Mr. Speaker, one of the member's colleagues brought up the question of waiting until the United States made its final decision and so on regarding the future of MMT. I should just point out to him that in the United States the tax relief on ethanol gasoline has doubled what it is in Canada. They gave it a leg up.
I should also point out to him that in the United States 39 cities mandate the use of gasolines containing ethanol for environmental reasons. This is because of what is called ground level ozone.
My colleague, the hon. Deputy Prime Minister, talked about ground level ozone. Some people believe it is not a problem in Canada and that it really does not exist. If we divide the ozone emissions into the square footage of Canada it is not a problem. It does not exist. However, if we take the area of metropolitan Toronto, the Ottawa valley, Montreal, Vancouver or southwestern Ontario it is a serious problem. It was a problem this last summer with ozone warnings that stayed with us for a number of weeks. The previous year I believe it stayed on for two weeks.
There are real reasons that we might want to give an industry a leg up. In this case it is not subsidy but excise removal. We can worry about the semantics of it but the fact is that the most industrialized country in the world has seen fit to promote ethanol this year. In 1995, 45 new ethanol plants are being built in the United States. There is only one reason for that. They want ethanol as an additive. In the United States right now 8 per cent of all gasoline has an ethanol additive. That is pretty substantial when we consider that the whole thing began very few years ago.