investments to public transit. This is a complex problem and not the simple problem that the member seems to think.