For anyone wanting to understand petroleum pricing, here's the link to Dennis Browne's 1998 study for the provincial government. Dennis sensibly recommended against wasting time on thinking we can "regulate" gasoline and home heating fuel prices.
That's the more sophisticated version of an earlier posting here in which I called the petroleum pricing system a charade and fraud. That posting elicited a couple of e-mail's to me from David Toms, the acting petroleum pricing commissar.
Well, at the risk of yet another one, let's be absolutely clear:
The increase in petroleum prices today and the ones likely to come before the end of the week demonstrate that petroleum regulation in the province produces no positive benefit for consumers. Gasoline may well rise by upwards of 5 cents per litre in price, based on the factors anyone with a brain can figure out - the cost of oil is up. On the back end, when oil prices go down, Mr. Toms will be slow in lowering prices, thereby guaranteeing we will have paid just as much for gasoline as we would if Mr. Toms and his staff went back to what they were doing before they got their sinecures in Grand Falls.
Petroleum "regulation" is a waste of time.
Mr. Toms comments in this VOCM story and quoted in the on-air version this morning are simply nonsense - no one needs time to adjust to high prices. This comment sounds a lot like Mr. Toms desperately is trying to justify his existence in the face of overwhelming proof of what critics of the regulation charade said all along:
The office in Grand Falls is doing nothing, can do nothing and will do nothing to benefit consumers.
Let's shut down the waste of money.