Honourable senators, before I get into my comments on the bill directly, I would like to say a few words that took place during the report stage debate. If I were to let them slip by without comment, I feel it would do actual harm to our future proceedings on this bill.

I did not solely write the report, honourable senators, nor did Conservatives, as many in here said and as Joan Bryden suggested in her article in the National Post. There were many people who contributed to the report, including Senator Simons, whose language Bryden cited as partisan. Anyone could have contributed to the report, and all the members on the committee had the opportunity to do so when the draft was presented to them in debate, to make changes if they wished. We did not allocate time.

They also had the opportunity to write a minority report. They chose not to. Here is what Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne wrote in an email to me on Friday, May 17.

After talking to Senator Dawson this morning, we are in favour of submitting to the Senate only one committee report on the defeat of Bill C-48, as a report, I understand from our discussion yesterday you wish to write. Senator Dawson and I would like a chance to look at the draft and if possible meet with you on Monday, May 27, or before committee May 28. Our wish to vote on a report on Tuesday, May 28, so that it could be tabled in the Senate as soon as possible.

I agreed to everything she asked for. Yet she chose to complain about the report and the process in her speech on the report. She said:

I decided not to spend hours trying to amend this long partisan biased report written by members of the committee who objected to the bill.

Yes, we objected to the bill. Choosing not to amend the bill is her choice, obviously. But to complain about the tone of the report and not to avail yourself of the opportunity provided to you in committee to propose changes, because you have another agenda, is disingenuous, not to mention a dereliction of duty at the very least.

Going much too far accusing an honourable senator.

“Dereliction of duty.” I think this is quite excessive, Your Honour.

Honourable senators, earlier today, in the ruling on a point of order raised by Senator Plett, I made mention of the fact that we should try to be careful with the words that we use. Inflammatory words do not really help advance the debate. Obviously, if senators want to disagree and express their displeasure on issues and on legislation, that is appropriate, since this is a debating chamber. But I would ask senators to please be cautious about the use of inflammatory language.

“The chair turned down requests,” Senator Galvez said, “to meet with the Subcommittee on Agenda and Procedures and made most of the decisions unilaterally.”

We heard from mayors of indirectly affected regions and then mayors of directly affected regions. We talked a lot about division and separation.

I would invite all of you to visit the Transport Committee website and look at the schedule of hearings we held on Bill C-48, and you will see that we heard from a cross-section of witnesses. We heard from precisely five mayors in British Columbia, so-called directly affected regions, and five mayors in total in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, which is what she seems to think is the indirectly affected region. Well, I can tell you, living there, that Saskatchewan is directly affected by this bill, as is Alberta.

Before I get to my comments on the bill, you should know that I subscribe to what Senator Patterson said in his speech and the points he was trying to make about the bill itself.

I want to begin by quoting some advice that the Minister of the Environment provided publicly recently:

If you actually say it louder, we’ve learned in the House of Commons, if you repeat it, say it louder, if that is your talking point people will totally believe it.

That comes from the Minister of the Crown, the Minister of Environment.

I was reminded of these words from Canada’s environment minister as I listened to Senator Harder’s speech the other night in which he repeated what he has often said before about this bill:

As you know, this legislation would formalize the long-standing oil tanker moratorium on Canada’s north Pacific coast.

Maybe he should have said it a little louder because I still don’t totally believe it and neither should Canadians.

First, as Senator Simons pointed out, this is not a moratorium. It is a ban. The lack of precision as to what words mean may explain why Senator Harder thinks he can convince us that Bill C-48 formalizes the voluntary tanker ban when it does nothing of the sort. He said Bill C-48 will have the effect of keeping tankers away from the northwest coast by removing any economic purpose for coming closer to the shore. No, Senator Harder, it is the voluntary tanker ban that has the effect of keeping tankers away from the coast. Formalizing a voluntary tanker ban would bring something that has the effect of doing that into force.

Bill C-48 does not do that. And I would assert that by using the phrase “have the effect of” to describe Bill C-48, Senator Harder is admitting as much and knows full well it doesn’t formalize anything.

Senator Harder is fond of quoting Professor McDorman as well as the law firm of Norton Rose Fulbright. Let me also quote from them as well. As we wrote in our report, the professor told our committee:

As a matter of commercial reality and good neighbourliness, you usually keep your ports open, but a country does have the capacity, as a matter of international law, to close ports to any and all vessels. As I understand it, that is what this bill would do. It closes the ports. It does not affect traffic in the waterway per se.

