One of the realities of the pipelines in Burnaby is that they were originally part of a co-operative that served refineries along our coastline in Burrard Inlet. Five or six refineries have now been reduced to a single refinery. Over the course of many years though it became incredibly difficult, as a result of geographical changes, to be able to determine where the original pipelines were laid. In each case, the National Energy Board has required that at any point you were doing any excavation near those pipelines, you were required to have staff from the transmission company available to supervise.
In the case of the oil spill we had in our residential neighbourhood in Burnaby, that supervision was not done. It was not properly executed when a contractor worked on sewer lines and a pipe was broken. That broken pipe, instead of being turned off at the point of the tank farm, was turned off at the tanker, which exacerbated the huge flow of oil into our neighbourhood, costing residential damage in the millions of dollars, and ecological damage, as that oil flowed into Burrard Inlet. It was catastrophic, and it literally took years to clean up the mess that was left for us.
That direct incident in our community, and the way it was handled by Trans Mountain in the course of their dealings with it was extremely disappointing. It brought to the attention of all our residents that these accidents do happen, and when they do happen there are severe consequences for the surrounding community and for the ecology of our city.
It's going to be even worse if we're looking at bitumen products coming through our community because, in reality, if we are going to export oil, I believe very strongly that we Canadians should be refining it here in Canada. We should be sending refined products to any place in the world that wants to purchase them and not crude oil. I'm very disappointed in it.