That's a great question. I appreciate the question.
We did a fair bit of analysis and certainly looked at a whole bunch of factors when establishing the proposed limits that are included in the bill. We took into account an analysis of the historic incidents and the number of incidents that have occurred and have involved pipeline spills. We looked at current and proposed projects. We looked at existing pipelines, the volumes they carry, the nature of the goods they carry, and the exposure they might have to different scenarios of land, property, and whatnot.
We looked at other jurisdictions as well, so as your benchmark would say.... We certainly recognize that to our south in the United States there is the example of the Enbridge incident in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where there was a rupture and just shy of 20,000 barrels leaked into the Kalamazoo River, I believe. The cost of cleaning up that spill is in the order of a billion dollars. I think it's about $1.1 billion or $1.2 billion, depending on which dollar you're looking at and what day you're looking at. That particular cost would be, I think, the high-water mark, if you will, in terms of analysis we've conducted.
We looked into the records of NEB hearings and different projects that are taking place. Certainly, the northern gateway panel, as an example, had established a $950-million limit as the terms of fiscal capacity expected of the northern gateway partnership project. That was a mix of cash, insurance, and asset requirements.
We looked at the United States, Norway, Australia, and other countries around the world that we would consider peer jurisdictions. In the U.S., the methodology for looking at oil spills is an oil spill fund. An oil spill fund has an upper limit of $1 billion per incident, so should an incident occur and a company is not able to deal with the incident adequately, there is up to a billion dollars of coverage that's funded.
In establishing our assessment and liability limit, we looked at all of those factors and felt that the billion-dollar amount was an adequate amount given (a) our comparators with other jurisdictions, and (b) the number of incidents we've seen and the incidents we've seen in terms of incidents around the world, and certainly what was established as a benchmark in the northern gateway scientific hearing, which had testimony from various experts from many jurisdictions. That was one part of it.
The second part of it was to look at and compare our world in terms of liability as it relates to liability related to negligence and fault and to liability as it relates to absolute liability. Certainly when we look at the Canadian context, we have several examples in statute around this particular domain of natural resource development where we see absolute liability, in which the entity that's responsible for the activity is automatically responsible in the event of something going wrong, regardless of fault or negligence. We see this in the offshore under Bill C-22, which has passed. We've seen it in the nuclear sector. We see it in the Fisheries Act. We see it in a number of places.
Not only did we establish the billion-dollar limit, but we also proposed—and this is certainly included in the legislation, as you see—the notion of absolute liability, which removes the arguing and entanglement about who's responsible for what and what degree of responsibility there is. It becomes the responsibility of the operator. After everything is settled and sorted out, if you will, the operator can then pursue the legal routes to deal with who may be responsible beyond themselves, whether it was a contractor or a third party.
Certainly, when we established the billion dollars, we worked fairly extensively at looking at a number of areas and came to a conclusion. I think I have covered most of what your interest was, and if there are more questions in this area, I'm happy to take them.