Norton Rose Fulbright in its brief on Bill C-48 wrote:

Bill C-48 does not in any way convert the voluntary tanker ban exclusion zone into one which is enforceable at law. Neither the TEZ nor Bill C-48 keeps oil tankers which are not moving Trans-Alaska Pipeline system oil from transiting through the Canadian West Coast or territorial sea. Bill C-48 does not prevent any oil-laden tanker traffic in Canadians EEZ or territorial sea regardless of its size as long as the tankers do not call upon the port in the defined area of northern B.C.

What it does, and Senator Harder admits as much when he says tanker traffic won’t have an economic purpose for coming close to the shore, is to prevent landlocked Alberta and Saskatchewan oil from getting to market.

Don’t tell me the TMX expansion, when it is completed, will do that. The port at Burnaby is too shallow to accommodate larger super-max tankers needed today to export oil to eastern markets.

Honourable senators, we have talked past each other for some time now about why this is a good or bad bill. My main contention is that it is an unnecessary and overkill kind of bill. It is these things because there is no pipeline to bring oil to the port in that area, and it’s unlikely to do so for years to come.

Senator Woo will be disappointed to hear that because I read that — I never knew this before — Senator Woo is a big proponent of Northern Gateway, or at least he was prior to arriving here.

My point is that there is already in place a de facto moratorium on the economic purpose for tankers coming close to shore in the area. This bill is simply overkill, and it robs us of our future.

Let’s talk about risk. Risk is part of life. You get up in the morning, and there is risk that you won’t make it home at night. You send your kids to school and there is risk. Senator Harder informed us that we need to understand that risk is probability multiplied by consequence. That may be true, but people, many of them in this room, get on airplanes every day. As many have said before, they do so knowing there is a risk of an accident. The consequences for them and their families would be enormous, but if we don’t get on planes, the business of the nation would grind to a halt, so we accept the risk for the greater good.

We do everything humanly possible to minimize risk, for sure. What we don’t do is ban air travel, which is essentially the government’s approach with this bill. The country did not get to where it is by refusing to take risks.

Bill C-48 is what Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, described in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow as an enormous overreaction to a minor problem — not that a massive oil spill would be a minor problem, but the risk of one is quite minor. That risk has been vastly overestimated due to what he describes as:

. . . an availability cascade: a nonevent that is inflated by the media and the public until it fills our TV screens and becomes all anyone is talking about.

In his discussion, the Exxon Valdez — an accident that Senator Harder trots out once again 30 years after it happened — is an initiating event. Kahneman further cites the work of Paul Slovic:

Paul Slovic probably knows more about the peculiarities of human judgment of risk than any other individual. His work offers a picture of Mr. and Ms. Citizen . . . [assessing risk] guided by emotion rather than by reason, easily swayed by trivial details, and inadequately sensitive to differences between low and negligibly low probabilities.

Lest anyone here consider themselves above the average citizen, “Slovic argues . . . that the public has a richer conception of risk than the experts do.”

I want to conclude with the remarks of another prominent thinker, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, whom Trudeau actually liked and had in his office. Trudeau wrote on his Twitter account: “Great to spend time with one of the world’s clearest and most vivid thinkers and fellow McGill alumnus S. A. Pinker today in Ottawa. Thanks for the enlightening conversation.”

Of course, the word “enlightening” was a reference to Pinker’s most recent book, Enlightenment Now, an appeal to reason and science. In his chapter on the environment, Pinker wrote:

The epitome of environmental insults is the oil spill from tanker ships, which coats pristine beaches with toxic black sludge and fouls the plumage of seabirds and the fur of otters and seals. The most notorious accidents, such as the breakup of the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, linger in our collective memory, and few people are aware that seaborne oil transport has become vastly safer.

Pinker goes on to explain:

. . . the annual number of oil spills has fallen from more than a hundred in 1973 . . .

— the decade where Senator Harder cites most of the studies he mentioned in his speech —

. . . to just five in 2016 (and the number of major spills fell from thirty-two in 1978 to one in 2016.

Pinker points out:

. . . even as less oil was spilled, more oil has been shipped . . . .

Finally, he points out:

It’s no mystery that oil companies should want to reduce tanker accidents, because their economic interests and those of the environment coincide: oil spills are a public-relations disaster (especially when the name of the company is emblazoned on a cracked-up ship) . . . .

There are economic consequences for the company and they have their own incentives to prevent spills. They don’t need one from the government. One that, by the way, flies in the face of the government’s so-called commitment to globalization.

I’d like to move an amendment. I’ve said in this place before that I think the people should decide. My amendment postpones the coming into force of this act to December 31, 2020.