Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for Windsor West for his speech and for again raising this issue of the pipeline rupture and spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I think it is particularly instructive to look at that, because it was a pipeline carrying dilbit.
Certainly this was the first dilbit spill that the United States Environmental Protection Agency ever had to deal with. It reported that it was basically impossible to clean up and it brought Enbridge back to the site over and over to try to clean it up.
I referred earlier to Enbridge's culture of negligence. U.S. regulators referred to Enbridge's response as Keystone Kops. Enbridge had a pipeline spill alert with high-tech equipment that would ring in a control room the minute there was a rupture. In fact, the alarm bells did ring, but the Enbridge guys in the control room went around shutting off the alarms because they did not believe them. They did not believe there was a rupture. They thought there was a malfunction somewhere else in the system. When the next shift came on, they did not warn them that all these bells had been ringing. The next shift came on and started pumping raw product right out through a broken pipeline, and that is when most of the spill occurred.
The legislation is fine as far as it goes, but I would like my friend's comments. Now that we know that dilbit is virtually impossible to clean up, why would we put it in pipelines at all?