Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hard-working colleague for her question. I have a great amount of respect for the way she works in her riding and her analyses of issues at this level. She has actually hit the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter here is that, as much as this bill enshrines into legislation that the polluter would pay, it would have the polluter pay only a small percentage of the real cost.
Once again, I want to assure my colleagues that I am not making up these figures from the air. Let us look at the cleanup for the BP Gulf oil spill, if there were a $1 billion cap: $42 billion has already been spent, and there is expected to be another $35 billion spent. That $1 billion seems like a pittance, does it not, even though $1 billion is a huge amount of money? Who is going to be on the hook for the rest? We would not simply say that $1 billion had been spent and no more cleanup would occur. That is just not an option. The reality is that, if it is polluter pays, then let us make this more realistic.
We are updating legislation that is over 40 years old. Let us not date it even before we have approved it in the House.