Bill C-5 (Historical)

Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act

An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident

This enactment establishes a liability regime applicable in the event of a nuclear incident that makes operators of nuclear installations absolutely and exclusively liable for damages up to a maximum of $650 million. Operators are required to hold financial security in respect of their liability. This amount will be reviewed regularly and may be increased by regulation. The enactment also provides for the establishment, in certain circumstances, of an administrative tribunal to hear and decide claims. Finally, this enactment repeals the Nuclear Liability Act and makes consequential amendments.

Nuclear Liability and compensation Act

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Order, please. I think the hon. member for Western Arctic still has a few questions to pose. Some members are talking about some other issues that may or may not come up later on in the day. We should stick to questions or comments based on Bill C-5. It looks as though the hon. member may have finished asking his question.

The hon. member for Vancouver East.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I think the Minister of the Environment is too eager to get to question period. He cannot wait to go at it. We will get there in about an hour, but right now it is nuclear liability.

I would like to thank the member for Western Arctic because I think he has put his finger on it. What is presented in this bill is only the tip of the iceberg. It is a bill that is setting the stage for the privatization of the nuclear industry in Canada. It is setting the stage to limit the liability, so that it is easier for operations to happen.

If I could answer the member's question, I think that raises the most serious question as to whose interests is this bill in? For the NDP the primary interest is Canadians and the protection of the health and welfare of people in the local communities.

Yet, when we look at this bill and what its impacts could be in the future, if there were an accident and the fact that the liability is being limited to a paltry $650 million, which in nuclear terms is a nickel and a dime, then obviously we have a lot of worries about the bill. It seems to be pandering and catering to private interests to allow a desirable environment in which they can move. That is not necessarily good for Canadian interests. In fact, we would argue on the contrary, that it is very bad.

I think the member has identified one of the key concerns that we have about this bill, that it is only the very beginning of a much bigger debate that unfortunately we have not had. It is not for lack of trying to raise that debate. I know the member himself has been a very strong advocate for the need for a national energy debate, so that all of these questions can be related: the need for an east-west grid, the need to consider why it is we are moving so rapidly to build the capacity of the tar sands to supply American markets, how environmental concerns are being thrown out the window, and the fact that nuclear capacity and availability could be part of that scenario. We see that already as something put forward as a response to greenhouse gases.

There is a lot that meets the eye here. I thank the member for raising these concerns.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my colleague from Vancouver East and the member of Parliament for Western Arctic for doing such an exceptional job in talking about nuclear liability and why it is that we feel so strongly about needing to oppose this bill.

As she so eloquently pointed out, the $650 million cap is an international minimum and is completely inadequate for protecting the interests of Canadians. I think she covered that area extremely well and frankly passionately on behalf of Canadians who want us here in the House to protect public interests.

I know the member could have talked about this for hours. I wonder if I could take her into that other area of the bill which deals directly with nuclear safety. We are in the dying days of the session and suddenly we are in this rush to get through a number of pieces of legislation, this is not the only one, that in a very real way undermine the safety of hard-working Canadian families.

The other example is Bill C-7, where we are talking about safety in the airline industry. The government is very eager to throw caution to the wind in favour of protecting its friends in the industry. I think we are doing the same thing here when it comes to the nuclear industry.

Let me remind folks who are watching today what the bill is about. The bill will shortchange ordinary Canadians who would become sick and/or die from a nuclear accident, or who would lose all they owned because of contamination, or who would lose a family member who would die from cancer or radiation sickness. These are the people we need to protect and we have that opportunity by opening up this legislation.

Our critic from the Western Arctic put amendments in place that would have protected Canadians' safety. I wonder, with whatever little time the member for Vancouver East has remaining in this debate, if she could focus on the safety aspect of this legislation.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Hamilton Mountain for rising to speak on her concerns about the bill and I am sure she will be speaking later on it as well at greater length. She echoes my concerns and those of the NDP. I would point out that Gordon Edwards, who is the president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, has said that any vote for this bill would be taken as an approval of nuclear power. It is a concern about the safety standards and the fact that the bill, as part of a larger privatization agenda that the government is so eager to rush forward on, is something that damages the public interest.

