Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to make a comment on my colleague's comments about the great distances in Canada; they certainly are very true. A lot of the reason involves air travel, of course. They haven't yet invented electric airplanes, so we're rather tied to the system. And just as a matter of fact, the Turks and Caicos islands are closer to Ottawa than my riding of Edmonton East is.
We have to be careful when we're instituting environmental institutions. I draw an example here from what has happened in the past in Sudbury, where their approach to cleaning up the area from International Nickel was to build a 600-foot smokestack. Yes, the lawns started growing in Sudbury, but it just shoved the pollution into the air and transferred it over a thousand square miles. You ask, have we learned?
I was in the Caribbean and I saw Japanese trucks. I asked whether there was a Japanese community there. No, out in the harbour was a huge ship, and apparently what happens.... The Japanese, of course, do a wonderful job of environmental controls and of removing the vehicles from their streets and roads when they fail the emissions test, but they load them onto ships and send them to the Caribbean and sell them there. Where's the net gain in that? We must have realistic approaches to this.
That was just a comment. Let me turn to the question of the sustainability of Canadian supply, because I think that's as important as sustaining the American supply. They have hurricanes in the gulf. As we saw in the summertime, it shut down and boosted the costs on both sides of the border. Do we have the capability of providing Canada sustainably during those periods, without having that surge and apparently very high prices and a shortage of supply, even here in Canada? That would be one concern.
My final comment would be on this thickened border issue. Is consideration being given, particularly for shipments that flow through the United States to Mexico or flow through the United States to the Caribbean and beyond, to using our coastal ports, Atlantic and Pacific, in conjunction with American seaboard ports? Time is money, and I would think they'd look at the financial consideration of going around particular border areas—maybe through lesser-utilized ports of the Americas and also directly into markets like Mexico—rather than through Canada.
There are a couple of questions there.