Madam Speaker, I rise here this evening to expand on a question I asked the minister regarding the Supreme Court decision on the Redwater case, which involved the bankruptcy of Canadian resource companies and their obligation to clean up their abandoned wells and mines. The case covered both the federal responsibilities under bankruptcy law, provincial responsibilities for natural resources and the dual responsibility for both levels of government to protect our environment.
In the Redwater case, the Alberta courts had ruled that the trustee in the bankruptcy of a resource company could absolve itself of obligations to clean up and reclaim its inactive wells and instead give priority to paying off its creditors, the banks. Therefore, the considerable costs of cleanup and reclamation would fall to the provincial government in this case, to taxpayers. On January 31, the Supreme Court reversed this decision and found that bankruptcy was not an excuse to absolve companies or their trustees of their environmental liabilities.
Why is this important? First of all, the issue of inactive and abandoned wells is a very large and growing problem. There are over 122,000 inactive wells across western Canada, and most of those wells have absolutely no prospect of ever operating again. That is almost a quarter of the wells out there. Most will require cleanup and reclamation in the near future. Many are on private land, on farms, where they impact the work and lives of farmers who are no longer receiving rental payments for those wells. The cost of this reclamation work will be in the billions of dollars. Increasingly, those costs are being borne by Canadian taxpayers.
This issue goes beyond abandoned oil and and gas wells. The cost of cleaning up the oil sands has been estimated at over $100 billion. Who will pay for that? The federal government will say it is the problem of the Alberta government, but what about resource projects north of 60, in Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut?
The Faro Mine in Yukon was abandoned 20 years ago. It is a 25-kilometre-square moonscape of toxic waste. The federal government has already spent about $300 million maintaining the site over the past 20 years and has barely begun to clean it up. It is estimated that Canadian taxpayers will have to pay another billion dollars to do that for that one mine alone.
The Giant Mine outside Yellowknife is a similar story. Over its life, the mine spewed tons of arsenic across the landscape, and the site still oozes arsenic and other toxins. Remediation of the Giant Mine includes the freezing of arsenic waste forever—for eternity. Eternity, as Woody Allen says, is a long time, especially toward the end. The cleanup has already cost a billion dollars. That cost will continue to go on, with the taxpayers paying those costs forever.
Will the federal government be looking to change the federal laws regarding bankruptcy and abandoned mines and wells? When will we truly have a regulatory system where the polluter pays, instead of one in which some corporations profit from reckless exploitation and let taxpayers pay for the cleanup?