Madam Speaker, I believe that if the government did the inspections, it would give the retailers a bit more protection regarding price fluctuations.
However, I noticed that when the Liberals were in government, they tended to adopt an approach of everything being done in a voluntary way. If toxic toys were the concern, they tended not to do a mandatory recall but would let the industry regulate itself and check whether or not the toys were toxic. If they were toxic, industry would tell Health Canada, but Health Canada would not do a mandatory recall. It was all about voluntary enforcement, which is no enforcement at all.
In many ways, there has to be firm guidelines, regulations or policies that if retailers are cheating consumers, they will be fined. There needs to be accurate measurements. There should be performance follow-up inspections. All of that is really important. Inspectors at Measurements Canada, which is the federal agency, should be solely responsible for the enforcement actions. All of those are important.
Also, increasing the number of annual inspections of gas pumps to approximately 65,000 is important. Right now there are only 8,000 inspections. I do not think that is anywhere near enough.
As for the 5%, I thought that between 1999 and 2007 the government's inspection of over 200,000 fuel pumps found that about 5% of the pumps delivered less fuel than reported on the pump display. In some places like Windsor, almost 25% of the fuel pumps inspected were discovered to be faulty.
As for the question in terms of the gas tax, right now 5¢ goes to municipalities. We think there should be an extra 1¢ gas tax, which would be about 440 million per 1¢ of gas tax. We think that at least 1¢ or 2¢ of that should be designated for public transit. Right now it is done per capita, which means that the city of Toronto, for example, where there is a large number of people taking public transit, is not getting the share it needs in order to fund public transit projects, such as the Transit City.
As a result, we have in the city of Toronto a lack of public transit. To go from one part of the city to another part sometimes takes two hours one way. Imagine people spending four hours taking public transit from home to work if they live in different parts of the city. That is not good enough. Traffic clogs the highways and the roads. It is important for us to invest in public transit
This bill does not deal with the gas tax. It does not deal with the price of gasoline. It just deals with the inspections and fairness for the consumers.