NO DOUBT AREA MOTORISTS were cheering Wednesday when they saw the price of gasoline drop at most stations to slightly under $1.26 a litre.

Over two days, the price had dropped about 12 cents from the peak of just under $1.38 reached in anticipation of major damage to oil refineries and rigs in the path of Hurricane Ike.

As all our readers are by now well aware, the damage to the Gulf Coast refineries was minimal, and although some oil rigs and platforms in the Gulf were damaged, the destruction was nowhere close to that suffered three years ago from Hurricane Katrina.

It will be interesting, indeed, to see whether there will be a public inquiry into Big Oil's price gouging and the obvious lack of even a semblance of competition that it demonstrated. Assuming a Conservative victory on October 14, no such probe will be likely, and certainly not one that would lead to any significant moves toward creating competition where none exists, thanks to the demise of independent gasoline retailers.

Interestingly, the same events in the southern U.S. that are blamed for the price "spike" in Canada had nowhere as much of an impact in states close to the Canadian border.

In fact, surveys showed that across the U.S., the "spike" was around 20 cents a U.S. gallon, or roughly five cents a litre.

And by Wednesday, anyone searching for relatively inexpensive gasoline in the Buffalo area could find it for about 3.70 a gallon, or slightly under 98 cents a litre, or about $1.05 in Canadian dollars, then trading at about 93.5 U.S. cents.

In other words, someone filling up in Dufferin at $1.259 was having to pay a premium of roughly 20 per cent, for a product that in all likelihood came from Canada.

Think that's bad? Think again, because the Buffalo prices are significantly higher than those in hurricane-ravaged Texas. A check on the gasbuddy. com website shows that one Exxon station in Dallas was offering regular-grade gasoline for $3.47 a gallon — 91.8 U.S. cents (roughly 98 Canadian cents) a litre!

And bad as the prices are locally, they are even worse out in B.C., where for several days they hovered at and above $1.50 a litre.

In the circumstances, we wonder whether any of the parties in this dull election campaign will consider advocating removal of the federal excise tax and GST on vehicle fuels and their replacement by a excess profits tax set high enough to recover the same revenue.

Granted, Big Oil wouldn't like the idea of providing relief to hard-pressed consumers by taxing their record profits. But it might win the party proposing it more than a few votes!