OTTAWA—Canadians lack confidence in the federal government to effectively deal with oil spills on land and at sea, according to internal polling conducted for Natural Resources Canada.

The $174,000 poll, administered by Harris-Decima between April and July 2014, found that Canadians largely agree the extractive sector creates good jobs and benefits local economies. But it also found that Canadians are not confident in the federal government’s ability to handle spills from pipelines, tankers, or rail accidents.

Only 27 per cent of respondents said they were confident in Ottawa’s ability to respond to an oil spill at sea, while 46 per cent said they lacked confidence. For oil spills on land, 32 per cent trusted the federal government to adequately respond, while 41 per cent said they did not.

The polling also showed that pipelines engendered much more confidence from Canadians than transporting oil by tankers or trains — good news on the domestic front for the Conservatives, who continue to aggressively lobby the U.S. government to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

“Awareness of pipeline projects and proposals was relatively high, but knowledge appeared quite limited, with the exception of British Columbia,” reads a summary of Harris-Decima’s focus group testing.

“Some suggested the diversification of market access could benefit the Canadian economy, . . . others felt that it makes sense to sell our oil exports just to the U.S. since we share a border, hold similar values, and getting oil to the U.S. was by far the easiest to manage and involved the least risk.”

So what could mitigate Canadians’ fears of an oil spill? The most popular response from those surveyed was to increase, improve and enforce regulations and standards for the transport of natural resources (14 per cent), followed by increasing and improving inspections along the transport chain.

Canadians were divided on the question of increasing energy infrastructure — ports, pipelines, rail transit and roads. While 46 per cent said it’s important to expand infrastructure even with environmental risk, 41 per cent said the economy should take the back seat to environmental stewardship.

“What I think Canadians are worried about is they’re being asked to take on all the risk for a product that’s being developed for the export market only,” said MP Chris Charlton (Hamilton Mountain), the NDP’s natural resources critic.

“The government needs to start taking these issues seriously, because there’s a large percentage of Canadians that are not trusting them with one of the most important sectors of our economy.”

The Star requested an interview with Natural Resources Canada for this article but the department was unable to provide one.

The Harris-Decima quantitative poll was conducted between July 7 and 22, 2014, and interviewed 3,030 people by phone. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.