Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Miron, I have some questions for you. I appreciate the concept you put forward of “polluter might pay”. That resonated with me. You talked about the fact that once we're over a billion dollars, the cost falls to Canadians for cleanup and compensation.
For me, all of this is with the backdrop of a couple of different things.
The first backdrop for me is the environment commissioner's 2011 report. The environment commissioner looked at the transportation of dangerous goods via pipelines and found little evidence that the National Energy Board was making sure that companies actually followed through on correcting their deficiencies in the practices they had, and also, alarmingly, that the NEB wasn't monitoring companies as to whether or not they had prepared emergency procedures manuals. That makes me think, then, about Enbridge and Kalamazoo and how the U.S. regulators likened the response to the Kalamazoo spill to the the Keystone Kops.
I think about the two overlaid. If we don't actually have an emergency procedure manual, what the heck is going on and how do we deal with it? The longer we're struggling to have a response, the more environmental damage there is and the higher the cost for cleanup and potentially for compensation.
My questions to you are around Bill C-46 and drawing on the experience of spills that we know about. How much did they cost? How much did they cost to clean up? What kinds of damages were there? What was the proportion of what the companies were on the hook for versus citizens paying through government? How much compensation actually went unsatisfied and wasn't paid out? Can you help us situate Bill C-46 within the context of what we know about spills?