Mr. Speaker, given that we do not know much about the contents of the hazardous material generally referred to as diluent, I have been doing some research into this. The hon. minister is telling us in her speech that we can ship oil safely by supertanker, but none of the current proposals for shipping Canadian fossil fuels to other countries actually deal with shipping oil. They all deal with shipping something called bitumen, which is not flowable and has to be mixed with something called diluent.
For example, the proposal by Enbridge called the northern gateway would bring supertankers up the B.C. coastline loaded with this diluent that it buys from the Middle East. It is off-loaded at Kitimat and then sent through a twinned pipeline to northern Alberta where it would be mixed with bitumen instead of upgrading it and refining it in Alberta. It is mixed with this diluent material, which is essentially a petroleum distillate called naphtha, which is mixed with benzene and which I have also discovered is mixed with butane. We do not actually know the chemical composition of diluent because it is more of a trade name. It is a commonplace term. It does not have a scientific meaning. It is definitely toxic. It goes two ways. If we were to allow this monstrous scheme to proceed, we would first ship it in, mix the bitumen in, and ship it out through a pipeline. We have no idea what is in those pipelines or in those railcars as the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic with this Bakken crude showed us.
I would ask my friend for any comments with respect to what he has been thinking in terms of whether we really know what is in those pipelines.