Mr. Speaker, I am someone who very much likes to travel in North Africa. It is a beautiful part of the world, particularly Egypt. I am very fond of the desert.
One of the most stunning adventures, if one is into the environment and into wildlife and that sort of thing, is to travel to the shore of the Red Sea and snorkel in the Red Sea, which is what I did about six or seven years ago.
The Red Sea is famous for its underwater marine environment. I arrived there and went swimming. There is a reef just offshore. It is quite fantastic because when looking around with my face out of water it is all desert. When I put my face in the water it was a riot of colour. There is life everywhere competing. There were fish, coral, sea fans and everything imaginable within my view. The water was beautiful and perfectly clear.
That was in one little cove that the local guides took us to. I asked to go a little way down the shore where again I went into the water and looked down with my face mask and snorkel on and there was desolation. There was nothing. Everything was totally dead. As I walked along the shore the sand looked perfectly normal, but I stepped on something soft. It was a sand coated globule of oil.
Prior to passing through the Suez Canal the oil tankers trim their tanks by dumping oil into the Red Sea. The devastation of one of the most fantastic ecosystems in the world is unbelievable. It is all because of a weak national government which did not apply standards to the tankers moving through the Suez Canal. Egypt did not apply those standards because it needs the money. It is as simple as that.
Let us return to Canada for a moment and travel with me to Newfoundland, to Cape St. Mary's on the Avalon peninsula. I was there the summer before last. It is an absolutely splendid situation. It is a bird sanctuary. Approaching the edge of the cliffs there is a huge pinnacle a couple of hundred yards offshore. The drop is about 300 feet. Tens of thousands of birds swarm around that pinnacle. That is their breeding ground.