From our perspective, they have not done a risk assessment of everything that would happen in the case of a spill. What they're doing is trying to show us that there is some kind of technology out there, that Canada is ready for a spill. Really, the report that came out in Ottawa earlier in the week I think is the definitive statement on that: this kind of technology doesn't exist.
When I was in the Gulf of Mexico, I went right out into the gulf area with the head of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, a fellow who worked in the oil industry for decades. When we went out there and looked, we saw were billions and billions of dollars' worth of vessels that were anchored up. We were out there in an 18-foot skiff in a two-foot chop. They were anchored because they couldn't skim oil because of this two-foot chop.
They only have two-foot tides in the gulf. We have 24-foot tides in Douglas Channel, where they're proposing to do this. On any good sunny, calm day, tide slop in our area can exceed that. So this oil, if there were ever a spill, would literally coat the whole coast of British Columbia in a very short period of time. This is the major concern we have: that we do not have the technology.
I give the oil industry absolute credit for being able to move oil faster and further and dig deeper to get it, but they have not spent the resources necessary to clean up a spill when it happens. And it does happen, as we have seen over the last six or eight months.