OTTAWA

Consumers feeling pain at the pumps got no relief yesterday from Canadian gasoline producers and retailers, who brought a don't-blame-us message to a Commons committee investigating high energy prices.

MPs are studying how a barrel of crude oil could jump from roughly $70 US to above $140 within a year, and what role speculators may have played in the rise.

The price of oil has declined by about 20 per cent since hitting a record high $147.27 on July 11. However, gasoline pump prices have not fallen as quickly, particularly in competitive big-city markets such as Toronto.

Retailers are not to blame for pump prices that have failed to decline in step with oil prices in recent weeks, said Jane Savage, president of the Canadian Independent Petroleum Marketers Association.

At fault, she said, are speculators in the oil markets and a small concentration of refiners who set the benchmark prices that retailers pay for gasoline.

"If one espouses the belief that the more the number of competitors, the lower the price, one could assume from that that with this high concentration of refiners in Canada, that we are paying a higher price at the wholesale level,'' Savage told the Commons subcommittee on oil and gas and other energy prices.

But Peter Boag, president of the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, said refiners have seen their production margins squeezed by high oil prices.

He argued that by global standards, Canada was not hurt as badly as some other countries by peaking oil prices in mid-July.

Some MPs on the committee, feeling heat from their constituents as they face the prospect of a general election call that could come as early as next week, said the largest number of complaints they received this summer involved a perception that gasoline prices regularly go up before long weekends.

Boag disputed the claim, citing studies that have shown that's not the case.

It's impossible to imagine that investment speculators could not be influencing the global oil markets, said Ellen Russel, a professor at Carleton University's School of Public Policy and Administration.

MPs followed the lead of U.S. congressional hearings that began in the spring, asking petroleum producers and marketers to explain how prices appeared to fluctuate wildly from one region of Canada to another.

What committee members got was a familiar refrain -- that local markets, and not the big players, decide the prices charged to consumers. Gasoline retailers also insist they face other cost pressures, particularly fees charged by credit card companies.