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

[Peter MacKay, Conservative, Central Nova, NS]

moved that Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, be read the third time and passed.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources and for the Canadian Wheat Board]

Mr. Speaker, it is good to get up on Bill C-5, because it is such a good bill. I think that all members are going to be interested in it. I would encourage all of them, as I said, to support it.

I want to mention that the Standing Committee on Natural Resources did a great job in dealing with this bill. There was a very positive study of the bill by the committee and the bill was reported back to this House without amendment. We certainly appreciate the work the members of the committee put into their study of Bill C-5.

Canada's nuclear safety record is second to none in the world. We have a robust technology, we have a well-trained workforce, and we have stringent regulatory requirements.

There are two pieces of legislation that provide a solid framework for regulating the industry in Canada. Those are the Nuclear Safety and Control Act and the Nuclear Fuel Waste Act.

Responsibility for providing an insurance framework, that is, a framework to protect Canadians and to provide stability in this important industry, falls under federal jurisdiction. The Government of Canada has the duty to assume its responsibilities in this area, and through this bill it is doing just that.

Canada, like virtually all other nuclear countries, addresses this responsibility with the enactment of special legislation. In Canada, we have put in place the Nuclear Liability Act. That act was passed years ago. Bill C-5 modernizes the Nuclear Liability Act. It does so by doing a number of different things. It brings the compensation levels into line with internationally accepted compensation levels. It expands the categories of compensable damage. It improves the compensation procedures and the way people make claims. It increases the financial liability of nuclear operators.

Up to date rules are needed to provide certainty regarding insurance and legal liability for suppliers, operators and the general public. Without this certainty, Canada would not be able to attract leading international firms and suppliers of technology in the nuclear industry. Of course, it could be argued that Canada's current legislation more or less accomplishes these objectives. Therefore, the question needs to be asked, why do we need new legislation when we already have a serviceable act in place? The simple answer is, as I mentioned, that the current act is outdated.

The Nuclear Liability Act was passed in 1970. In terms of today's nuclear technology, that is the middle ages. Several lifetimes of nuclear and related technologies have come and gone since then. In short, Canada's existing Nuclear Liability Act reflects the technology, the science and the thinking of an earlier period.

In the interim, it is not only the technology of nuclear energy that has advanced considerably, but the evolution of jurisprudence has contributed to substantial increases in potential liability. Therefore, the government has made the decision, and Canadians are supporting it, that our legislation must be upgraded.

There are, of course, certain fundamental principles of the 1970 act that must be retained. These include absolute liability, exclusive liability and mandatory insurance. I would like to take a couple of minutes to explain what those terms mean, because I know everyone in the House is very interested in them and fascinated by them.

Absolute liability means that the operator of a nuclear facility will be held liable for compensating victims in the rare case of a nuclear incident. This means that victims would not have to negotiate with a highly complex industry in order to determine who is at fault. There would be no question of where to take a claim for compensation.

A second and related principle, exclusive liability, means that no other party other than the operator, for example, no supplier or subcontractor, would be held liable. This removes the risk that would deter secondary enterprises from becoming involved in nuclear projects.

To modernize our liability scheme, we must have legislation that goes farther, although retaining certain fundamental principles. That is what Bill C-5 does.

The proposed legislation increases the limit of liability for nuclear operators. The current liability act sets the maximum at $75 million. That amount was substantial when it was set, but now stands as one of the lowest limits among the G-8 group of nations.

The proposed legislation reflects the conditions of today by raising that limit to $650 million. This balances the need for operators to provide adequate compensation without burdening them with huge costs for unrealistic insurance amounts, or impossible insurance amounts, for events that are highly unlikely to occur in this country. Moreover, this increase puts Canada on a par with most western nuclear countries.

Bill C-5 also increases the mandatory insurance that operators must carry by almost ninefold. It permits operators to cover half of their liability with forms of financial security other than insurance. This has been an important provision for the industry. These could, for example, be things like letters of credit, self-insurance, and provincial, or in the case of Atomic Energy of Canada, federal guarantees. All operators would be required to conform to strict guidelines in this area.

Bill C-5 makes Canada's legislation consistent with international conventions. It does so not only with respect to financial matters, but it also does so with clearer definitions of nuclear damage reflecting today's legal and international nuclear civil liability conventions. These definitions include crucial matters as to what constitutes a nuclear accident, what damages do or do not qualify for compensation, and so on.

These enhancements will place Canadian nuclear firms on a level playing field with competitors in other countries.

