Mr. Speaker, I first posed this question in question period on October 11, and surprisingly enough, I did not get a satisfactory response. By way of background, I was the only member of Parliament who obtained intervenor status in the National Energy Board hearings on the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. I think it is safe to say I am the only Canadian who read all of the so-called evidence submitted by Kinder Morgan. I am very familiar with this file, in other words.
I was shocked when we bought and then built the pipeline, at a waste of $34 billion, but through this whole thing, the City of Burnaby was consistent in saying it must not expand. Regarding the Burnaby tank farm, which consists of tanks of diluted bitumen and other fossil-fuel products that are highly flammable, the Burnaby Fire Department was consistent in saying it did not have the capacity to put out a tank farm fire. It also pointed out that for Simon Fraser University and various communities at the top of the mountain, there is only one road out in the event of fire. There is a significant risk to life and limb. In other words, the community of Burnaby had been, maybe one would say, a thorn in the side of this project.
To my horror, of course, the Government of Canada, as I mentioned, bought the project and built the project, and now all Canadians, all of us in this room, share in one thing if nothing else: We own the Trans Mountain pipeline. We have wasted all this money on it, and now, as we discovered the same week I asked the question on October 11, with our tax dollars at work, we have bribed the City of Burnaby to stop criticizing the pipeline and not mention anymore the risk of fire that would threaten the communities of Burnaby, particularly Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain. What Trans Mountain did was offer $21 million over 20 years, and along with that came a gag order on the people of Burnaby not to criticize the pipeline anymore. They are not allowed to say anything about the Kinder Morgan, now Trans Mountain, pipeline.
It is astonishing that we would, as a federal government, pour $34 billion into violating indigenous rights and ignoring the various concerns for the environment about what would happen, or will happen because it is more of a certainty than a potential risk, if there were a spill of diluted bitumen, which behaves very differently in a marine environment than even the most horrible of crude oil spills, like Exxon Valdez. We also have the risk of a tank farm fire in Burnaby.
The answer I got from the Minister of Finance was certainly very generous and nice about my reputation as a climate activist, but it failed to answer the question: Did the government know about this? Did the federal cabinet understand that our Crown corporation, Trans Mountain, was prepared to put $21 million into stopping the people of Burnaby from being protected and their fire department from speaking out about this?
For those who are watching this, I ask them to go to Google and google this: “Only one bear in a hundred bites, but they don't come in order”. This is a very instructive video about the nature of tank farm fires around the world, produced by that old folk singer, my hero, Bob Bossin, who lives on Gabriola Island and knows whereof he speaks.