Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to a very important bill that is at the second reading stage. At the moment, this bill is very controversial, even though the NDP plans to support it at second reading.
I am going to read the title for the people who are kind enough to be listening to us on CPAC. It is the Act to amend the National Energy Board Act and the Canada Oil and Gas Operations Act. The bill is at second reading. To ensure that people are able to follow us, second reading is not the final passage of a bill. Some of us are considering supporting a bill that is extremely flawed so we can send it to committee where a host of amendments will certainly be proposed. We will see how things go in committee in order to decide whether the bill then deserves support at third reading. That is the point at which it might be enacted into law for Canada.
In 2013, 1.3 million barrels of crude oil were transported through pipelines under federal jurisdiction in Canada. That shows the importance of this subject. In Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, we are currently having to deal with the presence of the National Energy Board, because at the moment, the processes that have been initiated are hugely problematic. As the entire country now knows, there is an oil port project in my riding that is directly associated with a very large pipeline project, energy east. We are in a completely ludicrous situation in my constituency, where, on the one hand, the promoter has unilaterally decided not to clarify anything about its project before the end of March, while, on the other hand, the National Energy Board is requiring that community stakeholders decide now whether they are going to be included in the consultations in a few months. Therefore we have very competent people who are spending hundreds if not thousands of hours preparing to participate in a consultation that is probably going to be about something other than what is being presented by the promoter at this point. That makes this project a hot topic for the people I represent.
I am going to offer some explanation about the bill that is before us today. The bill includes absolute liability for all pipelines regulated by the National Energy Board. That means that the companies will be liable for costs and expenses and for damages regardless of fault, up to a maximum of $1 billion for high-capacity pipelines, that is, pipelines that transport at least 250,000 barrels of oil per day. That is a very high capacity. For a middle-class person sitting quietly in Tourville, Longueuil or Trois-Pistoles, $1 billion may seem like a large amount. Someone might say $1 billion is wonderful, and if something happens, we will be protected.
I would remind people that things are relative here. I will take Lac Mégantic as an example. People have to understand that Lac Mégantic would not have been covered by this bill. We are talking exclusively about accidents associated with pipelines. In a situation like the one in Lac Mégantic, the money that was distributed to the families of the victims as compensation totalled $200 million. That is just the money paid to the victims’ families. The cleanup of the downtown area cost $190 million. Of the 7.5 million litres of oil the train was carrying, 80% mostly leaked into the river. The cleanup is going to take years, and we do not yet know exactly how much it will cost, but it will be several hundred million dollars. Just by looking at the situation in Lac Mégantic, we realize that in relative terms, $1 billion is virtually a minimum. We have not received assurance that the amount that must be available for protection in the event of an accident is sufficient.
I will give another example, a very tough one. It is the worst example in North America at this point, and it has been cited by at least three of my colleagues in the last few hours. It is the accident in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It involves the Canadian company Enbridge and 4 million litres of heavy crude that were spilled into the Kalamazoo River and wetlands. The last time I saw the figures, the damage amounted to over $1 billion and there had been more than five years of cleanup. More than 80% of the bitumen spilled into the Kalamazoo River is still there in the environment, after over $1 billion was spent. That is another example that puts this $1 billion into perspective.
I also wonder where the $1 billion comes from. Why $1 billion?
This $1 billion looks like a vote-getting figure, if you will pardon that term. The Conservatives seem to be using something easy to understand, something that looks big. However, if they had sat some experts around the table to estimate the kind of minimum guarantee needed for an oil spill, the experts would not have come up with $1 billion. They might have come up with $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion. This $1 billion is completely arbitrary; it is a round number, easy to remember. I hope that some very direct questions will be asked during the committee meetings where the bill will be considered.
The companies’ liability would be unlimited only in the case of fault or negligence. What will happen in a case where fault is not clear or is disputed? We are talking about billionaire proponents here. If, literally, they want to hire an army of lawyers to try to prove the fault does not lie with them, how many years will it take to see the end of a court action disputing fault, with resources like that? Mr. Speaker, I think your training makes you an even better judge of that than I am. It may really be a very long time.
That runs counter to another aspect of the law that I question, which puts a limit of six years after the event on the right to seek compensation, if a person is a victim of the consequences. That does not work. In Kalamazoo, they have been cleaning up for five years, and there are still pollutants. In the years to come, people are therefore going to have to take stock again to determine whether their property and their health have ultimately been affected by that. The cleanup is not yet finished. It is not that people do not want to determine, in six years, whether they are affected or not; rather, the phenomenon is still in a state of flux. The victims are not acting in bad faith. Someone may realize only after seven or eight or nine or 10 or 12 years that they have been negatively affected by the event. Why suddenly impose a six-year limit?
The energy east project will carry 1.1 million barrels a day. That means 173 million litres every day. We all remember the damage caused by 4 million litres of crude in the Kalamazoo River. That cost over $1 billion. Now, operators want to build a pipeline that will carry 173 million litres a day, or 120,000 litres every minute. Pipelines are relatively safe at the beginning of their life cycle, but often, near the end, tragedies or other serious incidents happen more regularly. An accident like the one in Kalamazoo, where managers took some time to close the valves, must never happen. Literally millions of litres of oil spilled into the environment. Think about it: that is 173 million litres a day. The same question remains regarding the $1 billion.
There is another question I have not yet heard. Perhaps an esteemed colleague, a minister across the way, could answer this. Is the $1 billion indexed? At the rate costs grow with inflation, in five or 10 years, $1 billion will not be worth the same amount. A major accident could happen in my region over the next 40 years and we are told there will be a $1 billion limit. If an accident were to happen tomorrow morning, it might already cost more than $1 billion, and I did not see any anything about indexing or mechanisms to guarantee that this will follow the cost of living, considering the astronomical costs associated with cleaning up these kinds of accidents.
I would like to finish on a more positive note and talk a bit about one of the NDP's key principles. What distinguishes us from the current government is, first and foremost, sustainability. We believe it is crucial that polluters pay for the pollution they create, rather than passing on the cost to future generations.
I have one last example. Now that the toxic effects of mines on the environment cost billions of dollars, laws require environmental protection funds to be set aside during mining operations so that we do not end up at the end of a project with a company that maybe made less profit, or left for another country, or suddenly disappeared at the end of a project to avoid paying to clean up the mess it left behind. That kind of mechanism is missing here, and neither I nor most of my constituents find that reassuring.