Mr. Speaker, one of the previous members raised a question to one of my colleagues, I believe it was the Minister of Indian Affairs, and advised that there are no issues with oil spills from tankers so why should we worry.
I would like to put to my colleague in the House in response that in May of this year, a double-hulled tanker spilled 2.9 million litres of crude off Singapore when it was hit by a freighter. This past January, 1.7 million litres were spilled in Texas after a collision with a barge, again a double-hulled crude freighter. In 1992, 76 million litres were spilled off the coast of northern Spain by an oil tanker.
In Alberta, it is reported by the energy board there that out of the 8,000 pipeline spills, a large proportion of them are due to external causes, where something else interacts with the pipeline.
I wonder if the member could speak to this issue where it appears that even where we have double-hulled freighters, which is not always the case, there can there be an amazingly large potential risk to the critical fishery off the west coast.