Gasoline needs less Layton!

Against the backdrop of the buffoonery of Stephane Dion’s carbon tax proposal, shines a dim light from the direction of Jack Layton as he demands — on behalf of “millions of Canadians” of course — a gasoline ombudsman to field complaints.

Now, I am not going to pretend that the gasoline industry is a free market but I reject the idea that consumers need more government bureaucracy to fill up their tanks. Layton calls it “fraudulent” if the gas pump does not expel the precise amount of gasoline. It might just be unavoidable mechanical imprecision. All tools or pieces of hardware contain imprecision. If this really was a problem in any financial sense, well, Mr. Layton, you have just opened up a business opportunity — read: no government intervention necessary. Anybody with an entrepreneurial spirit will look at this newspaper report and ask: “Which pumps are shortchanging the consumers?” That sounds like valuable information, I would think. It would certainly be valuable to their competitors.

If this “investigation” was worth its salt, the investigators would reveal which pumps were precise and which “one in 20 pumps shortchanges the consumer – errors that have cost Canadians millions of dollars.” A non-governmental standards board would be waiting at the doorstep. Until names of pumps are revealed, all of this is nonsense.