I am very glad that the member mentioned Bill C-7 which is the next bill behind that because it is exactly the same kind of track. It is a track of privatization. It is a track of deregulation. It is a track of putting the public interest below private interests and that is exactly what we do not want to see. A majority of Canadians believe we are here in this place to protect their interests, particularly when it comes to questions of significant liability around a nuclear incident and accident.

As the member has pointed out, people may be impacted by an accident and they may receive significant health concerns as a result, or that may manifest itself in a future generation if it were something that was very serious. People want to know that they have legal protection.

Yet, it seems to me the protection that is provided in the bill is really shortsighted. It is minimal. It is at the bottom of the international standings of what these protections are all about. Why would Canada, as is commonly phrased, be racing to the bottom? Why would we not be ensuring that we are leading the way with standards, whether it is on the environment, labour rights, or social standards?

This is part of a huge agenda that is taking place globally where we see a stranglehold of multinational corporations who want to advance the capacity for greater profitable gains at the expense of environmental degradation and a loss of standards for people who work in an industry. This bill is very much a part of that kind of agenda. Another reason we should say no to it.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the House for this opportunity to continue on the same vein as my colleague from Vancouver East with our concerns and reservations about Bill C-5, the nuclear liability and compensation act.

I actually asked for permission to join in this debate. I came sprinting to the Commons from my office in West Block hoping for the opportunity to rise and speak to this bill. I noticed there was another debate going on the last time I tuned in on my television and that seems to have collapsed. When this bill came on, I said to myself, “Self, this is a bill that you want to be involved in. You want to be on the record”.

I said that to myself, partly because one of the most important books to come across my desk in recent memory is one that a colleague sent to me. It is written by Dr. Helen Caldicott, a name that many of us remember well, a well-respected, internationally acclaimed scientist. The title of her book is, Nuclear Power is not the Answer.

Dr. Caldicott felt compelled to write this book because, as the world grapples with the obvious risks to the environment by greenhouse gas emissions, it is tempting, seductive almost, to revisit nuclear power as perhaps the source of energy that might not contribute to global warming. In the temptation to be lured in that direction, we fear, and she fears in her book, the world is overlooking the potential risk and the gaps in the technology that cannot give assurance to the world's citizens that this is the right way to go.

We in the NDP were alarmed in that sense when Bill C-5 was introduced. We spoke against it immediately, saying that the last thing we want to do at this point in time, when the world is being attracted to revisit nuclear energy as a viable option, is in any way diminish, undermine or deregulate the safety regime associated with the nuclear energy system as we know it. It is a shocking idea. As I said, I want to build off the comments of my colleague from Vancouver East. It seems to be a worrisome motif, a hallmark almost of the corporate sector today, that it is trying to further deregulate and undermine the environmental standards and reviews that are necessary.

As the world becomes more aware, we become more insistent on developers and industries to be more compliant and to be more sensitive to environmental issues. That is a nuisance to them. They have been forced by the general public to go in a direction they do not want to go. The only way they can maintain the status quo or even diminish the status quo in terms of safety is by regulation. Bill C-7, which was before the House earlier this week, is along the same vein. It would dismantle or certainly diminish a safety regime.

I asked a page to go to the Library of Parliament, that wonderful resource, and bring me a copy of Dr. Helen Caldicott's book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. To her credit she found it in jig time. I strongly recommend it to all of my colleagues in the House of Commons, in the context of debating this bill. They should pick up this book and go through some of the important points that this internationally well-respected scientist cautions us about. I am just going to read some of the titles of the chapters. I am not going to read from the book at any great length.

