Mr. Speaker, it is interesting that government members still believe the pipelines that being proposed out of Alberta will be shipping oil or any sort of processed material at all. There are proposals from Husky just this week to put another $1 billion into the tar sands, explicitly to ship out raw bitumen to other countries to process there, therefore shipping jobs out of the country at the same time. What will be left behind? The legacy of the tailings ponds from the tar sands.
The government tells us to essentially trust it and the oil companies when they ship this oil because they have plans in place. Government members were talking about the Coast Guard earlier and that it was in charge of any potential spill. We know audits from the Coast Guard are saying that it does not have the capacity. It is not us saying it. The Coast Guard is saying it cannot handle a major spill. It does not have the training and its equipment is old. Companies are telling us to trust them when they put their emergency response plans in place, supposedly, but then will not make them public.
If the government is for accountability and transparency, when we talk about such high risk projects, would it not then make sense to put into legislation, along with a ban on dangerous tanker traffic, the requirement for some of these things to be made public so the public can have a look at them and determine whether they are trustworthy and safe enough for their measures?