Oil Boil

Is it just me or does anyone notice what is going on with oil pricing regulation in P.E.I. lately that seems just a wee bit "out there"?
Let's circle back for just a minute.
I read an article in The Guardian about IRAC's recent decision to NOT put heating fuel prices down 10 to 15 cents a litre on the first of the month, because Irving would not like it. IRAC, which is short for Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission, is a board of people who make decisions about things like enforcement of Island property laws and other bylaws and, as what concerns me today, prices of fuels, in particular, furnace oil. Generally, fuel prices, both furnace oil and gasoline for automobiles, go either up or down on the first and fifteenth of each month, here in P.E.I., because of the intervention of the members of this board.
In order to determine what they call fair prices for consumers and vendors alike, the members take many factors into consideration. The usual; prices world wide and in the North American market, time of year, strength of the economy and so on. No secrets there.
Irving, on the other hand is the oil processing company that supplies a good deal of the oil products in the Maritime provinces and even further afield. For those who are foreign to this soil, K.C. Irving, who founded the corporation many years ago, based in New Brunswick, was one of the world's wealthiest men before he passed away. He wasn't known for being gracious.
What made me sit up straighter while reading this article was something the IRAC rep said to the reporter. He said, they would have LOVED to put prices down as an early Christmas gift to Islanders but felt they couldn't because it would affect supply and demand. I scratched my head, wondering what he was talking about, as, to the best of my knowledge, there is still no shortage of oil on planet earth quite yet. And here is where I started to see red. He said if they were to put prices down right now, Irving would refuse to supply the retailers with product and there would be a shortage here on Island.
Duh.
ISN'T that sort of how extortion works, folks? As long as you give us your money, we won't beat you up. I mean, this is nothing short of ridiculous and it does not take a genius to see through it all. And yet, this article made the papers with very little fallout. I believe I was the only one to point out the obvious on The Guardian website, after it was posted online.
When I was in high school, my big brother got interested in socioeconomic theory. He started reading books written by Karl Marx and Lenin, whose literature and lives were hugely instrumental in the Russian revolution at the turn of the last century. As a result of his interest, my brother got involved with the legal Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Canada. So he brought home all these newsletters citing financial atrocities done with our tax dollars in favour of big business, at all levels of government. Stories about multi-million dollar grants having been given to large corporations out of public coffers. And many of these dealings were actually exposed by decent journalistic efforts in years to follow. My brother's hobby was vindicated.
Now, before we go any further, don't get me wrong. I am not saying I support communism or think China, the U.S.S.R. or North Korea were and are somehow doing better things than we.
Nah, not by a long shot, because I know, full well, that human nature, left to its own devices, sucks. These ways of governing have proven to be just as faulty and corrupted as the ones we question here in what we call the "free world".
BUT - We really need to take a deeper look at what is going on all around us. This imbalance of financial justice, as rendered by Irving's apparent monopoly of the oil product market here in P.E.I. is, to me, just one prime example of how we are being blatantly, financially abused and we are not lifting a finger about it.
And what's sad is, if this had happened about fifty years ago, the company would have, at least, tried its best to hide what it was doing, because a monopoly, to the best of my understanding, is actually illegal in this country - Isn't that the whole fulcrum of healthy capitalism, after all? That it thrives in a system which refuses to harbour those companies who want total control of any particular market in order to make as high a profit margin as possible?
It's kind of like the old story about the frog who got boiled to death. It hopped into the pot when things were rather cool and inviting and slowly the heat was turned up, so that the frog barely noticed. Frogs, being cold blooded, don't respond to the change in temperature with any sense of panic and you know the rest of the story.
Perhaps because we have been in this pot of water for so long and have had the temperature turned up so gradually, we aren't aware of how hot it is. I say this because, sadly, based on the typical lack of response from the public to the IRAC article, it appears as if we really don't care.
I think it's called learned helplessness. What a sad state of affairs.
All I can say is, the CEO at Irving must really like frog's legs.