Dr. Caldicott goes through the whole costing of nuclear energy. As seductive as nuclear energy is, even on the face value, it is extremely expensive. She spends one chapter chronicling the whole cost of nuclear energy when we contemplate the insurance, never mind the cost of cleanup if there was in fact, God forbid, an accident, and the pollution, et cetera. I will come back to Dr. Caldicott in a minute.

I think we are better than this. I think we are better than expanding our nuclear system in the context of meeting our energy demands and needs. Let me explain what I mean by that.

I used to be the head of the carpenters union, the head of the building trades union in the province of Manitoba. The government of Manitoba lost a major power deal with the province of Ontario. The hydroelectric power sale somehow fell apart which resulted in the cancellation of a hydroelectric dam. That would have employed 1,500 of my members for five years. I was running the carpenters union at the time. It was devastating. It forced us to take stock, to do some research as to how we might cope with the loss of the job creation opportunities associated with building a hydro generating station.

I commissioned some research. We published a report called, “A Brighter Future--Job Creation through Energy Conservation”. We compared the job creation opportunities in a large megaproject such as the Darlington nuclear power station, which it has just been announced they intend to double in size. Let me backtrack. The original bill for Darlington was going to be $4 billion. By the time the dust settled, it was turned on and it generated its first unit of energy, the bill was $15 billion and I do not think they have finished spending yet.

What we learned in the comprehensive study, and I raise this in the context of Bill C-5, is that demand side management of our precious energy resources is far smarter than the supply side management in a number of significant ways.

A unit of energy harvested from the existing system by energy conservation measures is indistinguishable from a unit of energy produced at a generating station, except for a number of key important things. First, it is available at one-third the cost. The unit of energy that we harvested from the existing system by eliminating waste and by energy conservation measures is available at one-third the cost of generating a new unit of energy at a hydroelectric dam or nuclear power station.

The second great advantage is that the new unit of energy is online and available immediately. In other words, the second we turn off a light switch in a room, that unit of energy conserved is available to be used at the house next door or to be sold offshore internationally. We sell a lot of power from Manitoba to Minnesota and the states directly south of us.

If we had an east-west grid for electricity, we could in fact close down every coal-fired plant in Ontario by selling them clean hydroelectricity from Manitoba. I think most Ontarians would be happier to get cheap clean power from Manitoba instead of expensive dirty power from coal-fired generating stations or, God forbid, risky electricity from nuclear power stations.

Another advantage between demand side management units of energy, or units of energy harvested from the existing system and ones produced at a generation station, is the lag time where one does not have to borrow money to do it. In fact, many energy retrofits can be done through a process where the upfront cost is paid for, free of charge to the property owner, and the financier is paid back out of the energy savings over the next three, five or seven years. That is a great system. It is sweeping the Building Owners and Managers Association, those property owners that own skyscrapers and large institutional, commercial and industrial buildings because their energy costs are going through the ceiling. They can have off balance sheet financing to renovate and energy retrofit those buildings for which they do not pay a single penny. They pay it out of the energy savings over the next three to five years until that renovation is complete.

The federal government would be a perfect place for that. You would be surprised to learn, Mr. Speaker, or maybe you would not be surprised to learn because, being in charge of the parliamentary precinct, you do supervise a great number of publicly owned buildings, there are 68,000 federally owned buildings in Canada, many of which were built during a period of time when we were wasteful in our design and usage of energy. They are energy hogs, really. They are wasteful. There have been some legitimate efforts to try to upgrade and modernize those buildings to make them less wasteful, but there has never been a comprehensive plan to deal with a significant number of these buildings.

Imagine what a demonstration project that would be, if the federal government of the day actually engaged in energy retrofitting thousands of these buildings that are owned by the-

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Order. The hon. member for Tobique—Mactaquac is rising on a point of order.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I believe the topic that we are talking about here is Bill C-5, nuclear liability.

