Oil companies came up with a new one over the weekend!

I guess I've been oil company bashing a bit more than usual in recent weeks, but with what is going on out there, I just can't help it. I mean, a small fire in southern Ontario has seemingly caused prices to rise from the low to mid-80 cents per litre price only weeks ago to the dollar mark - in no time flat! Wasn't there a small fire out west last week as well? Unfortunately (OK, now I'm being overly cynical) firefighters on staff were able to put the fire out before any damage of consequence had a chance to occur.

The price of oil has fallen below the $60/barrel price today. It has traded in the low sixty dollar range for quite some time now. It was trading in that range when we were regularly paying less than eighty cents per litre late at night in Ottawa a month or so ago. If the world market prices are stable, how can an almost 25% increase in prices at the pump be explained?

Don't forget my quoting a Hamilton Spectator article last week where Imperial Oil had announced that despite lower sales due to the Nanticoke fire, quarterly profits would likely increase due to increased retail margins. Hmmm...

But this one takes the cake. I was listening to the morning business report at 6:25am today. I can't seem to find any written articles on the subject but if this story were to be aired a little under three weeks from now, I would swear it would be an April Fool's joke.

What's so funny? CFRA picked up a wire story where speculators warned that prices at the pump were unlikely to fall any time soon. They further warned consumers that they might even go up because of increased demand due to the additional hour of sunlight we're getting every day due to the changes in implementation of daylight savings time.

Um, OK.

First of all, days get longer at this time a year, at the rate of a minute or two a day. Regardless of what we do to our clocks - heck, we could have moved our clocks up three hours (meaning sun down would have gone from around 6pm on Saturday to 9pm on Sunday) - but we would not have one more minute of sunshine than we would have otherwise.

Secondly, I don't know about you, but I am not planning on doing anything different in the coming days or weeks as a result of the early onset of DST this year, nor will I when we roll the clocks back to standard time a bit later than usual in November. Will I drive hundreds or thousands of more kilometres because of the change? No.

Finally, it's three weeks!!! We "sprung forward" three weeks early. Three weeks. Twenty one days. Yes, it's nice that we won't have to turn our headlights on as early tonight as we did last week, but in the overall scheme of things, it's not that long a period of time. Even if you did buy the absurd idea that we have "an extra hour of daylight" as a result of the change, it's twenty one hours out of 8,760 we have in a year.

So tell me, Mr. Oil Company CEO, how will this change in Daylight Savings Time have any impact of consequence on world oil trading prices or at the retail pumps? I thought so. Not much, if any at all.

It's sad, however, that it is possible that prices will fluctuate per today's early morning report. Once I find a link to a story along those lines, I'll post it. Even more sad is the fact that if it does come true, we'll take it and won't utter one peep.

So why not raise the prices? At the end of the (so-called longer) day, nobody cares. Ain't apathy grand? Apparently it's worth a few hundred million dollars, and don't Shell, Imperial Oil, Petro Canada, et al know it...