Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague for the hard work she and others have done in contributing to the debate on Bill C-32.
I suppose there are some of us in the House who have supported the bill. I would point out that in terms of an industrial barrage of lobbying, I know that I have seen in my time here lobbying that was much more intense, for example, the lobbying over the bank mergers, and yet our government decided to disallow bank mergers at this time.
We have lobbyists and we have lobbyists. I am sure there are lobbyists on the environmental protection side of the issue. Therefore, to say that this bill is the result of an intense industrial lobby is perhaps somewhat unfair.
In my experience in the forest products industry we had a number of concerns with legislation that was introduced by the Ontario government during the NDP period which concerned the use of the best available technology. What that legislation did was to say that, notwithstanding the cost, if there was technology in place that would allow the removal or elimination of certain pollutants, then the law required that the best available technology be implemented. For example, if emissions could be reduced by .000 and it cost $1 billion, to use a ridiculous example, the legislation said that would have to be implemented.
I know there are differences of opinion on this issue in the House, but on the concept of virtual elimination I think there was a legitimate concern by industry that we were going to be chasing molecules or those pollutants that are not measurable by any reasonable standard and investing millions of dollars of capital to reduce pollutants which are really having no significant impact at all.