We have had a number of discussions at our natural resources committee about the greening of electricity in Canada, and I was beginning to think that the member was a member of our natural resources committee and was talking about the greening of electricity in Canada.

I would suggest we get back to the topic of third reading debate on Bill C-5, nuclear liability.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

The hon. member for Winnipeg Centre, I know, was going to make his remarks relevant to the bill. I assumed he was talking about other forms of energy having to do with nuclear liability and I was waiting for him to get to that point, but I am sure he will take note of the point of order and respond accordingly.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

That is right, Mr. Speaker. I think you will agree that patience is a virtue. If the member would be more patient, he would see me developing this line of reasoning, hopefully coming to the logical conclusion that we should vote against Bill C-5. It is a circuitous route, I will confess.

I was trying to illustrate that Bill C-5 actually strips away some of the safety regime associated with nuclear energy. We believe that is harmful. We believe that Canada is better than this.

We do not need to be dealing with Bill C-5 at all, because we have alternatives. We have the technology. We have the luxury of being a wealthy developed nation. We should be leading the world in alternative energy, not embracing an outdated technology.

I put it to the House that nuclear power is an outdated technology. It was a detour on the road to a sustainable world and it took us in a direction that we will regret as a people, not just as a nation.

A number of bad ideas are associated with trying to meet our energy demands and a number of bad ideas are associated with trying to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. One of them, I believe, is the expansion of nuclear energy.

Another one is what was just tabled today by the Liberal Party of Canada, this carbon tax notion, which is a distinctly bad idea. When we are talking about energy, we would be negligent if we did not speak about the consequences of production of energy, and that is the greenhouse gases that we now know are strangling our planet.

I was putting forward the notion that we should be seized of the issue of the demand side management of our energy resources more than we are seized of the issue of the supply side management of our energy resources. Nuclear power is not the answer.

Do not take it from me, I say for members, but take it from Dr. Helen Caldicott, one of the world's leading authorities on the general health of the world and the impact of technological advances. There is a fallacious and misleading advertising campaign put forward by the nuclear energy industry.

I have one advertisement with me here that is being used by the nuclear power industry in trying to convince Canadians and people around the world that it is the answer to harmful greenhouse gas emissions. It tries to convince us that if we are worried about greenhouse gas emissions and carbon dioxide, we should “go nuke” or go nuclear.

What is really worrisome is when industries like this use children to try to convince people that all is well and all is safe for our next generation. As for this particular advertisement, I will not read from it. I am not using it as a prop so much as I am to explain.

There are three pictures, one of very happy children in bathing suits jumping into a lake and clearly enjoying themselves. It is probably a clean lake that they are swimming in. Another is a picture of group of children lying on the grass, which presumably is pesticide free and free of any kind of nuclear contamination. They are clearly enjoying playing some kind of a video game, I presume, on their laptop. The other one is the affirmative action part. Two children of colour are playing on an old tire hung by a rope from a tree. They are swinging back and forth on that tire. They are clearly enjoying themselves and living a carefree life in the shadow of the nuclear power plant in the distant horizon.

The message is that these children are not affected by the effluent from that nuclear power plant, which dominates the horizon of the neighbourhood they live in. They still play in the lakes, so the water is fresh. They still lie on the grass, so the grass has not mutated in any form. Presumably the fish in the lake do not have three eyes like Blinky in the Homer Simpson show. The children swinging from the swing are not concerned about the quality of the air they are breathing as they play so adventurously.

This advertisement makes the point that already in America one in every five homes and businesses is electrified by nuclear energy. That worries me, because when I was young, the number was not nearly that high. In fact, it is within my lifetime in the post-war era that nuclear energy has expanded and spread and is seeking to gain mainstream acceptance by the population. The industry has sought, in a very deliberate public relations marketing attempt, to convince the world that there is absolutely nothing wrong, that nothing can happen. “Trust us,” it says.

A lot of these plants are privately owned. Not all nuclear power plants are operated by states. A lot of these laboratories that have the nuclear accidents are privately owned.

