IF THERE EVER WAS any doubt as to the need for tough regulation of Big Oil’s offshore drilling operations, it surely disappeared in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil “blowout.”

And, to be specific, there’s just as little doubt that such regulations should be at least as tough for drilling off Canada’s coasts as for the activity in the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore areas under U.S. jurisdiction.

Just last week, exasperated Members of Parliament grilled the head of BP Canada concerning the risks involved in the company’s plans to drill in Arctic waters in view of the parent company’s catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

But BP Canada President Anne Drinkwater offered few answers at the hearing at the Standing Committee on Natural Resources.

Ms. Drinkwater, who has also run BP operations in Indonesia, Angola and Norway, declined to answer technical questions and strained the MPs’ credulity by saying she had not compared Canadian and U.S. drilling regulations.

“You’d think coming to a hearing like this that British Petroleum would have as many answers as possible to assure the Canadian public. We got nothing today from them,” said Nathan Cullen of the NDP, telling reporters later that he was “very disappointed. I think British Petroleum is going to have to do a lot better job if they want to drill in Canadian waters.”

Liberal MP Larry Bagnell, who had asked her to compare regulations in Canada and the U.S., said: “I thought she didn’t have answers to a lot of questions ... I was asking for a very simple answer.”

There’s little doubt critics are right in asserting that an oil blowout in the Canadian Arctic would be much worse than the current Gulf disaster, given the ice, severe weather conditions and the lack of infrastructure in one of the world’s most remote regions.

In 2008, BP paid $1.2 billion for rights to explore three parcels in Canada’s part of the Beaufort Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. It has yet to announce plans to drill there, but shortly before the U.S. disaster, BP and other oil companies were urging the National Energy Board to drop a requirement that they drill relief wells in the same season as the primary exploratory well.

The companies have contended that the drilling season in the far north is too short, at about 50 days, to complete both an exploratory and relief well in the same season, while suggesting that there would be minimal risk of a blowout, anyway.

However, that’s the same rationale that lay behind BP not having a backup safety system in place for what it thought was the unlikely event of the blowout preventer malfunctioning.

Our federal and provincial governments and their regulators are reassessing the industry’s preparedness for an offshore disaster following the explosion of Transocean Ltd.’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, hired by BP to tap reserves roughly 1.5 kilometres below sea level. The explosion killed 11 workers and triggered what will be the worst-ever U.S. oil spill if the crude keeps spewing unchecked into the Gulf.

The National Energy Board has launched a review of Arctic safety and environmental drilling requirements and canceled hearings into the relief well issue, board chair Gaetan Caron saying it was too early to say what the review might conclude.

Provincial governments are also reviewing offshore drilling regulations. Nova Scotia has extended a moratorium on oil and gas exploration on the Georges Bank, an important fishing region, three years to the end of 2015, and Newfoundland is also launching review of offshore safety practices, although that government says it is satisfied with the current level of environmental protection being practised by the industry and has allowed Chevron Corp. to start drilling a well in the Orphan basin that’s a full kilometre deeper than the one polluting the Gulf of Mexico.

One thing we think regulators ought to examine is whether the risks of environmental catastrophes could be materially reduced by reducing the size exploratory drill holes.

Apparently, the gushing pipe in the Gulf is about five times the 15-cm diameter of the tube now siphoning some of the oil and gas – far bigger than you once found in a conventional oilfield.

Although the costs involved would be high, we suspect that a 10 cm (4”) drill could provide the needed information on such things as the size and characteristics of the oil deposit and the real risk of blowouts in the subsequent drilling of production wells. We wonder how much those charge at BP really knew about the potential risks of a blowout when they concluded that it was remote. Although the seismic data they had obtained might have provided a good indication of the size of the oil field, we doubt they knew how much methane was there, or how much pressure it would exert.

In such circumstances, a relatively tiny drill hole in the exploratory phase of all offshore drilling would seem make a lot of sense.