Mr. Speaker, for the hon. member to suggest that I passed over the environmental impact of this too quickly, I would suggest to the hon. member that in my former life I was a dry land farmer and, therefore, water is very important to my livelihood and to the livelihoods of my constituents in the riding of Macleod.
We live in the drainage of the Rocky Mountains. We have wonderful volumes of freshwater but that freshwater can be polluted. It has been suggested that we are polluting it through our oil and gas explorations. We take great exception to that because we are working diligently with the exploration companies that are working within my riding and all across this country to ensure we are protecting this environment.
The environment minister is working very hard to get this new plan in place, the first plan, I might remind the House, that any government in Canada has ever had. In fact, we are quite excited about the fact that our Prime Minister can now go to the G-8 conference with a plan. We have never had a Canadian prime minister who actually had an environmental plan to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, which my hon. colleague spoke about.
I want to share some of the things we are doing. Yes, oil exploration in the tar sands has been using too much freshwater so companies have taken the initiative to look at new ways of extraction and are using CO2 to extract the oil from the sands. We are working on that. These industries have taken the initiative, with the support of this new government, to ensure we are protecting the environment.