Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that this issue is not terribly unlike the issue of the ethics counsellor. We need to have some distance between the person who is making a judgment and the people who are directly involved.
It looks to me that what we have here are two studies that were made and are being distributed by the principals of the dispute. I personally feel that we have a very strong reason to doubt the validity of the evidence.
I would like to become very personal here. I do most of my own mechanical work. I always have in order to save a buck or two. On Saturdays I change my own sparkplugs.
Not long ago, I turned out the plugs on my car in order to replace them because they had 75,000 kilometres on them and I had never touched them. It stood to reason that by then I should be changing them. I turned them out. They were almost as good as new. I cleaned them up, regapped them and put them back in and finally replaced them at 100,000 kilometres.
The studies we are asked to believe say that these plugs will fail 17 times as often using MMT. I am in an environment where as far as I know there is MMT in our fuel. If that is really a cause of sparkplug failure then either I was the recipient of a miracle or the studies are not to be depended on.
I have a tendency to think that it is the studies that are not reliable because I have many acquaintances and I talk to many people and not a single person has complained to me of premature sparkplug failure. That is a sample of I do not know how many thousands of people. I am sure that if that were happening, I would have heard about it as the representative from Elk Island.
If we cannot trust this study in the area of sparkplugs, why should we then trust the same study when it tells us that it is very harmful to the environment and has all these other dangers? It may or it may not.
I personally do not believe that these are to be trusted. That is why we need to call for a truly independent agency that is reliable and trustworthy to evaluate the merits or demerits of the use of MMT. Let us have the truth instead of a bunch of wildly stated causes and effects that may or may not rest in truth.
I would like the member who just spoke to respond to this. I would like to ask him also why there is a reluctance on the part of the government to submit this to a truly independent study.