Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise tonight in the House to return to a question I asked on February 5 of the Prime Minister.
February 5 should not seem like so long ago, but it was when conversations about Kinder Morgan were less tinged with hysteria than they are today. It is a shame that we have descended into sort of a tit-for-tat competition without regard to the facts.
I want to focus on facts. That was what I did in my question on February 5 for the Prime Minister on the use of the figure of 15,000 jobs being at stake in building Kinder Morgan, that this was an exaggeration. Even Kinder Morgan had never suggested that. Therefore, I have decided, in the four minutes allowed to me, to put forward the five top whoppers of claims about Kinder Morgan that are not factually correct, and hope I have time to add some facts about what is correct.
First, 15,000 jobs is something that is repeated often. I do not know where it came from. Kinder Morgan's submission to the National Energy Board put forward that its project would create a grand total of 2,500 jobs a year for two years. It never asserted more than that, and it asserted 90 permanent jobs. There is no multiplier factor I can find that comes to 15,000 permanent jobs. It is 2,500 jobs a year in construction for two years.
Second, repeated quite often is the idea that this pipeline has been operated by Kinder Morgan since 1953, shipping dilbit with no problems. However, there are two problems with that statement. In 1953, the pipeline was run by a different company, TransCanada, and it was shipping a different product, crude, not dilbit. When Kinder Morgan took it over and bought it in the early 2000s, starting about 2004-05, very small amounts of bitumen mixed with diluent started to be shipped. This is the substance that has specific problems, and it is very different from crude.
The third point that keeps being claimed is that dilbit is just like crude and anyone can clean it up. We know that this is not true because of a spill that happened at an Enbridge pipeline at Kalamazoo, Michigan. This was the first time that even people like me who were dubious about pipelines realized that shipping diluted bitumen was an entirely different matter from shipping crude. The dilbit in the Kalamazoo River separated, the diluent floating to the surface and making the neighbourhood surrounding it sick. It was the symptoms of human illness that alerted Enbridge that it had a pipeline break, because it had systematically shut off all the alarms as they went off in the control room. Then the bitumen sank to the floor of the river.
The studies on bitumen and diluent fall into different categories. The studies done approximating ocean conditions, such as at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, show that in ocean water with sand, bits of seaweed, and so on, when the diluent separates, the bitumen forms oil balls around particulates and then it sinks. However, if they fill a tank full of fresh water in Alberta and add in salt and do the studies there, they are able to report that bitumen mixed with diluent will float, at least for a while, until the diluent floats away.
Fourth, the next big whopper is that there is a $73 billion benefit to the Canadian economy over 20 years. That comes from a study by a company called Muse Stancil. Kinder Morgan submitted it in the NEB process. It was thoroughly reviewed by economists working for the City of Vancouver, who found that it was fatally flawed. This conclusion was also reached by a Minnesota public government review of a report by the same company. It found that its assumptions and data were unrealistic and unreliable.
Fifth, in my last seven seconds, is the claim that we lose $40 million a day, which is totally false.