Bill C-5 also makes changes to the time period for making claims. Under the act that was passed in 1970, claims had to be brought forward within 10 years of the incident. However, the proposed legislation raises the time limit on compensation for claims to 30 years. Both the earlier Nuclear Liability Act and Bill C-5 provide for an administrative process that will operate faster than the courts in the adjudication. However, the proposed legislation clarifies what the arrangements for the quasi-judicial tribunal must be in order to hear those claims. This new process will ensure that claims are handled both equitably and efficiently.

There has been a lot of debate about some of these proposed measures. For example, there has been discussion about how and why the government arrived at the $650 million amount. Questions have been raised as to other international practices and what goes on in other countries. We believe the $650 million liability limit will adequately address any foreseeable incident in a Canadian nuclear power plant.

Although the U.S. operator liability is cited as $10 billion Canadian, in practice, individual U.S. operators effectively carry $300 million Canadian in primary insurance coverage. A few countries, namely Germany, Switzerland and Japan, do incorporate unlimited liability to the operator under the provisions of their nuclear civil liability legislation. However, in practice, that liability is always limited to the amount of coverage provided by existing insurance plus the net worth of the operator that is liable.

Questions have been raised as to how the $650 million liability limit will stay modern. It is important to note that the $650 million limit set out in Bill C-5 can be increased by regulation, and that limit needs to be reviewed at least every five years. This review will examine changes in the consumer price index and international trends, but will have the flexibility to take into consideration any other criteria that is deemed appropriate.

We have made the argument, and Canadians have accepted it, that this is a proper limit in order to ensure that we have the nuclear liability amounts that we need.

The challenge for the government in developing this legislation was how to be fair to all stakeholders and to strike an effective balance in the public interest. In developing Bill C-5, we consulted with nuclear operators, suppliers, insurers, the provinces with nuclear installations, as well as the public. They generally support the changes that I have described.

I know that some nuclear operators may be concerned about cost implications for higher insurance premiums, but they also recognize that the current levels have been outdated. Suppliers welcome the changes as they provide more certainty for the industry. Nuclear insurers appreciate the clarity provided in the new legislation and the resolution of some long-standing issues.

Provinces with nuclear facilities have been supportive of the proposed revisions to the current legislation. Municipalities that host nuclear facilities have been advocating revisions to the Nuclear Liability Act for some time. They are supportive of the increased levels of operator liability and improved approaches to victim compensation.

In short, Bill C-5 was not developed in isolation. The evolution of policy was guided by consultations with key stakeholders and by experiences gained in other countries. The reality is that we have general support of the industry at large for Bill C-5. I would urge the members of the House to join in that consensus.

To conclude, Bill C-5 establishes the compensation and civil liability regime to address damages resulting from radiation in the unlikely event of a radioactive release from a Canadian nuclear installation. It ensures that a proper compensation program is in place and channels civil liability to operators.

The introduction of Bill C-5 adds to this government's track record of making responsible decisions on the safe, long term future of nuclear power in Canada. It adds to the government's record of promoting a safer, more secure and cleaner world through the responsible development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, based on the debacle of what occurred last year with respect to the current Minister of Natural Resources and what took place at Atomic Energy, I want to ask a simple question. What assurances can the member give Canadians that there is an open and transparent process by which Canadians can be confident that the oversight mechanism at Atomic Energy is actually competent and transparent, and that Canadians will be aware of the process and the findings of what occurs when we are examining our atomic energy facilities?

While the chances of something happening are small, if something did happen, it would be catastrophic. Canadians have a right to know what safeguards the government is putting into place to make sure those catastrophes will not happen.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I need to point out that the Canadian technology being used is extremely safe and the likelihood of any sort of a nuclear incident is very, very small. I think we will hear that from other members who will speak to this bill, who were at committee and understand that issue.

I should explain the oversight mechanism as it is at present. Clearly, AECL has been the provider of the nuclear technology in this country for a number of years. We have initiated a review of AECL to determine what its role should be in the future. Apart from that, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission provides the oversight of the safety of nuclear installations in this country. We have confidence that the commission can do that and it has been tasked with that job.

Overall, the Canadian nuclear industry is healthy. It is a safe industry and we look forward to the future.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question about the liability the Government of Canada may have with respect to its involvement in the nuclear industry. I am not sure if the member can answer the question, but I will ask it anyway. There are two incidents that I will point out on which I think we have had liabilities or currently have liabilities.

I wonder to what extent this piece of legislation restricts the federal government's liability with respect to the nuclear industry. In the summer of 2005, the government of the day transferred $2.3 billion from the Government of Canada to its crown corporation, AECL, in order to recapitalize the corporation with respect to its liabilities for waste management.

Another liability that comes to mind is the liability associated with the medical isotope reactors that were to be built at Chalk River. That project was recently cancelled. My understanding is that the Government of Canada is partly responsible for the cost overruns and liabilities associated with that.