I have a list here of some of the hiccups that have occurred on the road to a nuclear future. It is quite an extensive list. I do not think time will permit me to share all of these hiccups with members, but they are not limited to underdeveloped nations that do not have the technology to deal with or supervise the operation of nuclear power plants.

There was a partial core meltdown in Monroe, Michigan. The sodium cooling system malfunction caused a partial meltdown on October 5, 1966. My parents were marching around outside nuclear power plants saying “no nukes” in 1966. They had that written on signs. At the time, they were worried that nuclear energy was leading to nuclear warfare.

In Wood River, Rhode Island, there was a critical accident with the handling of uranium solution. The tank containing 93% uranium-235 was being agitated by a stirrer. The worker, intending to add a bottle of trichloroethane to remove organics, erroneously added a bottle of uranium solution to the tank.

Accidents happen, as we know. In my field, we might chop off a finger when an accident happens, and it is a tragedy. When we are dealing with a nuclear power station, we can cause serious problems for the planet.

In Galloway, Scotland, there was a partial core meltdown when graphite debris partially blocked a fuel channel, causing the fuel element to melt.

These are fairly innocent, innocuous things. There is no great oversight involved here. There are finely tuned, technical things that can happen. If Bill C-5 in any way diminishes the safety enforcement or regime associated with the nuclear industry, we are against it.

Based on this pile of statistics alone, this should be enough to compel most Canadians to say, “We do not want to go down this road if that is where it is leading”.

At the Mayak Enterprise in Russia, there was a criticality accident with plutonium solution. In Obninsk, Russia, there was a terrible radiation accident at a nuclear power plant involving the manipulation of the fuel rods.

The potential for accidents is overwhelming at almost every step of the process, never mind the storage. I live in Manitoba where there is now the bright idea that spent nuclear rods will be stored in a deep underground storage plant in and around the eastern part of the province, in the deep granite of the Precambrian Shield.

The industry really does not have a satisfactory way of or idea about how to store spent power rods, which still have enormously long half-lives, other than to keep them in great swimming pools full of water. We cannot find a swimming pool in the inner city of Winnipeg for children to swim in, yet the countryside is littered with Olympic-sized swimming pools full of spent nuclear power rods.

Again, these accidents do not always occur just in underdeveloped nations that do not have the technology to supervise nuclear facilities properly. The Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois had a critical accident with uranium particles in plastic. It turned out that was a bad idea, because the doses to four individuals were 136 rads. That level of exposure is fatal. Workers in the nuclear industry were being deceived as to the hazard.

I am no stranger to that. It makes me furious when industries that know full well certain things are hazardous do not inform their employees. I worked in the asbestos industry for many years. They were lying to us about the health hazards of asbestos then, just as they are lying to us today about the health hazards of asbestos. But the asbestos cartel is so powerful that it has even the Conservative Government of Canada kowtowing to it today. Canada is still the second largest exporter of asbestos in the world, even though we now know full well that asbestos is a killer and there is no safe level of asbestos anywhere--

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Order. The hon. member for Tobique--Mactaquac is rising on another point of order.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member said that we were taking what he called a rather circuitous route to get there, but I am still trying to find the relevance to Bill C-5, nuclear liability, in the comments the hon. member is making. I am sure he has some great things to say about the bill. I just wish he would talk about the bill.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

I am sure the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre has been taking circuitous routes here and there and then hitting on subjects that have to do with the bill after explaining why he has done it, perhaps being a little far away from the principle of the bill from time to time. I am glad the hon. member for Tobique—Mactaquac is paying such close attention and is able to remind the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre of the necessity for addressing the bill before the House at all times in his speech.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I was quite innocently trying to illustrate that a lot of industries and the corporate sector are negligent in warning workers in their industry about the potential hazards, the nuclear industry being one of them.

