Mr. Speaker, I am here today to stand up for the coast and ask the government about its oil spill response plans.

Along with my New Democrat British Columbia colleagues, we represent the waters that the 2013 tanker safety review identified as being one of the four areas in Canada with the highest probability of a large oil spill and one of the two areas in Canada with the highest potential impact of an oil spill. Therefore, it matters to us. It matters to our constituents and our economy.

Just last week, there was an alarming increase in oil tanker traffic approved by the government to go through these waters. It is bitumen oil tankers that will be moving through the Salish Sea. This is against the wishes of coastal first nations, local governments, and almost everybody on the coast who participated in the undermined regulatory reviews. It is all downside, no upside, for the coast and the increase in risk is tremendous.

I want to talk about that risk and what the government's plans are to accommodate it. A sevenfold increase in tanker traffic laden with bitumen means, inevitably, an increase in risk. The impact of bitumen is something that we are still learning about. It is an unrefined product, it is viscous, it is sticky, it needs a diluent in order for it to flow through pipelines, and the volatility of the diluted bitumen was identified in the Kalamazoo spill in the U.S. several years ago as being extremely volatile and having a big human impact.

Only two days after the spill happened, the diluents containing benzine, toluene, and micro polyaromatic hydrocarbons began gassing off in the area, causing symptoms such nausea, dizziness, and headaches among the local population. Oil spill expert Riki Ott spoke in my area. She was on the ground after the Exxon Valdez spill back in the 1980s. She reported that micro-polyaromatic hydrocarbons are major health hazards causing cancer, asthma, and hormone and reproductive problems by jamming immune system and DNA functions.

The risk is alarming to first responders, in particular, who might be first on the scene in the event of an accident and the impact on the physical environment is also something that we found had not been properly studied by the government. Vancouver's Tsleil-Waututh Nation and the Tsawout First Nations commissioned a study in 2015, saying “collecting and removing oil from the sea surface is a challenging, time-sensitive, and often ineffective process”. Even in the calmest conditions, it is very hard to control.

A 2013 study by Environment Canada said that spilled bitumen exposed to sediment in marine settings sinks and chemical dispersants tested on dilbit were not effective. In fact, they made the oil sink beneath the surface of the water, which made it even harder, of course, to recover.

I want to know the government's consideration of dilbit, how to clean it up in the marine environment, and how it was able to approve the Kinder Morgan tanker traffic expansion without being able to assure Canadians and the House that it actually has a plan in place to recover bitumen from the ocean when it, inevitably, spills.

Sheila Malcolmson

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Adjournment Proceedings

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