I mentioned it. If you have a buildup of pressure in a well or a blowout in a well resulting from an accident, as occurred with BP in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the main ways you seek to control that development is to drill a parallel well to extract oil and relieve the pressure. You want to drill such a well as quickly as possible.
In Norway, including in the Norwegian Arctic, companies have to demonstrate that they can begin to drill a relief well within 12 days of an accident occurring. In Canada, when we were pioneering Arctic oil and gas development in the 1970s and 1980s, we introduced world-leading regulations that said you have to have a same-season relief well capacity. In the Arctic you can only drill for two, three, or four months each year. It's longer and longer as the ice melts, but it's two, three, or four months each year. You have to be able to get that relief well in to stop the blowout before the winter closes in and the ice re-forms, because otherwise you're not going to be able to do anything for 10 or 11 months, and you have this blowout continuing through the winter season. That was our policy.
Under some pressure in the last few years we've hedged away from that policy a little bit, and I don't think we should. I think it should be very firm to the oil companies. Yes, this means you'll have to have a second drill ship close by. Look at the United States. This last season in Alaska, there were two drill ships precisely for this reason.
We shouldn't back away from this in Canada. The fact of the matter is that Arctic oil and gas will be attractive as prices go up, but we cannot lower our standards to the disadvantage of our environment, our indigenous peoples. Let's hold to the standard we put in during the 1970s, at a very basic minimum.