Could the member indicate whether or not this piece of legislation in front of us limits the Government of Canada's liabilities, either with respect to these sorts of incidents or in any other way?

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of areas there which I could talk about for some time. I will try to make it short so other people have an opportunity to ask questions.

Clearly, in the development of the bill and the changes to the Nuclear Liability Act, there was an examination of what would happen in the unlikely event there was any sort of an incident in this country. There was a study of what level of compensation needed to be put in place in order to deal with whatever situation might arise. The former amount was $75 million. It was felt that $650 million was a good requirement in order to cover any incident that may occur in this country. That is why that number was picked. It is a practical number which, after studies, debate and discussion about what liability would exist, it was felt would cover more than adequately any event that would take place in this country.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the parliamentary secretary’s remarks. We are now at third reading and he knows that the Bloc Québécois will support the bill.

My question is closely related to Bill C-5. Today, in La Presse, we see a front page article by François Cardinal with the headline, “Nuclear: Safety is less than maximum” due to a lack of resources.

Today we are discussing a bill that offers guarantees, that assigns responsibilities to operators and that provides for compensation to people who suffer the consequences of a nuclear accident.

Can my colleague tell me whether, in his opinion, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has all the necessary means and all the human and financial resources to properly play its role of monitoring and ensuring the safety of all the nuclear installations under its responsibility?

After reading the article published this morning, we have doubts about that. Since we are discussing responsibilities related to nuclear energy, I hope the parliamentary secretary will take this opportunity to reassure us by telling us that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has all the human and financial resources it needs to carry out its entire mandate.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I want to reiterate that Bill C-5 deals with a number of these issues in terms of providing the environment we need to ensure the nuclear environment in this country is safe.

The bill would bring compensation into line with internationally accepted compensation levels. It would expand the categories of things that are compensatory. It would improve the compensation procedures. It puts in a number of procedures that would make it much easier for people to make claims in the event of an incident. It would increase the financial liability of financial operators. On that side, Bill C-5 would put a very strong framework in place for Canadians.

On the other side, in terms of AECL, this government has provided extra resources to AECL. We have also undertaken a review of AECL and its role in Canada. As was mentioned by my colleague earlier, we have provided extra resources for cleanups and those kinds of things.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has been given the resources that it needs to do its job, which is to supervise the safety of our nuclear installations in Canada. We believe it now has adequate resources to do that job.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to my original question for the hon. member because he did not answer it. It is a very fundamental question for most Canadians because most Canadians want to know if the nuclear industry is safe.

The member is right when he says that it has been safe in our country but that does not mean that it will always be safe. Let us look at the situation in Chernobyl in Ukraine. If we had asked representatives of the Russian nuclear energy agency at the time whether Chernobyl was safe, they would have said that there was never going to be a problem. Therefore, saying something is safe does not mean that it will be safe.

My question for the member is a very fundamental one, a non-political one and one which I hope he answers. What assurances can he give Canadians that the mechanism of observing and ensuring that the atomic energy industry in Canada and our atomic energy facilities are safe? What can he tell us about the process the government has implemented to ensure those safety mechanisms are transparent, open and available to the public?

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Speaker, those structures, for the most part, are already in place. The public has access. It is an open process in terms of understanding what is going on.

As I have mentioned a couple of times, the CNSC has been given the responsibility for overseeing the safety of nuclear installations in Canada. It has clear guidelines and directions as to what needs to happen in these facilities. I think we saw some of that previously this year in terms of the things that it demands from the installations themselves.

I do not think it is fair for the member to even consider that we can compare with Chernobyl because our technology is completely different. We have decades of safety and safe operation behind us. It is not the same technology at all. For him to be even comparing the two is not realistic.

AECL is developing new technologies and, obviously, the technologies are becoming safer as the procedures are becoming more demanding. We are willing to work with that.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Thunder Bay—Rainy River.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

As this is the first round of speaking, I will need to ask the House if there is unanimous consent to allow the member for Mississauga—Erindale to split his time. Is it agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak to the bill again. Bill C-5, the nuclear liability bill, is an important bill. It is a culmination of years of examination and review of the old bill and is a concise overhaul of the old bill.

I want to take this opportunity to echo what the parliamentary secretary said earlier. I want to thank members of the natural resources committee for their diligent work in reviewing the bill, for listening to various stakeholders and for offering constructive discussion throughout our hearings. I also want to thank the officials at Natural Resources Canada for their diligent work and for offering an insightful presentation of the bill.

This is an administrative bill that overhauls the 1970 act . It offers new and tighter definitions, clearer objectives, a new liability limit and defines financial security. It also proposes a new tribunal for claims.

