Mr. Speaker, polluter pays should be the backbone of the legislation, yet we still seem to have thew Canadian people being asked to be on the hook after a certain amount of money for an oil spill cleanup. How much is a cleanup? It sounds like a lot of money. As my colleague for Skeena—Bulkley Valley pointed out, it could be hundreds of millions of dollars.
Professor Rashid Sumaila at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Economics Research Unit asked the question about who paid. We have a mechanism to cover $1.35 billion, but look at the example of the Exxon Valdez, at $6.5 billion to cleanup. The Gulf of Mexico was much larger. For northern gateway, the cost of cleanup and losses could be up to $9.6 billion.
If there is no political will to enforce and if the government is not serious about polluter pay, it will be the rest of us Canadians who will foot the bill, and that is wrong.