Canada

You are describing a natural monopoly and why private ownership of it sucks. That is the whole point.

Gas stations are a natural monopoly. You cannot have twenty competing pipelines running to the same neighborhood. You cannot have fifteen different refinery complexes in every city. The infrastructure is too expensive and too duplicative. So what happens is a handful of companies end up owning everything and they just coordinate as a cartel instead of competing.

PetroCanada used to be a crown corporation. It existed precisely because we recognized that fuel distribution is too important to leave to private profit extraction. It kept prices honest because there was a public option that could undercut the private cartels. Then we privatized it and pretended the market would fix everything. Surprise surprise it did not.

The core problem is not algorithms or Gas Buddy or tax holidays. The core problem is that we allowed a natural monopoly to operate as a for profit business. When one company owns twelve thousand gas stations and the other three companies own similar numbers there is no competition. Market based pricing really means that a group of executives in a boardroom decide what number makes them the most money and then they all charge that number.

This is exactly why socialists argue for public ownership of critical infrastructure. Fuel distribution is a natural monopoly. Either the state owns it and sets prices at cost plus a reasonable margin or a cartel owns it and extracts every cent they can get away with. There is no third option where competition magically appears.

Prices are based on what the market will pay, not the cost of materials.

I heard a take on this, which suggests price is more a measure of the value of labor rather than the cost of materials. Under more historical economic models, you were limited by your immediate regional supply of a good or service. And we would talk about shortages, droughts, and famines when the local supply was exhausted. The local labor force couldn't produce more commodities with the tools/conditions at hand, so they exhausted them.

Under a more modern market system, we no longer talk about "running out" of a given commodity. Instead, we talk about the price going beyond what we have available to pay. You'll walk into the grocery store and see a $10 banana. And it'll sit on the shelf till it rots, because nobody has $10 to spend on a banana. But it's only there because nobody can pay that price. The fact that there's no second banana in the stock room is obscured by the astronomically high price on display.

However, you do eventually get to the point where people need the commodity more than they need the currency. That is, in effect, the cause of inflation. And then the banana gets sold, there's no second banana, and we reveal the real cost of materials in their absence. There's no supply chain bringing in more bananas because we've experienced a structural failure in the economy. The cost of maintaining infrastructure eclipsed what the owners/administrators were willing to front. We obscured it with a price signal until the bitter end.

And the empty shelves ultimately reveal what national administrators believe to be the value of the local population. It is not a question of commodity markets any longer, but of labor markets. You (the local public) aren't worth sending new supplies to, because we (the capitalist economic administrators) no longer consider you productive laborers.

No I'm pretty sure it's just saying the tax cut didn't do anything at all. Oils still going up, but the cut made zero difference

I think that's what the original post was implying but yeah it's two fold.

1. Tax cut won't lower prices, it will just increase company profit margins
2. Prices went up because of Iran war

Only way to reduce prices is to reduce demand. Small modular nuclear reactors are the way and we have companies in Canada working on them yet I don't hear of any government help in those projects.