How very kind of you, Mr. Chair, to want to come back to me. I really appreciate that.
When I left off last time, I was talking a bit about oil well abandonment and how an abandoned well is generally considered to be an okay thing. The reason for that is there are extensive regulations and requirements around it. I took a few minutes before this meeting to take a quick look at what some of the provinces do.
In front of me, I have the document for the Province of Saskatchewan. This is a 17-page document on well abandonment requirements. Within the 17 pages, there are several other links to go to further energy regulator recommendations for steps on specific things, like dealing with a sour well or an H2S concentration greater than a certain percentage. There are more extensive requirements, and there are links that will take you to what those requirements are.
This is the main point I am trying to make about the requirements for what an abandoned well actually is. When you look through the table of contents in Saskatchewan for the routine well abandonment methods, you see a whole bunch of different portions on that. When you go to the non-routine well abandonments, there's also a whole bunch of other subcategories. There's a very extensive and exhaustive list of requirements in Saskatchewan to be able to abandon a well.
The Province of Alberta has a 62-page document available online. It also contains a series of hyperlinks to be able to access further regulations for all the different types of requirements. These include making sure that your abandoned well is not leaking, but if it is leaking, the regulations tell you what the cleanup methods are, what the plan is, how you're going to deal with that and how you're going to monitor it and make sure that it doesn't continue. It's important to note that.
The Province of British Columbia has 37 pages, as well as many other links to many different regulations for how you deal with an abandoned well.
Of course, all of these provinces have orphaned well requirements and things in place as well, but I wanted to focus more on the abandoned well requirements.
Actually, there is a neat little three-page document from the Province of Alberta about what happens once a well is abandoned. In order to reclaim the land, the well has to first be abandoned. Again, that underscores the whole point that an abandoned well isn't a bad thing, which is partly why we are arguing that the preamble for this motion that the Liberals have put forward contains a lot of misinformation and misleading points.
Another thing that's worth noting, which is missing from the preamble, is that the Province of British Columbia also returned $12.8 million. If it was not a motion intended to divide or if it was not a motion intended to go after a specific province, of course the motion would have contained language about the $12.8 million the Province of British Columbia returned, but we don't see that included. I would hate to speculate as to why the parliamentary secretary's motion didn't contain that language as well. Nevertheless, here we are.
Of course, as I mentioned at the last meeting, there's the issue of wells. There are wells in Manitoba and Ontario. There are wells in numerous provinces that will need to be part of this study if we're going to actually have a serious discussion about the issue of orphaned wells and abandoned wells.
I think getting all that information on the record was very helpful.
With that, Mr. Chair, I will move to adjourn debate on the motion for today.
(Motion agreed to: yeas 6; nays 5)