Madam Speaker, I know my hon. friend from St. John's East is on the other side of the country all together, so he can be forgiven for not knowing anything about dilbit. Bitumen is a solid. While he just said in the House that the safest and most environmentally-friendly way to ship it was by pipeline, unfortunately he has it exactly backward.
Bitumen is a solid shipped most safely by train. It only becomes dangerous when people stir diluent in order to make it flow through a pipeline, thus creating dilbit, which is both noxious to human health and cannot be cleaned up.
My question is to the point about the claim of great economic dependency of our country on oil and gas. Did he know that at the height of the oil sands production, it represented 2% of GDP, therefore, 2% of our schools, hospitals, and social services, not a dependency?