I was using the asbestos industry as another example of how the asbestos industry and the nuclear industry have successfully duped the general public into believing that their product and their industry are safer than they really are. Let me put it that way.

They do so, as I illustrated earlier, by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and PR campaigns to try to convince the public that there is really nothing to be afraid of and that we can dismantle our safety regime, such as Bill C-5 does, because, they say, “trust us” and they will take care of us.

This book by Dr. Helen Caldicott should be mandatory reading for anyone who intends to vote on Bill C-5. I urge everyone to read this book tonight, tomorrow or whenever they can before they vote on Bill C-5. I guarantee that it will turn people around on a dime. If they intended to support this bill, they will not any more after they read the cautionary tale associated with this book. Bill C-5 is designed to protect corporations more than citizens.

I know I am getting short on time, so I am coming to a conclusion. The point I was making about demand side management is that Canada is better than reverting to nuclear as a solution to our greenhouse gas emissions problems. We are smarter than that. We have the technology.

We should be leading the world in demand side management measures. We should be a centre of excellence for all the world to see in energy retrofitting, doing our public buildings first, our institutional buildings second, our private buildings third, and then every home in the country.

I remember the residents of a small town, Espanola, Ontario, who made up their minds about this when the member for Toronto Centre was the premier of Ontario in the early 1990s. They decided to see how far they could go. They decided to see how much energy they could save if they energy retrofitted, even to a small degree, every home, business, gas station, hospital and school in all of Espanola, Ontario.

The results were staggering. Even without comprehensive retrofitting, even with minor retrofitting, they harvested units of energy out of Espanola that they sold to the rest of the province, and they precluded the need for building any more nuclear power plants for quite some time.

If only we would expand that reasoning across the whole province. We have not even scratched the surface in harvesting units of energy out of the existing system. It is like mining for gold. Energy is gold these days. There is gold going up the smokestacks or leaking out of the leaky windows of every building in the country.

I began my speech by saying that a unit of energy harvested out of the existing system by demand side management measures is indistinguishable from a unit of energy produced at a generating station, except for a number of important differences.

First, it is available at one-third the cost.

Second, it is online and available for resale immediately. The moment we turn off that light switch in a room, that unit of energy is available for the light switch next door to be turned on.

Third, it precludes the need to borrow billions of dollars to build a generating station.

Fourth, it creates seven times the person-years of employment. If we are concerned about employing another generation as our manufacturing sector goes down the tubes and every job in the country is given to China, this give us employment as we energy retrofit our building stock. We can develop a technology and an expertise that we can export around the world. We will become known as champions of energy retrofit technology and energy conservation measures. That is an export technology I can be proud of.

I do not approve of giving loans so that countries can buy CANDU reactors from us, set up CANDU reactors in their countries and create bombs. We created the nuclear risk between India and Pakistan because we gave them both nuclear capabilities. We paid for it with loans that were never repaid. We did the same in Romania.

We are so desperate to sell our bloody reactors that we give countries the money to buy the reactors from us and we do not even ask them to repay the loans. I would rather be exporting energy retrofit technology. The best and most energy efficient windows in the world should come from Canada. The best energy efficient furnaces should come from Canada.

We should be proud to lead the world in this because we have the intelligence, the technology and the educational background. If we only had the political will.

It makes me want to cry when the only idea that we see debated in this country on energy and greenhouse gas emissions is a carbon tax on home heating fuel that will make some poor senior citizen living in northern Canada, who is already paying $800 a month for home heating fuel, pay more. However, the guy who drives a Hummer will not pay any penalty. He will enjoy the tax cut that is supposed to come from this poor little old lady who is paying astronomical home heating bills.

If that is the level of debate we are having, we are wasting our time, our God given talent and the gift of technology in this country. We are completely blowing it in terms of an opportunity to develop the technology of energy retrofitting and demand-side management.

