Thank you.
I support the amendment because I think it's really important that this issue is framed in terms of the national interest and also our obligation to address the huge liability cost of resource extraction if the companies are not living up to their obligations.
I don't see this as an Alberta-specific issue. Rather, I would see this in terms of what the regions have done—the provinces. If one region has failed, then it gives us a better benchmark. I would remind people that long before Leduc No. 1, the first oil well in North America was in Sarnia. Even before the Americans came along, in Canada there was Petrolia. What happened with those wells? Those are fair questions.
Looking at this, if we're going to do five meetings, that's a fair engagement of time. We should do it right, so that we're providing a national perspective on each region. I'm going to bring in again the fact that, coming from northern Ontario, we have an enormous background in abandoned mine waste. At least our mountains in Cobalt aren't quite as big as Vivian's mountains and slag, but I live on an abandoned mine property.
The responsibility for the massive damage that was done in the Cobalt silver camp is, by and large, now under Agnico Eagle Mines. It's a very interesting company. Agnico Eagle didn't create the ecological disaster zone that many of our lakes and many of our forests were subjected to—this was early mining—but Agnico Eagle has the responsibility.
Just down the street from me is Cross Lake, which was heavily dumped with cyanide, arsenic and mercury. A hundred-some years later, a mining company has the legal obligation to monitor the wells to make sure that what's going into the streams and, in a lot of cases, into people's well water, meets a standard. That's a level of corporate responsibility that was imposed on a company that came in after the fact, and the province at the time said, “You want to mine here? Well, you're responsible. If you're going to take these old sites, you take their liabilities.”
We know that, certainly in northern Ontario, once mining companies—and some of the big ones—realized that the money wasn't going to be made anymore, they shifted it off to junior companies, shifted it to shell companies and walked away. We know that happened all the time in oil and gas, so that whoever ended up with the property at the end of the day could go bankrupt. They could change their name. They could be something else the next day.
If the system is set up so that nobody is left to pay for that except the taxpayer, that's a serious problem. It fits under federal jurisdiction in that, if the federal government is being asked to pick up the cost of damage that was done by companies who made money, it requires an investigation. It requires us going back to the taxpayer and saying, “Listen, there's a reason we gave x billion dollars to clean up something that was not our responsibility.”
What is that reason? We have to explain that to the public. We also have to shine a light on people who corporately weren't living up to their responsibility, or if the Alberta Energy Regulator is not living up to its responsibility of holding those companies.... We have to deal with that because, if, at the end of the day, it comes back to the federal taxpayer, I have to say to people in northern Ontario that this is why we're paying out for damages in Alberta now.
Many people in northern Ontario have lots of close relations in Alberta. Many of our people have worked in Alberta and vice versa. They come to work in our area. The last thing they want to do is pay for someone else's damage—that's a reasonable thing—so we have to be able to say that we're going to study this and get answers.
To that, I want to know that we're also going to look at the methane cost, because the majority of methane leaks we're now identifying are coming from abandoned wells. These are ecological carbon bombs that affect us and our global commitments. These are carbon bombs that can be fixed, but someone's going to have to pay for it. I think we should have the methane frame on what's being done. We know that a lot of the federal money during COVID was put on methane, and we didn't get a real, clear answer on how much of it went and actually did the job.
At the end of the day, I think everyone agrees that if you have an abandoned well in your field, the last thing you want is to have it leaking methane. Someone needs to come to fix that.
I think this is a very reasonable study. The one thing I want an assurance of is that it's not going to bump the final work that we're doing on TMX because I believe we have.... There are how many ministers still? They haven't appeared yet. I don't want them to be bumped down the list. I'd rather that this be worked in with our other work.
I support the amendment and the main motion, and I'm ready to vote.