No fines issued, four years after laws were passed to ensure you aren’t cheated at the pump

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s been four years now since laws were passed to ensure that retailers aren’t cheating drivers with faulty numbers, toughening up the penalties for gas station owners who alter their pumps to display phoney figures.

The law created mandatory inspections for gas pumps and monetary penalties for retailers caught short-changing, raising the maximum penalty for repeat offenders to $50,000. Inspectors can even fine owners up to $2,000 without charging them.

But to date, there hasn’t been a single fine handed out since the laws were passed in June, 2011.

The changes came after a 2008 report from the Ottawa Citizen which claimed around one in 20 stations across the country were cheating drivers.

But former MP and Gasbuddy.com founder Dan McTeague has some questions.

“The report itself was highly suspicious. I called it suspicious at the time. And now with no convictions, one is left scratching their head, wondering why we went through this entire exercise if frankly, there has been no evidence of it occurring,” says McTeague.

He says in reality, the number of gas stations under-selling drivers is virtually non-existent, which is why there have been no fines.

McTeague was the vice-chairman of the industry committee while he was an MP and says altering a pump is near impossible.

“It’s very difficult; there are a number of foolproof [features] within the machine that makes it very difficult to do that. But it’s a very precise program. If you start playing with things, you can actually do a lot more mechanical damage. So the incentive to do that is lessened by anybody who knows anything about running a gas station, which is why this legislation was predictably useless and irrelevant.”

McTeague says the only discrepancies he’s heard of is when pumps wear out, which benefit the driver by dispensing more gas than displayed on the meter.

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