Madam Speaker, I have just pulled myself away from the Senate, a House which I do not usually get to be in. I heard Dr. Buffy Sainte-Marie talk about her vision for the country that we want together. She said, “We truly want to move our country forward.” It was a beautiful presentation and a great honour to be a member of Parliament and to hear words like those in these Houses.
I will pick up on some of the conversation we were having about four months ago about marine protection and how to move our country forward toward a sustainable way to protect our coastline and sensitive environments from oil spills, and a recent success story that I heard about in my own riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith. It was a fantastic presentation by local innovators.
In south Nanaimo, Ace Innovation Solutions is designing oil spill response equipment that might address some of the immediate needs we have when a small or large spill happens. It has a barge. It has a large extractor that floats, a small extractor that can fit inside a bilge tank, a very common source of oil spills on our coast, and also a portable unit that has a three metre collapsible boom that can sit on a dock or on a boat and can pick up 500 litres of diesel per hour.
There was a very concerning spill that happened around one of the fish farms up in Echo Bay north of Vancouver Island. This was in the news about three weeks ago. The proponents of Ace Innovations said that their machine would have been able to act quickly and in a very responsive way without waiting for outside equipment if the fish farm had had this equipment on hand. Their machinery skims the surface of the ocean and picks up diesel, motor oil, gasoline, crude oil, and any other type of oil immediately.
It was very encouraging to see this small business finding innovative solutions. We very much hope that the federal government wants to partner with that business, work with it, and especially tighten the response times so that anybody spills oil is required to have the equipment available to take fast action.
It has been five months since the oceans protection plan was announced by the government. I wish there were more we could point to that would show that our country is truly, actively moving forward.
We do not yet have a legislated tanker ban on the north coast. That was one of the announcements. We do not yet have more certainty around bitumen response. This is a sticky oil. When it hits the water, the Minister of Transport said in January it is not known what it does. In fact, there have been a number of studies that have said it may well sink. However, the minister was willing to approve the Kinder Morgan pipeline and its associated bitumen oil tankers in the absence of his having confidence that there was a way to clean it up, which is extremely worrying. We have not seen anything on abandoned vessels in the budget.
I would like to know from the minister's representative, what good news do we have to celebrate regarding actual changes on the ground that will help coastal communities prevent an oil spill?