We heard throughout our study that Bill C-5 was very much needed for the industry and for Canadians. Nuclear suppliers, host communities, independent professors and stakeholders offered our committee very comprehensive thoughts on the bill.

While there were many legitimate questions about what the limit should be, what type of financial security there should be and how the tribunal should be structured, the overall consensus was that the bill was needed. Host communities, industry and many Canadians are waiting for it. We will be supporting the bill as presented to the House.

However, I cannot miss the opportunity to speak about the nuclear energy situation in our country.

Earlier this year we witnessed a lot of issues with respect to Atomic Energy and the government's management of AECL. We had a national health crisis when the NRU reactor at Chalk River was shut down because of a licensing issue. As a result, we had a severe shortage of nuclear isotopes. Many Canadians, in fact many citizens around the world who depend on the supply of isotopes, were left scrambling for alternative medicine. Some people had their appointments or examinations delayed. I remember the minister at the time saying that many lives were at stake, and I agreed with his comments. Many lives were at stake.

That problem resulted from the Conservative government's mismanagement of the situation. The fiasco was blamed on the Canadian nuclear safety regulator who was doing her job. The government accused her of partisanship. It claimed to consult independent experts, who, by the way, happened to either be a Conservative or a former AECL employee. Rather than address the root cause of the problem, which was the shortage of isotopes, the government placed the blame exclusively on someone else and, in fact, ended up firing her without any justification.

It is important to raise this issue today because we were just reminded of this a week ago when the government again showed its incompetence by announcing that it would stop the MAPLE reactors, which were supposed to replace the old NRU reactor that produces isotopes, without providing Canadians with a plan on how the supply of isotopes will be supplemented.

In December of last year, Canadians witnessed what could happen if the NRU reactor were to go out of production: severe shortages that could potentially cost Canadian lives.

The minister, after hiding for a month and getting training from a media consultant, told Canadians that he had to fire the nuclear regulator because Canadian lives were at stake. Now he has the gall to say that the government will end the project of replacing the NRU reactor and that we should not worry about it because everything is under control. By the way, we do have a 30 year contract to supply isotopes but we will keep the 50-year-old reactor to produce those isotopes.

Any reasonable observer can be forgiven for not trusting the government's word on having any sense of reliability or competent management of the situation. If the government had presented a plan at the time of its announcement of shutting down the MAPLE project, it would have been excused for its decision. However, the fact that it has announced that it will no longer pursue the MAPLE reactor but has offered no real plan to supplement the production of isotopes, leaves those questions in the minds of many Canadians.

I would not be doing my job here today if I did not ask those questions and raise those points. My Conservative colleagues cannot disagree with me. At the time, supposedly they justified the firing because lives were at stake. Now they cannot claim that there is no risk involved here.

There is another issue here. The Conservatives are secretly considering the privatization of AECL but they are not sharing their plans with Canadians. They are not telling us what they are working on. Instead, they want to do the write-off of the MAPLE reactors on the backs of taxpayers so that if they want to privatize it, taxpayers will pay for that write-off.

It is important that the government, the Minister of Natural Resources and his parliamentary secretary tell us here today what their plans are for AECL. It is not just important for me. It is important for Canadians. It is important for the Ontario government, which is looking to hire AECL to build a nuclear reactor, but right now the Ontario government is skeptical about the future of AECL because the federal government has said nothing about it. There are jobs at stake and talent at risk. We need to know what the Conservative government plans to do with AECL.

I do not think anybody can attack me for asking these questions. This is my job. This is what Canadians are asking for and the Conservatives are failing Canadians. They are not explaining what they are doing. They are not assuring us that they are worried about nuclear safety. They are not telling us that they concerned about the supply of isotopes. In fact, they are not even telling us what their plan is for the future of nuclear energy.

We know that nuclear energy has a bright future, not just in Canada but around the world. We know that AECL has a wealth of talent, people with high degrees of experience and education that have been inventing and creating products unparalleled around the world and they deserve an honest answer from the government. They need to know what the future holds for them. They need to know what the government plans to do. The Conservatives need to do it transparently, apolitically and publicly. They cannot do it in secret.

I want to take this opportunity here today to urge the government to consult publicly and share with us its plans for AECL. Again, future projects depend on it, jobs depend on it and our nuclear energy future depends on it.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources and for the Canadian Wheat Board]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to respond. It is good that the member used his time to ask us questions, but I do want to talk about AECL because we have been, as he said, transparent. We have been apolitical and we have been very public about what we are doing. I think he knows that. I think he is perhaps just trying to confuse people a bit.

Clearly, in budget 2008 we recognized that nuclear energy and specifically the Candu technology is an important component of the programs that we are developing internationally and domestically. The minister has been more than clear about the fact that he is committed to restoring prudent management of the nuclear energy file after years of neglect by the previous government. Everyone knows that.

