Mr. Speaker, I would like to speak to the amendment of the member for Calgary North.
One of the things about this House that concerns me is how many of us become experts in certain fields in which we do not know anything.
Members of the Reform Party have said that they want to cut taxes, they want to cut the deficit and this kind of stuff. Here they are asking us to go to the National Research Council, hire a group of scientists to work for the Ethyl Corporation and do all the work that corporation is supposed to do. We have all these automotive manufacturers, BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Saab, Lada, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes Benz. The list goes on and on.
I will speak about how a car actually functions. We are talking about an octane enhancer. The octane rating is a unit of measurement established by the automotive industry to determine the action of variable fuels. In the laboratory is an engine with a variable compression ratio and various substances, gasoline, stoichiometric and some of these additives are added. At the point where it knocks-at 100 per cent it does not knock-the enhancers put into the gasoline are reduced.
Why do they do this? They want the combustion process to be predictable. Mr. Speaker, if you have ever driven a car and turned the ignition off and the engine still was running this is called after-runner or dieseling. What you have got is the gasoline reaching so high a compression ratio that it explodes by itself. We do not want that happening in our cars. We want to trigger it when we turn the ignition on, getting a spark from the sparkplug. When we turn the ignition switch off we want the spark to stop and the engine to shut off.
What happens in a modern car with all this onboard diagnostic equipment? Starting with a PCV valve, exhaust gas recirculation, the use of a catalytic converter, a sophisticated combustion chamber design and raising the temperature of the engine by using higher thermostats is a sophisticated modern engine where we are trying get a stoichiometric mixture of 14 pounds of air to 1 pound of gasoline.
We want that condition all the time. We want a good spray in the combustion chamber. We want a certain amount of turbulence and we want the predictability so that when that gasoline explodes at a certain point in the cycle, when the piston is travelling down a particular angle, the maximum pressure is built up.
This is done by antiknock. For instance, if one went to a modern car, took a hammer and hammered on it, if the timing light is used the spark will retard when that happens.
These cars are very sensitive. The bottom line is that they have these onboard diagnostic pieces of equipment. The onboard diagnostic piece of equipment is a way of refining the entire combustion process from start to finish making sure the contaminants that come out in the air do not pollute the atmosphere.
That is what the Minister of the Environment is trying to do. The Minister of the Environment has said if there were no onboard diagnostics on cars in Canada but available in the United States, Canadians would get a inferior product to their counterparts in the United States. We would be actually manufacturing the cars in Canada and exporting them to the States while we are using cars with obsolete technology.
Study after study by the automotive manufacturers has said MMT interferes with diagnostic onboard pieces of equipment and causes them to foul up. It causes them to trigger warning lights. It causes them to take the car under warranty which in turn would cost more money for the car.
These cars are supposed to go well over 100,000 kilometres without these parts being replaced or without some major clogging up of the complicated three way catalytic converter.
What has the Government of Canada done? The Minister of the Environment went to the manufacturers and went to the Ethyl Corporation and said solve the problem and they could not solve the problem.
If the Ethyl Corporation feels so strongly that its product is so good, let it take the risk. Do not ask us to go to our National Research Council and use our researchers to prove its product is good or bad. Put it in sample cars and prove it. The idea that there is a court case in the United States is a sham because the Americans have not been using MMT for 17 years.
There is still a ban. It is not legal to buy MMT in the States and the Environmental Protection Agency has said it has to go through that series of tests which are so important to environmental protection. It has to go through that thumb print required by any fuel additives that have certain restrictions which have to be met.
Hydrocarbon emissions, nitric oxide emissions and all these things are calibrated through an acceptable level which cars have to go through in order to make sure they pass the test.
We have an automotive industry of which we use 10 per cent and 17 per cent is exported. It is important to get into the new model year. The minister had to act and she acted.
I do not see why any of my colleagues being lobbied by the Ethyl Corporation are trying to tell the government side that we should be spending any more money.