Mr. Labonté, you can take notes, because I have some questions for you.
You mentioned the polluter pays principle. Does that principle apply in your department as a general rule or did you decide to apply it to this specific bill?
You said that you used certain accidents to determine the level of liability. The Piper Alpha accident in the United Kingdom cost $1.2 billion. If you consider inflation, that comes to $2.83 billion. For Ixtoc 2, the cost was $3.4 billion. Those amounts exceed $1 billion.
Which accidents did you use to determine the costs of liability? Would recovery operations in the Arctic, in Canada’s far north, cost a lot more? Did you include those operations in your scenarios and your calculations?
The legislation has not been changed for 30 years. We are presently studying Bill C-22 so that we do not have to amend the legislation for a while. So why does the bill not provide for an annual indexing formula for the liability amount so that we can avoid a situation whereby another 30 years might go by without the amount being indexed and with it no longer reflecting reality? Would it be possible to include an indexing formula in the bill? If so, what would you suggest?