He announced a full review of AECL last fall as part of that changeover to responsible management of the crown corporation. The review of AECL is ongoing and all options are on the table. No decision has been made on that yet. I think everyone is aware of that as well. His department is working closely with the other departments, the Department of Finance and with the full collaboration of AECL.

I should point out that everyone who has been following this file also understands that National Bank Financial has been hired as financial adviser to the government and is currently preparing its first report on the financial position of AECL. Therefore, there is a review ongoing. There has been a financial report that has been developed about AECL. Management has been updated. In the coming months the government is going to have the results of those reviews and will gladly release them. The member knows these things, but the Canadian public needs to understand that he has been well aware of them as well.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I must have touched a nerve with this member, but rightly so. He did not answer any of the questions. We know that the government fired the nuclear safety regulator but to this day we still do not know why. It has not been able to provide any reasonable justification for that decision.

We know that the government suspended the MAPLE project, but it did not tell us how it is going to secure the supply of isotopes for the next 30 years. We know that the National Bank Financial report is done because the minister told us that in committee, but the government has not shared that with Canadians. We know that the government is planning on some form of privatization, but it is not telling Canadians.

This hon. member, especially given the performance of the minister last December, needs to understand that we will continue to ask these questions. We have every right to doubt the government's ability, skill and competence in managing that file because it has proven that it is incompetent and incapable of managing nuclear safety.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member for Mississauga—Erindale on his remarks. I share his concerns about nuclear safety.

Today, we are discussing a bill on nuclear responsibility and, in my view, nuclear responsibility cannot be isolated and treated separately from safety. I am concerned, and I share his fears, as do many Quebeckers when we know that the reactor that produces isotopes at the Chalk River laboratory is now 50 years old and that we were counting on MAPLE reactors to produce a new generation.

The initial requirement for the MAPLE reactor project was $140 million. We still do not know how much Quebec and Canadian taxpayers have invested in this project, nor what results it produced because the project was cancelled

Now that the project has been cancelled, after swallowing millions of dollars, what steps will be taken to protect and produce medical isotopes?

Would the member tell us more about the concerns that his fellow citizens have been sharing with him on this subject?

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank the hon. member for her question and also thank her for the excellent work that she does at committee.

This is a question that I have been focusing on and I would like to focus on more. Let us for the sake of argument assume that it was the right decision to suspend or cancel the MAPLE project. Let us for the sake of argument say that it was the right decision. However, what is of concern is that the government did not take the time to devise a plan B, to tell us how it is going to maintain the supply of isotopes for the next 30 years.

AECL has a contract for the next 30 years to supply isotopes. If the government plans to get out of that business, it should be honest and tell Canadians so they know not to expect isotopes from AECL. However, it is not telling us. All it is doing is cancelling the project.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member for Mississauga—Erindale. As a member of the committee and as the lead on this issue, his work has been quite stellar and inspirational to all members from all parties in terms of the depth of his knowledge and his ability to get to the point, and make those points objectively and incisively.

I was also very proud to be a member of the natural resources committee. When we worked through this process, it actually was quite positive. I believe our common goal to protect Canadians and enhance protection on this issue was really foremost in our minds and indeed the world. There is no doubt that when legislation is proposed on nuclear viability, many people are watching to see what our nation is going to do and how effective it will be. When there is a chance to make better legislation, we always hope that it is.

What happened during the course of this debate is probably quite strange to many of us because it seems that the government has been reluctant to provide the confidence needed to satisfy Canadians that our reactors are completely safe. I am hoping the reactor isotope scandal has not forced the government to cocoon or muzzle its members.

When the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca asked if the Canadian public can have the confidence that there is public safety oversight, so that plain and simply we know that our reactors are safe, I believe the response from the government should have been unequivocal, prompt and clear. I certainly believe that the mechanisms, structures and processes for safety are in place, and that the Canadian nuclear industry provides the highest standard of safety. Indeed, it is a selling point for us internationally.

I am hoping, as the viewing public watches this debate, that the isotope shortage scandal does not confuse the public in terms of the goals and objectives of this bill. Clearly, the industry needs and wants this. We went through a very long and comprehensive list of witnesses, scientific groups, citizen representatives, environmental organizations, people who understand the industry from many components, and communities which are affected directly. When we make legislation such as this, we want to make sure that people are consulted.

Indeed, on the question of the adequacy of limits, as someone who has a background in commercial insurance, it is always an interesting question about how much insurance could one really have. From a sales standpoint, many people would think that we are always encouraging people to buy more just for its own sake, but eventually we have to get to a point where we can set a limit and feel confident that in the very remotest possibility of an accident that the compensation level would be adequate and that people would be in the situation they were before the accident.

