Mr. Speaker, as this bill would predominantly affect my riding in northwestern British Columbia, and as we have been dealing with this issue for more than a generation, there is some authority in terms of the people I represent and for whom I speak.
Here is a fundamental question we have been asking for years. The northern gateway pipeline, and now the Kinder Morgan pipeline, proposed to move diluted bitumen through a pipeline to the west coast. A question we have been consistently asking of the former Conservative government and the current Liberal government is what happens when this stuff gets into water and whether they can clean it up. Diluted bitumen has different properties than traditional, conventional oil, and the best knowledge we have so far is that it cannot be cleaned up because it sinks.
Does my friend have anything to reassure us, or even assure, because no one actually has a lot of assurance right now, that in the event of a spill from a pipeline or a tanker in the ocean we have current technology that would clean up even a scintilla of the oil that actually gets into the environment?