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The then-intolerable price being between 92 cents and $1.06 a litre, depending on grade and location. Even allowing for a dozen years of inflation, those were the days, what with today’s prices pushing $1.70 a litre.

Horgan being a member of the Opposition, his bill was of the private member’s variety, which seldom pass or even get called for debate.

But he did manage to wrangle it on to the legislative order paper for a brief debate one Monday morning in May, triggering a lively exchange with the then-governing B.C. Liberals.

“We regulate electricity prices in B.C., we regulate natural gas prices,” argued Horgan. “There’s no earthly reason why we couldn’t do the same with petroleum products.”

LISTEN: This week on In The House, Mike Smyth and Rob Shaw ask why Premier John Horgan thinks refineries are the solution to skyrocketing gas prices and dig up Horgan’s old plan in 2007 to cap and regulate the price of gas in B.C. What happened to that idea?

The Maritime provinces were already doing that, he noted. The goal being to even out those wild fluctuations, not permanently cap prices.

“With the utilities commission regulating prices, they would be set for a two- or three-week period,” the NDP’s then-newbie energy critic explained. “They (the commissioners) would look at the evidence, weigh the pros and cons, and say to the sector: ‘You can’t justify those wild increases. The price remains the same.’”

Waiting in the wings to respond were several B.C. Liberals, starting with West Vancouver MLA Ralph Sultan, the Harvard-educated economist and former mining executive.