Madam Speaker, I do not know how much time we have. I was interested in a couple of
the comments the hon. member for Athabasca made. One was the question of bringing in and passing a Tory bill.
I would like to remind him of the story of Senator Hayakawa of the United States who was asked if the government of the United States should keep the Panama Canal after its term expired. He said: "Of course we should. We stole it fair and square".
The other thing I would like to talk about is fraud. The hon. member mentioned that the tar sands contain enough oil potential for several hundred years. I think he mentioned 400 years. What is his information base for that? Is that 400 years of Canada remaining at 29 million population or is that 400 years of witnessing the exponential curve in population growth and subsequent energy demand around the world? Is that 400 years of a population decline in Canada? Four hundred years of what? When one makes a blanket statement like that, one has to follow through with some kind of qualification to make the thing legitimate.
Since predictions like that were made years ago, the population of the world every year has increased at the rate of about 95 million people. I do not know whether he wants to keep those other people from having any of that energy and if he would prefer that, but that is not the way it is going to be.