Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do appreciate the Members bringing this motion forward. I am absolutely not happy with the distributors of gasoline, the retailers who are putting such a markup on our gas prices and consistently across distributors. It shows a real lack of competitive spirit. I think already we’ve seen a response from the Minister of MACA who has done some investigation on what our authority is in this area and, unfortunately, I think the window of opportunity for doing much about this is small from a GNWT standpoint. The Minister raised a number of valid points and certainly that’s one of them.
Another consideration, of course, is we are the actual distributor in many Northwest Territories communities. There are thermal communities further north and so on. That’s not true here, obviously, but there’s quite a difference between other communities such as Hay River and Yellowknife. This is primarily a Yellowknife issue.
I would say that we need to be seeking ways to spur competition. I will be doing that to ensure that the government does use whatever modest authority they do have. I will be also seeking ways to increase competition on my own. I think the public needs to play a role here. Of course, the very best way to deal with this is to decrease the demand. By decreasing demand, that will spur competition for sure. There are a lot of good vehicles on the market now that get a lot better mileage and, of course, there’s public transit and so on. Those are all considerations that we should be thinking about and will have a lot of other benefits with them.
The opportunity for the GNWT intervention is small; nevertheless, I do appreciate this motion being brought forward and I will not be opposing it.