Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Hamilton Mountain is right. We are coming up to a long weekend and I expect that each and every one of us will go back to our home communities and surprisingly find that gas prices have gone up 5¢ to 10¢ a litre. It is a tradition on long weekends in Canada. Sadly, it is a tradition that affects consumers. Yesterday in my speech I mentioned that low income Canadians are even harder hit by this kind of pricing. The member for Windsor West has long called for oversight on how prices at the gas pumps are arrived at.
I want to come back for a moment to why this piece of legislation was introduced. The member for Hamilton Mountain pointed out that it does not go nearly far enough and adversely impacts on small retailers. I want to refer to the Ottawa Citizen article in 2008 which talked about the report that eventually led to this piece of legislation. It said:
But using the most conservative figures, pumps that fell outside the tolerance zone would have shortchanged consumers by at least $17 million annually if projected across the entire industry. At the same time, however, fast pumps would give out $8 million in free gas. On the small percentage of pumps outside the tolerance zone, consumers come out about $9 million behind.
It went on to say:
But if pumps that passed inspection also skewed against the consumer by about the same rate within the tolerance zone, Canadian drivers would be out of pocket even more.
With about 40 billion litres of gas sold in Canada, the 0.5% variation within the legal tolerance represents a potential swing of $240 million in either direction. If the variations in gas flowing from these pumps evened out, it would have no effect on consumers. But even a small shift could represent millions of dollars.
That article points out that not only are consumers impacted by the variations in the pumps, but the small retailers are as well. Their margins are pretty tight. If they are giving out free gas, they cannot afford that. The much broader issues around regulation of gas prices and effective oversight into pump regulation require attention.