Had enough of regulated gas prices yet? Now, to be fair, even without regulation we (in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) would be paying in the neighbourhood of $1.20 per litre this week. It's summer; there's war in the Middle East and insurgency in Nigeria; the Chinese economy is growing rapidly and guzzling oil commensurately; refinery capacity hasn't recovered from damage wreaked by Hurricane Katrina last summer, and it was already marginal before that.

Translation: don't expect gas prices below $1 any time soon. And if the Middle East situation escalates or starts spiraling out of control, or another big hurricane hits the U.S. Gulf Coast, we could well be paying $1.60 or more per litre by the end of the summer, regulation or no regulation.

However, for the governments of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the optics are terrible. A whole lot of people naively expected that "regulation" meant governments could somehow magically hold pump prices down, and governments did little to discourage that fanciful notion.

The spike in petroleum prices just as regulation kicked in is poetic irony, at least for those of us who have maintained all along that regulation is a really bad idea.

Aside from tax relief, provincial governments are powerless to exert downward influence on gas prices, which are dictated by global and continental market forces. The markets work to the greatest benefit of the consumer if governments just butt out and don't meddle.

However, the rascals can certainly make prices go up by adding bureaucracies that can only increase, not decrease, costs. It is estimated that Nova Scotia's regulatory regime will siphon another $1 million annually out of consumers' wallets. It shouldn't be a difficult concept to grasp.

But what about the price-gouging by refineries, gasoline wholesalers and retailers alleged by conspiracy theorists? Well, the $170,000 Gardner Pinfold study commissioned by the Hamm government last fall, entitled Economics of the Nova Scotia Gasoline Market found that despite pump prices doubling over the past three years, retailers and suppliers continue to share a marketing margin of between 7.0 and 10.0 cents per litre, changing little in the past five years.

Repeated investigations over the past 30 years by the Competition Bureau of Industry Canada have uncovered no evidence of price fixing among major integrated oil companies or independent wholesalers.

So what possible advantage is there to regulation? From the consumer's perspective, there simply isn't any other than the dubious blessing of a greater degree of price stability.

Study after study has confirmed that in regulated markets, consumers pay more for gasoline on average.

Some folks may think that eliminating frequent pump price fluctuations is worth a couple of cents per litre extra, but I hate to imagine that a majority is that illogical. It surely makes no sense to me.

Perhaps most galling of all about this regulation fiasco is that both governments knew bloody well that regulation wouldn't lower prices - would very likely increase them - and both admitted as much before the fact.

So why did premiers MacDonald and Lord plow ahead anyway? Because leading a minority and the slimmest of majority governments respectively, they looked at poll data indicating that about three-quarters of respondents thought gas-price regulation was a good idea (a proportion that I expect has seen massive shrinkage recently), and seized on the issue to boost their sagging popularities.

Unhappily, unless some really strong grassroots political pressure is applied, we're stuck with regulation for at least another six months or so. Even when promised policy reviews kick in, it will be very difficult for both governments to admit they did something really dumb.