Mr. Speaker, in fact, both the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister have indicated that they are looking at specific measures now to help alleviate the problem for Canadians.
It is not necessarily going to be a magic bullet, but it is going to be, I presume, an approach that will assist those middle and low income families and small businesses that are particularly affected by the rising price of fuel. There is no question about that.
Again, and I agree with my friend across the way, the Competition Bureau needs to have serious changes made to it to give it the power. Yes, it does all these investigations. Yes, it does try to find the smoking gun. Part of what it does not have is to say to the oil companies in Canada that if they want to raise the price by x amount, there is a cooling off period of, I suggest, 30 days as an example.
That is the kind of thing I would like to see the Competition Bureau have, so that it has not only the power to investigate and prosecute, but also in terms of its monitoring ability is able to say that these are the rules if oil companies wish to increase the price.
The average person, including myself, who goes in to buy gasoline cannot understand why the price seems to fall slowly at night, suddenly jacks up in the morning because of impacts. We talk about hurricanes and so on, but some of the companies are not importing American oil. We have not had the impacts.
Yes, there is a refining capacity issue. There is no question that it needs to be addressed, but again, that is not something directly that the government has a direct say in.