Mr. Speaker, at the end of February, I travelled with the caribou commons project, which is an environmental lobby to protect the calving grounds of the porcupine caribou herd. The people in the north depend on this caribou herd which has calved on a very small coastal plain just across the border in the United States.
What they have, in effect, is this sense of powerless to protect their way of life and the sustainability of their economy which is one that depends on the fish, the berries and the caribou both spiritually and physically.
If we look at what they could be facing in terms of cost effectiveness, someone might think that it would be a a heck of a lot more profitable to have oil fields than to depend on caribou for a living. Under that logic, it would be perfectly acceptable to have roads through the habitat of the caribou, through their calving grounds and through their wintering grounds where North America has just one range left for the migrating herds. The north is then completely overlooked.
I would stress again that the effects of toxins are disproportionately dangerous for the people who live in the north as compared to the places where they are actually produced.