Mr. Speaker, as always it is a great honour to rise and speak for the people of Timmins—James Bay. I am very proud to be speaking to Bill C-52, a piece of legislation that is very important for this House. I would like to put in editorial parentheses that it is nice for a change to be debating legislation that has something of value to the Canadian public, as opposed to the so many bizarre hot-button sideshows we have been dealing with. The issue of rail safety is a serious concern. The government needs to respond.
We saw the horrific disaster in Lac-Mégantic, where so many lives were needlessly lost. However, we are also dealing with a huge increase in the transport traffic coming out of Alberta and Saskatchewan in terms of the carrying of unprocessed oil, crude, bitumen. We saw in the Lac-Mégantic spill the oil that was coming out of the Bakken fields that is very combustible. These are issues that have to be taken seriously.
As I say that, it is not just the oil industry that is involved. Many of our industrial sectors have an important role to play in their connections with the railways. I live literally across the street from the Ontario Northland and every day the huge sulphuric acid tanker cars come down from the smelter in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. We have had spills, and those are catastrophic spills.
However, the kinds of spills that we have been seeing with increasing regularity as the increase of traffic is coming, particularly in the oil sector, have raised many issues about safety. In my own region, we have had in the last few months three derailments: one at Hornepayne and two at Gogama. One spilled heavy crude into the Mattagami River right at the site that I have been led to understand is fish-spawning grounds. There has been so much work done on that section of Mattagami River to build a better ecosystem for fisheries. To see heavy crude burning in the Mattagami River is a travesty, and it is an economic and environmental tragedy for the people who live along the river and in fact for all the people who live in my part of northern Ontario because the Mattagami is such a large river system.
There is not a lot of comfort from the promises of CN or Transport Canada that they will suddenly make this all better again. The minister said they will restore it 99.99%. I find that rather hard to fathom, how crude spilling into fish-spawning grounds can be remediated that easily. We look at what happened in Kalamazoo, Michigan when the Enbridge pipeline burst. For 18 hours after the alarm started sounding in Edmonton that there was a problem, no action had been taken. That blowout destroyed a large section of the Kalamazoo River. Five years later, the water is still damaged and it has cost over $1 billion in repairing the environment. These are serious issues.
We have to go back a bit to give people some historical explanation. Before we had this huge increase in tanker traffic, there was a belief, pushed by the Liberal government of the day, that if we allow self-regulation everything will be better. It is a blind belief that capital suddenly somehow had a sense of public duty, that if we pulled out the inspectors, if we pulled out the inspectors from the meat industry, if we pulled out the inspectors assuring health and safety, if we pulled out the inspectors of the railway lines and allowed the companies to self-regulate, people would make more money and somehow that would be a social good.
The Transportation Safety Board has talked about the weak safety culture that has existed both at Transport Canada and within the companies. Serious issues have been raised to the point where, after the latest Gogama spill, the Centre for Biological Diversity said, and I do not think it is that unfair to say, that the oil and railway industries are playing Russian roulette with people's lives and our environment given the fact that the transport of these goods cut through the centre of so many communities in our country.
That being said, we have to ask ourselves what the long-term solution is here. One of the arguments we always hear from the Conservatives is this. If there is a rail derailment, some kind of accident or any issue about the transport of oil, the Conservatives will immediately jump up and say that we need pipelines, that the New Democrats need to stand up and support pipelines. That is a bizarre, false argument but I am not surprised that the Conservatives say it because they are so much the puppets of the large oil interests.
I have been noticing that more and more my colleagues in the Liberal Party use that argument time and time again. I was actually shocked that yesterday when we were talking about rail safety, my colleague from Trinity—Spadina was talking about pipelines. I do not think he understands that we do not have to have either-or, what we have to have is public safety. We are a nation of transporting of resources. However one chooses to transport goods, it has to be done where safety is put ahead of expediency.
For my colleague in Trinity—Spadina who believes that the NDP is wrong on our concern about pipelines, we are saying that the issue of pipelines is the same as the issue with rail transport. What are the public protections that are in place if we are going to be moving raw bitumen through 40-year-old pipelines? That is a question that the public needs to have answered.
Whether they are concerned about Line 9 in the city of Toronto, whether they are concerned about the pipeline planned through the mountains of B.C., the issue is safety. Where are the shut-off valves? What kind of oversight is there going to be? What kinds of remediation measures could be put in place to stop a blowout? If there is a blowout in the B.C. mountain ranges, how are we going to remediate that? We know that would be impossible. If Line 9 blows out in Toronto, how could we assure the safety of the community?
It is a false argument to say the New Democrats have to choose between pipelines or rail. We say that whatever method is going to be used to move the nation's natural resources, the issue of safety to the public has to be part of the discussion from day one. There is a larger long-term issue in terms of safety with Canada's oil industry that needs to be looked at. What kind of nation has a vision for economic development that takes raw resources and ships them thousands of kilometres to put them on ships in the St. Lawrence to ship them to China to be processed? That is a bizarre, short-sighted view of economic development.
We have enormous resources in this country and we have to look at value added because when we do value added we are not only creating jobs, but we are also ensuring that the transport would be safer because we are not dealing with the unstable, unprocessed Bakken oil being transported. We would process it in Alberta or Saskatchewan and then move it.
The issue of transporting bitumen as we have seen from the Kalamazoo River catastrophe is that bitumen is very different for cleaning up than oil. This needs to be balanced and the best way to deal with that would be to have the upgrading and the processing at source. This is a long-term vision issue that needs to be addressed.
With regard to my colleagues in the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister who is going to create this energy superpower, we have seen after eight years of this hyperbolic talk that it has not come to pass because there has not been the necessary equal commitment to environment. We have become more and more of an international outlier on these issues. If we are going to develop non-renewable resources, we have to show that we do actually care about the environment.
President Obama turned down Keystone XL, much to the chagrin of the leader of the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister. We look at what the EPA said about Keystone XL, that it was not in America's interests and that the effect of Keystone XL would be to add another 1.37 billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The United States was looking at the Canadian government and saying for all its blunder and bluff on its energy economy, what has it done to ensure that it is balanced with the long-term environmental vision. The government had nothing to offer except more blunder and bluff and that it is not taking no for an answer from Mr. Obama. Well, President Obama and the Democrats' response is “talk to the hand”. If we are not going to balance environment and long-term security, they are not going to partner with us.
In our transport of oil and our natural resources, which we have been abundantly blessed with, what we are saying is that we have to balance environment, sustainability and public safety, that we cannot shortchange public safety because we simply cannot tolerate it and the Canadian public will not tolerate another tragedy like Lac-Mégantic.
Therefore, I support the bill. I think it is a first step, but we have a long way to go in addressing this issue.
