He talked about the highways of Saskatchewan being clogged up with oil tanker trucks, and he said that shows the desperation of Canadian oil producers trying to get their crude to market.
We're stewards of our resources here. We're nothing more than that; we're stewards. We've been given these resources by our creator, and we've been entrusted to use them responsibly, to look after the environment. We've been entrusted with that responsibility as well, to make sure that we look after the earth. We also have this resource that we've been blessed with as a country.
We need to make sure that we allow companies—in a responsible, environmentally friendly way—to develop these resources, and then we need to provide them with the ability to get these resources to market. That's something I take very seriously. I'm a steward of the land, but I'm also a steward of the resources. These resources are something that we need to make sure are developed in an environmentally friendly way, but also in an economically viable way.
Today, tanker trucks are journeying 500 miles from the pipeline and rail terminals. It says here:
It's a phenomenon that Ken Boettcher, president of Three Star Trucking Ltd. in Alida, Saskatchewan, started to see three or four months ago when oil shippers around Kindersley, near the Alberta border, began requesting trucks to move their crude, in some cases, as far as North Dakota.
He said it's “never been a common practice before. They can probably buy it cheaper and bring it down here and blend it.” He's referring to the Americans. The trucker traffic during 2018 has spiked to over 200,000 barrels of crude oil per month being moved by tanker truck.
You know, Bill C-69 is supposed to be an environmental bill. However, if it's going to prevent us from safely building pipelines to get our resources to market, there's nothing environmentally friendly about having to then turn around and use tanker trucks to uneconomically, with huge environmental liability, move our crude to market by hauling it down the highway. It doesn't even make sense that we would want to consider that.
In addition, the cost of doing that 500-mile trip is about $15 a barrel one way. If they have to come back empty—I don't know what you would haul in a tanker truck on a return route—it doubles. It's $30 a barrel cost to move that oil by tanker truck, as opposed to what it would cost by pipeline. That's very significant. I think the environmental liability and risk are much more significant in hauling it, and there's also the danger that is posed to traffic on the highway with increased loads. I think it's something that needs to be considered.
Without the Trans Mountain expansion project going ahead, I think we're going to see a continued exploitation of our producers by the Americans, by Donald Trump's oil companies. I think we're going to see more of that. It actually peaked in August, when there was a $52.40 discount for our oil over world price. That is significant. That's happening because our current structure allows us to have one customer, and that's the Americans.
As long as we're going to be in that kind of situation—