Thank you. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to be here.
It's great to be from a “have” province where some of us are still trying to figure out what exactly it is that we have. In the metropolitan area of St. John's, I think that's probably fairly obvious. The economy there is doing well, and obviously the oil and gas activity is the driving force behind that.
When you get into the rural areas of the province, where most of our members are located, it's not so obvious that we're doing well. In fact, the economy is in tough shape.
Nobody really told me, so I was trying to figure out what I would have to offer this particular committee. I assumed it would relate to the impacts on the fishing industry, so that's the area I've chosen to focus on.
Oil and gas means a lot of things to a lot of people. To people in the real estate business, or suppliers, or a whole host of people, it means major economic opportunity and growth. For people in the fishery, it primarily means risk. They're the ones in the line of fire.
If you look at the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, the Prestige disaster in Spain, and most recently the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, people who make their living from the fishery were the ones in the line of fire and who felt the most immediate impact.
As the mayor of a small town in southern Louisiana put it to us a few days ago, “April 20 changed our lives”. It's very serious to people.
In Norway there's been a conscious policy that some of the proceeds of oil and gas development, which is a non-renewable resource, would be used to strengthen and stabilize traditional renewable industries. If there is such a policy in Canada, I'm not aware of it. I think there should be.
We recognize the impact of oil and gas on our economy, and we have done our best to work with the oil and gas sector in terms of trying to coexist, to the point that we formed a liaison organization with them called One Ocean, which meets periodically. It has a board of directors consisting of equal representation of oil industry and fishing industry representatives, including me.
Two weeks ago we had a delegation from One Ocean, including me, go to the gulf states for a week to meet people who could speak with some knowledge and experience on the impacts of the disaster there. I can give you a quick sketch of what transpired.
There were three people from our union, two from the oil industry, and a staff person from One Ocean. We met with fishermen, fish processors, marketing organizations, mayors, parish council members, the Governor's director of coastal management, the response contractor who was brought in to coordinate vessels of opportunity, and oil and gas industry associations. We had a half day at the end at the BP command centre to hear their views of what transpired and how they responded.
We had a pretty hectic schedule while we were there, but there are a few main take-aways we got from that, if I could touch on them.
People in the communities and people involved in the fishery thought there was something in place to deal with these kinds of eventualities. They were just as surprised and horrified as our members were that there didn't seem to be a capability to handle the problem that arose.
Dispersant use was a very contentious issue--and contagious, too, I think. Market tainting--i.e., the perception of a problem--became a problem in itself. Probably the most tested seafood in the world is down in the gulf. I ate the stuff without any hesitation, but tell it to the judge. I think a University of Minnesota survey showed that 44% of the American population wouldn't eat gulf seafood because they were fearful of the consequences. That's a major consideration.
The other thing that came back to us over and over again was the importance of having a plan in advance. We talked to a man who lives in Seattle. He works for a Finnish firm, and he had experience as the coordinator of the vessels of opportunity response to the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. He was brought into the Gulf of Mexico to do the same job.
He said he started with a blank sheet of paper. He didn't know who the fishermen were, he didn't know who owned vessels that could be used, he didn't know the characteristics, and he didn't have a plan. He had to start from absolute scratch. He said it would be so much better to have this done ahead, in what he called “peacetime”, when there was less stress and more ability to have a plan for these things. A lack of such a plan, in his view, made his job much tougher.
Bland assurances really don't do a whole lot for us. I think they had those kinds of bland assurances down there. When you stop to think about it, once this blowout occurred, what they had to do to fix it was to accurately hit an eight and a half inch hole three and a half miles down in the ocean. When I was a kid, at the regatta—that's our kind of garden party—they had an annual fair where there was a game with a bucket of water and a little cup in the bucket, and if you flicked your quarter and made it land in the cup, you got a dollar back. I tried it only enough times to realize it was a sucker's game and that you weren't going to get your money back, so I used my quarter on cotton candy or something else. So that was a challenging job they had to get at that hole.
One thing that was very clear to us down there, which we got from the people we visited, was that since the Exxon Valdez disaster, which I believe was in 1978, they've had virtually no R and D done on boom technology, skimming technology, and so on. All of the R and D went into drilling and development, and not into that kind of remedial action. I think that's clearly an area that needs attention.
As a final note, though I'm not very knowledgeable about energy security, I would certainly hope that our environmental security would not be sacrificed on the altar of energy security. We have renewable industries that depend on that ocean, and I think there's a responsibility on the part of legislators and regulators to do everything that's reasonably possible to protect those industries in the first place and to have a contingency plan in place in the event that something goes awry.
Thank you.