Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be back in the House after working in the constituency all summer. I am glad to see my colleagues' smiling faces around, all ready to co-operate as we move forward into this session.
I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-22, an act respecting Canada's offshore oil and gas operations, and enacting the nuclear liability and compensation act. I will be splitting my time with the member for St. John's East whom, I am sure, will have lots to say about how the bill would affect Atlantic Canada.
I do have an admission to make. George Bush has been very influential in my life, and I somehow cannot seem to get nuclear and nucular straight sometimes, so I beg your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, if I do accidentally misspeak. I promise that is as far as I will go toward copying Mr. Bush.
I also thank the member for Hamilton Mountain for her hard work on the bill. She is an outstanding member of Parliament and also a great leader within the NDP. She has led the natural resources committee since taking over recently very well, so I thank her for her work.
Although we supported the bill at first reading, we did so with the hope that the committee would accept some of our amendments, would listen to the witnesses, listen to what we had to say on our side. Unfortunately, we will not be supporting the bill at third reading because we did not really feel we were listened to. We put forward 13 amendments, which we thought would improve the bill quite a lot, but the Conservatives rejected all 13 of those amendments.
I was formerly a member of the natural resources committee and quite enjoyed my time there. I found my colleagues on both sides to be open to suggestions, willing to bring in witnesses who were not partisan, and really conciliatory. I quite enjoyed my time in that committee. Even sometimes they would accept motions from the opposition parties for study, which I thought was quite good of them.
I do not actually think that the rejection of these amendments came exclusively from the members of the committee. It was probably from the PMO. As we know if we have been on enough committees in the House, no matter what kind of debate we are having or what kind of witnesses we hear from, we do have dictums that come from central office to say what exactly will show up in bills. Again, it is sad that this happens.
In fact, I think that perhaps this is related to the bill. There is a member of the natural resources committee from Saskatoon—Humboldt who has a private member's motion where committee chairs would have much more freedom over the content of their reports and also the committee agenda. I am proud to say I jointly seconded that motion and support it as it moves through the House, hopefully to enactment. That bill points out what should happen in committees.
However, I do think the members of the natural resources committee are reasonable on all sides and would do a very good job if they were freed from the constraints of the Prime Minister's Office. I really do not fault the natural resources committee for rejecting all our amendments, but we know that the all-seeing eye that is the PMO has probably made this happen.
My second comment about the bill is that it is all about energy, once again. It seems that all the time of the natural resources committee was spent talking about energy usage and disposal all across Canada. I find that this not only engages the natural resources committee but also the industry committee, which I have also sat on.
We have had many bills tabled in the House that specifically deal with how we use energy in Canada. This one is no exception. This one is about how we extract oil and gas or how we use nuclear power and what happens in the event of accidents. It is tied in to our consumption and usage of energy. It shows us a sliver of the complexity of energy usage in Canada.
For example, just to outline a little bit of what is included in the bill, it updates Canada's nuclear liability regime to specify the conditions to compensate victims following an incident at a nuclear power plant and the levels of liability of operators. That is needed. Every country in the world that uses nuclear power has to have these kinds of provisions. It is a needed step forward but a very small part of Canada's energy portfolio.
The second is dealing with oil and gas exploration off the coast. The measures in the bill are supposed to explain what happens in the event of an accident, so they are important. This is off the Arctic and Atlantic waters.
There are important issues that are dealt with in the bill. Although we know it has been tabled five times and finally coming through the House, whether it will make it all the way to the end I do not know. However, it is too bad that it was rushed through at this stage and none of our amendments were taken.
Part of our problem with the bill is that it does not really uphold the idea of polluter pays. It does discuss this notion but it does not really deal with polluter pays when it comes to the nuclear energy sector. For example, there are provisions in the bill, as I understand it as I was reviewing it again this morning, that allow the minister to make adjustments as to how much a company or operator would have to pay in the event of an accident. It does not mandate an inclusive consultation process for specific projects.
In my riding where this is not specifically related to oil and gas but the industry, when there is no proper consultation there are problems with getting the social licence from the local community. Therefore, whether it is pipelines, drilling offshore, or dealing with nuclear energy, if there is no proper consultation there will never be social licence and there will be problems.
We have had a pipeline rupture in my community in 2007. Because there was not an inclusive system in terms of how we deal with pipeline spills, there are still ripples within the community and real resentment toward the company for these types of accidents.
The other problem with the bill is that it removes company liability for oil spill chemical dispersants. That is also a problem because if we think that we have to clean up the oil and we use something that is as bad as oil or even worse, then there is no liability for the companies and we think that is a problem. I think the folks listening at home or reading what we propose would say that these are things that are worth including in the bill, but of course they have been rejected.
Our 13 suggested amendments were consistent with the principle of polluter pays, including the removal of the liability cap, which reduces taxpayer liability. As we have seen, these offshore spills, the BP spill in the gulf in the United States is a recent example, can run into the billions of dollars for cleanups. The liability cap right now is far below the costs of such a cleanup. Our amendments also included the principle of sustainability by adding non-use value damages, which are important to consider.
When I think about what we are debating here, what we are talking about, what is going through on this third reading, it is the whole idea of how we deal with energy in Canada. We do not have a comprehensive plan. Most countries in the world have a national energy strategy. They have not only a long-term view of what should happen in the country but also a comprehensive view, which is thematic. For example, in the United States energy security is probably the key principle of its national energy strategy and everything kind of falls from this key principle.
We have a sliver of a bill that deals with a very small component of our overall energy plans in this country. Unfortunately, it is not very comprehensive and non-inclusive. It is kind of a shallow vision instead of what we really need for Canada, which is a large vision. That is what people will get when they elect an NDP government in 2015.