It was a fascinating debate when other components were added: offshore, water transportation, airborne contaminants, and transportation disruptions. My impression from those witnesses observing the legislation, as they compared our proposed legislation to other countries, was that this bill would come out very good compared to much of the rest of the planet where others have actually gone to the stage of providing such liability. After all the intensive questioning it seemed that as we tried to address this, it was to a large extent overshadowed by the isotope shortage issue.

We on the committee realized that it could have been averted. With proper planning and arrangements internationally with other countries, there would not have been the need for a knee-jerk reaction, which of course disturbs the entire country and everyone feels it was the industry that was at fault as opposed to the government. Was it handled incompetently? It is now pretty obvious. The vast majority of Canadians would agree with that.

Were there people making presentations who had a partisan bias? That of course clouded the issue to some extent. As it continues, we know that the isotope issue has to be addressed in a much more open and consultative process. Here we are close to June. We had the hearings in January and the report to Parliament has been delayed through some other work but also because of an extremely long process for a forestry report.

Parliament should have had the report on the isotope issue already. Hopefully there will be enough time to address that and table it in Parliament before the summer adjournment. Otherwise, it appears that the committee may be meeting during the humidity days of July. Can we get to that report in common cause for the common good? I truly hope that all members of the committee are on the same wavelength for that. I am speaking in good faith.

Rainy River, of course, is part of Thunder Bay—Rainy River. For those who may not be aware, my riding is seven and a half hours long over two time zones. Imagine driving to a community such as that over the Victoria Day weekend and hearing an announcement that there is going to be a shutdown of the program. I ask, as many people do who are tuned in to this, why would the government do it on the Victoria Day weekend? What confidence should I get from this? Is this not strange?

The media reaction, of course, was that it was very shocked. It undermines public faith. When we tell them we are striving to have the highest possible standards for an industry, it certainly gives fuel to critics who may have their own biases about the nuclear industry, so that we actually undermine confidence as opposed to some form of open media or press release at a time when people can respond to it. It is hard to imagine that something would happen at that time of day over that kind of weekend and people would not suspect a hidden agenda.

When Canadians want to know what lies in the future for the nuclear industry, we should be able to overcome unfair reaction. We should be able to debate the entire future of energy, energy supply, energy demand, and how Canadians will meet their needs in the future.

Where does nuclear fit in all of this? In my riding of Thunder Bay—Rainy River, there are two coal plants. I want to let people know that we want clean coal as an alternative energy. We want to be part of the program for energy where nuclear fits. This is where this bill helps. Do we need a national plan? I believe we do. It is only fair. Canadians need the reassurance. It is needed internationally for our sales of Candu products and it means that not only Canadians but the entire world has to feel confident in us.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Mr. Speaker, since we are on the topic of the nuclear industry, I want to ask my colleague across the aisle about the proposed build-out of new reactors in the province of Ontario.

A couple of months ago Ontario energy minister Gerry Phillips announced a request for proposal that would go to four firms, two American, one French and one Canadian, the Canadian one being AECL, to build-out the new reactors in Ontario.

My question to him is this. Does he feel it is essential that those contracts be awarded to AECL to ensure the vitality of the nuclear industry in Ontario or does he feel that they should be awarded to the best bidder? If he feels they should be awarded to AECL, what measures does he feel that the government or the provincial government should take to ensure that happens?

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as someone who was fortunate to have a private member's motion pass for buy Canada content for public transit, my bias to supporting national industries is pretty much a public concern here. I understand that the provincial government has included a 25% buy Canada component but I do not know if it extends to the nuclear industry.

The question is an interesting one because even here in our nation's capital, its bid for light rail transit had no Canadian content requirements at all. I am not privy to the way the provincial government awarded those things, especially with my bias to clean coal, as I mentioned earlier in my speech, and my hope that the two coal plants would be--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Brant.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the speech by the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River, as I did the speech of his colleague, the member for Mississauga—Erindale, both of whom contribute magnificently to the natural resources committee, of which I am a member as well.

I am sure the Speaker will recall that a very professional woman, Linda Keen, had her reputation sullied and damaged. The background, very briefly, is that Ms. Keen had ordered AECL to effect certain repairs, so to speak, or certain measures to the reactor at Chalk River in August 2006. By November 2007, some 15 months later, it became apparent that the reactor had not yet been rectified in the fashion ordered by the regulator. In any event, the day before Ms. Keen was to appear at committee, she was fired.

