Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand and speak for a few moments on Bill C-3.
I want to commend my colleague, the member for Shefford, for his comments. He and I have worked together on fisheries and oceans. I know he is deeply concerned about these issues as they impact his constituents. He has worked very hard and continues to work very hard in their interests.
The title of Bill C-3 is interesting. It is the “safeguarding Canada's seas and skies” bill. Once again the Conservatives are all talk and very little action. While members have indicated that we will be supporting this bill and moving it through second reading, it is only because it makes very modest improvements. In the time I have, I want to speak about the need for us to do a better job of protecting our oceans.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau once said, “For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.”
Today that means protecting our oceans from ourselves.
Before I go any further, I want to indicate that I will be sharing my time with the member from Quebec.
Canada is the steward of more than 7.1 million square kilometres of ocean and the world's longest coastline, stretching over 244,000 kilometres across three oceans, yet we remain grossly unprepared for disasters off our shores. The bill, as I said, contains only modest improvements in marine security at best, and it does very little to respond to Canada's lack of preparedness for oil or chemical spills.
My NDP colleagues and I take the protection of our oceans very seriously, and that is why we proposed to broaden the scope of this bill to make real, comprehensive changes to protect our coast. Not surprisingly, the members opposite, the Conservative government, rejected our proposal.
It is fair to say that Canada, in many ways, has been lucky to date, in that we have not had a significant spill off our coast, because over 20 years of reports have told us that we are simply not ready.
In 1990, following the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, the Brander-Smith report came out regarding tanker safety and marine spills response capabilities. This report had three major findings: first, Canada did not have the capability to respond effectively to a spill, regardless of where in the country it was; second, based on tanker traffic, Canada could expect over 100 spills of various degrees every year, with a significant spill once every 15 years.
In reality, this number was greatly underestimated. Between 2007 and 2009 alone, a total of 4,160 spills of oil, chemicals, and other pollutants were reported.
The third major finding was that the risk of spills was highest in eastern Canada.
These findings are nearly the same as those identified in the 2010 report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. In this report, the commissioner found that while Transport Canada and DFO have carried out risk assessments related to oil spills, they can provide no assurance that the federal government is ready to respond effectively to a spill.
He also identified that eastern Canada remains most vulnerable for a spill. The Deepwater Horizon incident in 2010 resulted in an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. It is estimated to cost $40 billion to clean up this spill over an unknown number of years.
This disaster needs to remind us of how quickly an oil disaster can occur and how costly the cleanup can be.
In Canada, we currently have a liability cap of only $40 million. While the Conservatives committed back in June to increasing this cap to $1 billion, we have yet to see any action on that commitment, and we can appreciate the fact that if we had a spill like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, $1 billion would be only a fraction of the money needed to deal with the disaster.
We need real action to protect our oceans, and we need it now. Canada should be a world leader when it comes to oil spill preparedness, not a reluctant follower of international requirements. We have too much at stake—surely we all recognize that—and too much to lose when it comes to protecting our oceans and their resources. Many of our coastal communities depend on a healthy ocean for their livelihoods, and we understand clearly that Canada's economy benefits from clean coastal resources.
I am the member of Parliament for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour in Nova Scotia, where a couple of big companies are moving to develop resources off our coast. Billions of dollars have already been put on the table by Shell and BP just for the right to begin to dig; that is how confident they are of what they are going to find. The Province of Nova Scotia has extended the moratorium on Georges Banks against exploration and development, but the federal government has failed to respond. All of these things are indications that the government is failing to act quickly enough.
Earlier today in question period, I talked about the changes the government has made to the Fisheries Act. The gutting of the Fisheries Act is putting the development of natural resources above the protection of our oceans and marine life. Members opposite know this only too well. It is going to take a disaster of the kind I am talking about to bring it to their attention once and for all.
When we consider the reports that have been written and the science that has already been presented that indicate to us very clearly the dangers that lie on our three coasts, do members opposite not agree that now is the time to move forward? Let us not wait for another report. Let us not wait for a disaster to bring to our attention the fact that we had the opportunity but did not move quickly enough.
Let us not do that. Let us be a leader. As we move this bill forward, let us take the opportunity at committee to bring in expert advice and make the kinds of changes that we advocated for previously when this bill was before the House, to give it teeth, to give it a real commitment, to recognize that we have to do so much more to protect our coastlines if we are going to be developing our natural resources.
Let us not wait for another disaster. Let us not wait for another example of why we need to act, whether it is in the north, as the member for Western Arctic talked about, or in the St. Lawrence, as my colleague from Shefford talked about. Let us move now. I urge the government opposite that when this bill goes forward, passes at second reading, and goes to committee, let us make sure we make efforts to expand it to make it more encompassing so that we can truly protect our oceans once and for all.