Before the member for Tobique—Mactaquac interrupted me, I was saying that 68,000 buildings in this country are owned by the federal government. What a brilliant place to start as a demonstration project, first to show the private sector and then to show the world how it can be done. Copenhagen has just declared that it will be the most energy efficient city in the world in the next 10 years and it has set about a cooperative public-private partnership to make that so.

We could do that on a national scale if there was any kind of vision. If we had a national dream to become that country, we would be that country. Instead, we are tinkering with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by adding a carbon tax in all the wrong places. It is a complete diversion that will waste the time, energy and intellectual capacity of the nation when that energy and capacity should be applied to something transformative and meaningful as we wean ourselves off dirty energy and embrace clean energy.

Yes, hydroelectricity is good and I am proud that the province of Manitoba will meet its Kyoto targets. It already is because of all the hydroelectricity it produces. I wish the Minister of the Environment was here. If it could sell that clean hydroelectricity east-west instead of just north-south, it could help Ontario wean itself off of its dirty energy and nuclear energy. Saskatchewan would benefit enormously, God bless it. However, there are three or four important key elements that need to fall into place before we can go down that road.

As we contemplate nuclear energy as an alternative, we would be negligent and irresponsible if we ignored the actual empirical evidence associated with the use of nuclear, such as in Kiev, Ukraine on February 4, 1970. We do not hear about these things in the national news, partly because, I would not call it a conspiracy, there is an unwillingness to share all of the facts. We have the Voronezh nuclear power plant in Russia in 1971. Bhopal is another liability and the costs associated with cleaning it up.

Bill C-5 would limit that liability. We are almost doing the industry's dirty work for it. Rather than the industry ensuring it does not happen any more, we are limiting its liability to $650 million. That does not pay for the cleanup of a great deal of contamination in a major nuclear incident. What if we had something on the scale of Bhopal, my colleague from Western Arctic asks. There was a chemical spill at that time and 3,000 people were killed and 10,000 people were affected.

We could have thousands of people affected by a nuclear incident and the total liability would be $650 million. I say that one individual being affected for a lifetime could be eligible for a settlement of millions of dollars. This liability would only pay for perhaps a couple of hundred people. It is wrong-headed and it should be defeated.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, the member touched on a number of significant issues and some of them deal with the directions the government is taking on energy.

What have we seen so far? We have seen a $2.2 billion investment in ethanol, in biofuels, which, in many respects, internationally is not considered to be a very good investment at all. If it does not have conditions attached to it, we may end up importing corn ethanol from the United States at a higher greenhouse gas emission rate than if we had just left gasoline in the tank. That is one of the things that the Conservative government has done.

The second is that it just put a quarter of a billion dollars into clean coal technology in Saskatchewan. The Conservative government in Saskatchewan is throwing in three-quarters of a billion dollars and industry is topping it up with $300 million. They are creating a 100-megawatt plant for $1.3 billion. This will never be cost effective.

The budget has $300 million in it for nuclear, once again subsidizing an industry that has been around for 50 years, to keep it on its feet and to try to make it work. We see the same thing with the MAPLE reactors. Big dollars have gone into it, with no results.

Perhaps my colleague could speak to this a bit. What is it about the Conservatives, supported, in most cases, by the Liberals, in their inability to look at energy in terms of all the options and really come up with answers for Canadians that will work?

Instead, we see this “I'll fund this project in your riding if you fund this project in my riding” approach that is going on right now in Parliament, with no cohesive plan. It is not being done on the best advice of our scientists. As BIOCAP Canada quite clearly said in its reports to us with regard to biofuels, that we are taking these actions without thinking them through.

Does my hon. colleague know why do the Conservatives and Liberals continue to do things in such an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Western Arctic quite rightly points out that it is the absence of a cohesive plan, an overall central strategy that is worrisome, because often these piecemeal bits and pieces are at the whim or the will of an aggressive corporate lobby. They are individual incidents but they create a motif or a theme.