I would like to ask the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River if he shares my concern and the concern of the distinguished member for Mississauga—Erindale that the government has not been as forthcoming about its plan--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I will have to allow the hon. member for Thunder Bay--Rainy River a chance to respond.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I believe the policy of shooting the messenger as opposed to addressing the solution is probably not the right course. It undermines again the confidence in the nuclear industry, in particular, and in government processes in general.

As a member of the committee, when we see that first-hand, where a thoroughly professional person is meant to carry the burden and has to take the fall when clearly the leadership has to come from the government, it has to be the minister's responsibility.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The member for Beauharnois—Salaberry for a very quick question.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we know that in the last government budget, $100 million was set aside to continue with the development of the ACR reactor. We hope that this $100 million from taxpayers' pockets will finally do the trick because each time a budget is presented we have been told that this is the last time money will be invested in this project.

Does he truly believe, as a member from Ontario, that Atomic Energy Canada Limited will be able to provide a marketable reactor that will respond to the needs of this province in a timely fashion?

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I can only hope that such will happen. If not, there are always the two clean coal plants in Thunder Bay and Atikokan that we could probably use to carry us through.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the debate at third reading of Bill C-5.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the members of the committee for their excellent work. Knock wood, all the members in the Standing Committee on Natural Resources work earnestly, professionally and even passionately. We have just concluded a study on forestry during which we discovered the talents, passions and especially the skills of the members of our committee, which enriched our debates.

Unfortunately, in the debate on Bill C-5, we did not have any specialists in insurance or nuclear liability. We truly had to listen very carefully together to all the witnesses and all the legislative staff who advised us and explained certain things.

We also heard from mayors. Those were the testimonies that touched me the most. There is an association that consists of the mayors of all cities that have nuclear power plants, who have joined together to be represented. We heard from one mayor who told us she was truly pleased with the bill, but that she was surprised and even disappointed that the bill allowed for just $650 million in compensation.

Perhaps we should remind those watching us on television that the purpose of Bill C-5 is to modernize an existing law that has been obsolete and neglected for over 30 years. The bill is intended to meet international standards on nuclear liability. This bill explains the responsibility of operators regarding nuclear liability, sets compensation at a maximum of $650 million, and creates a tribunal to hear claims in the event of a nuclear incident.

After much debate, everyone agrees that $650 million is a clear improvement over the current provisions. With the resurgence of nuclear power, we all agree that $75 million was not enough. Nonetheless, some concerns remain. We are reassured by the fact that the minister or the government will be able, every five years, to increase the amount of compensation.

It was pure negligence. For 30 years and from government to government, whether Liberal or Conservative, this legislation and the compensation should have been updated but were completely neglected. It was only recently that they started paying attention on the heels of a recommendation from the Environmental Commissioner who told us in his 2005 report that we had a real problem in Canada because our nuclear liability was not up to the international standards and that it was really starting to be problematic. It was certainly a problem for our citizens and communities, as well as our companies and operators.

We will support Bill C-5 in order to ensure that our communities have better coverage and better tools to defend themselves in case of nuclear incidents.

We heard some pretty impressive witnesses and got sound advice from all the partners and expert stakeholders. A bill dealing with insurance is necessarily very technical and legalistic and we needed to hear some especially good witnesses.

The only nuclear power plant in Quebec is located near the town of Gentilly and there was an incident here recently that could have been serious, but fortunately was not. That leads me once again to say that if this incident had actually had repercussions, we would have had to rely on this old legislation providing the citizens of Gentilly with only $75 million in compensation.

We must understand that if there had been a very serious incident, there would have been consequences not just for Gentilly but the entire area, the cities and suburbs all around.

I want to emphasize that we in the Bloc Québécois are not satisfied with the $650 million amount, especially as the bill provides that the amounts will rise from $75 million to $650 million over four years. This will not happen at once and will take four years. To us and our citizens and communities, this may seem a long time, and quite rightly so. The operators also have some fears about the increase in their premiums over such a short time.

We worked very hard on this bill in committee and discussed the issues using all the procedures that the House provides us to really get a handle on it. We can be proud of what we accomplished. We worked in an atmosphere in which we all focused on the task at hand and the positive effects rather than partisan politics. There is still no doubt, though, that there are problems with the entire nuclear issue in Canada.

I made a short list of nuclear-related events that occurred in the past year and were of concern not only to the government but to all parliamentarians in this House. You may be surprised by this list.

First, as you know—and I believe the opposition members pointed it out—the isotope shortage and the mismanagement of this crisis by Atomic Energy Canada caused many problems and raised many questions. Although the government may not have said so outright, by initiating a study on what happened between Atomic Energy Canada and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission it has, in fact, acknowledged that there were serious management and communication problems at play in this crisis.