We recently dealt with Bill C-7 where the government is dismantling the safety associated with the air transportation system. Now we are dealing with the nuclear industry where the government is dismantling the safety provisions in the nuclear industry. I would suggest that not one person in this House should vote on this bill until they have read Dr. Helen Caldicott's book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. I implore members to get the book out of the library and read it. I will put it back today because I have read it.

I want to point out that the nuclear safety record in the world when compiled is a staggering and horrifying list. We have the explosion and combustion of the graphite reactor core in Pripyat, Ukraine that spread radioactive material over much of Europe. That was not in 1956 at the advent of the nuclear age. That was in 1986. Some 300,000 people had to be evacuated from the fallout areas.

We would think that would have ground the nuclear industry to a halt and that it would have regrouped to ensure that could never, ever happen again. However, in 1989, in Greifswald, Germany, fuel damage operators disabled three of the six cooling pumps. However, instead of the automatic shutdown, the fourth pump failed causing excessive heating which damaged and exposed 10 fuel rods. Workers again were hurt.

Earlier that year, at Hamm/Uentrop power station in Germany, fuel damaged spherical fuel pebbles became lodged in a pipe used to deliver fuel elements.

The technology is so complex that every step of the way is fraught with potential failures. I am a tradesman. I am a carpenter by nature and I have been in installations of hydroelectric dams. I have never worked on a nuclear power plant but I know the complexity associated with generating energy and the room for failure in a hydroelectric dam when it stops producing energy for a while.

The possibility for failure in an incident associated with a nuclear power plant is that it can devastate whole communities, whole regions and contaminate them for generations to come. However, the government is trying to pass a bill today that would put the maximum liability on any nuclear company that has this kind of a nuclear incident, for Monty Burns, $650 million, which is peanuts. A couple of hundred people alone who were affected by some of these accidents would easily burn that up in the liability lawsuits that are bound to follow.

Somewhere out there Homer Simpson is running a nuclear power plant. Somewhere out there Monty Burns is lobbying the Conservative Government of Canada today to ensure the safety regulations are not too onerous because “How am I supposed to make a buck cranking out nuclear energy if you make me pay for my mistakes?”.

I put it to the government that if we are looking to nuclear power to meet our energy needs in the coming decades, we are not trying hard enough. In fact, we have ignored the obvious and we have embraced the outdated technology.

The post-war era was tragic in many respects. The petrochemical industry, the asbestos industry and the nuclear industry ran amok. We are just beginning to realize that we have soiled our own nest to the point where we can hardly live here any more if we do not change our ways.

We do not want to see the Darlington nuclear power plant doubled in size. We want to see it shut down. We want to see clean energy from demand-side management, from energy retrofitting, from solar and wind energy. We do not want to see the industry contemplating the next generation of nuclear power.

Some of us believe it was a mistake. We believe that a government with some vision and leadership would have done more than expand or compound the problem. We also believe that an opposition party with some leadership would come up with something better than the carbon tax that it is flogging today, because it will not tax the guy who drives the Hummer. The people who are trying to heat their home in the western Arctic at $800 a month for home heating fuel will to pay the carbon tax. The guy driving the Hummer will pay nothing because it is excluded.

The government will take money from the person in the western Arctic heating their home but give a tax break to the guy driving the Hummer. That is the most convoluted, pretzel logic I have ever heard in terms of meeting a well-defined environmental problem.

We have been let down by both sides of the House today, with the exception of this little end where the NDP lives, where people are hearing some reasoned debate. The Conservatives have let us down with Bill C-5, hobnobbing with nuclear lobbyists again. I believe they have fallen victim to a bunch of clever lobbyists again. We have been let down by the official opposition as well because those members have come up with something that will suck all the life out of the debate about reducing carbon emissions.

We only get one shot to capture the public's imagination, if we are to talk about limiting carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the debate is going to be about defeating this bad idea instead of being about solutions. We are going to have to waste our energy defeating the government's bad idea first before the genuine debate can begin.