What we learn from bad experiences helps us to avoid the next crisis. However, when looking at the chronology, it is surprising to note the extent to which Atomic Energy Canada was disorganized. There are questions to be asked.

During this crisis, Ms. Keen, the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, was fired. There was also the matter of the current study of Atomic Energy Canada. When he appeared before our committee, the Minister of Natural Resources did not hesitate to say that the partial or full privatization of Atomic Energy Canada is among the solutions and recommendations that will very likely be retained. We had our suspicions. He was quite forthcoming, if I remember correctly, when he last appeared.

Furthermore, costs always increase by millions of dollars. As members and party critics for a given file, when analyzing the budgets of each department, we talk in terms of millions of dollars. I have been a member of Parliament for two and a half years. What I have seen, every time, is that millions of dollars are added to the nuclear file, for security, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission or Atomic Energy Canada.

This year, we are talking about $300 million: $80 million to make Chalk River safer and $100 million to further develop the ACR-1000 reactor. We can certainly ask questions, because that is a lot of money. Furthermore, they say nuclear energy is clean energy—I do not agree—but very costly energy.

The Minister of Natural Resources often tells me that nuclear energy is a provincial option. He knows that I am an MP who keeps a close eye on federal and provincial areas of jurisdiction. There we agree. But nuclear safety and waste management are federal responsibilities. For a year, there has been a lot of spending and a lot of studies, but it is not very clear where the government is headed.

I am not a strong proponent of nuclear energy, and as a taxpayer, I find it very disturbing to see these millions of dollars going to institutions such as Atomic Energy Canada, even though we do not really know what direction the government wants to take, nor how much money will be needed to achieve the objectives of making Chalk River safer and developing the ACR-1000 reactor. It would be especially important to find out how much we need to invest to upgrade the reactor that produces medical isotopes in Chalk River. As an aside, this reactor is 50 years old and is at the end of its life span. We can modernize it and make all the upgrades we want, but it still has a finite life span.

What solution and plan does the government propose? We recently learned that the government was terminating the MAPLE reactor project. That in itself is not actually news, since it had already been announced on May 16.

We know that taxpayers provided an initial investment of $146 million in this project. Apart from that initial amount, no one really knows how much taxpayers have invested since 1996 in the MAPLE reactor research and development project. We do not know how much it all cost, in the end. We do know, however, that the project was abandoned because it was considered a money pit and it was believed that it could never be completed. We learned this officially on May 16, 2008.

I am personally involved in activities that often bring together major players in nuclear energy. Behind the scenes, everyone knew that MAPLE was doomed to fail and that, clearly, the government failed to realize this fact quickly and in a transparent manner. We are especially concerned about what will replace the reactor that has now reached the end of its existence.

To top it off, we learned from the front page of today's La Presse that, through access to information, a journalist was able to get a document produced by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. That document reveals that the commission is worried that it does not have sufficient financial and human resources to fulfill its role and ensure the security of Quebeckers and Canadians, in short, to carry out the mission that is its raison d'être.

This is somewhat surprising, while the current government touts nuclear energy as the solution to environmental problems and greenhouse gas emissions across Canada. In any case, we have a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission that admits that it does not have sufficient financial and human resources to carry out its mission and guarantee Quebeckers and Canadians that all operators and facilities comply with and meet international safety standards.

The document reveals one quite impressive fact, namely, that the commission has had to quadruple its security budget. Indeed, since the events of September 2001, security measures intended to protect the facilities against terrorist attacks—

[The Deputy Speaker, Bill Blaikie]

I apologize for interrupting the hon. member for Beauharnois—Salaberry, but the House must continue with the items on the order paper.

The House resumed from May 28 consideration of the motion that Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, be read the third time and passed.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the bill once more.

I had the opportunity to speak to many amendments that my colleague, the member for Western Arctic, made at the natural resources committee on Bill C-5. I think about 35 amendments were moved, which, unfortunately, were not passed, that would have improved the bill and made it a bill we could support. Sadly, the NDP cannot support the bill in its present form.

The bill was introduced last year, sent to committee, where it was quickly shuffled through with no amendments, and now we have it before the House today.

The bill, in our estimation, was introduced to facilitate the development of the nuclear industry in Canada. The federal government developed the legislation to limit the amount of damages a nuclear power plant operator would have to pay out should there be an accident causing radiological contamination to property outside the plant area itself. Such legislation is deemed necessary, as private insurers refuse to compensate for damage due to a nuclear accident or incident.

As I said, we had many problems with the bill but the biggest one for us was the limit on the liability. The current legislation, as we know, dates from the 1970s. It is woefully inadequate, and we agree with that, with a liability limit of only $75 million. By comparison, a new mine usually has to post an environmental bond of approximately $50 million, and it does not have radiological contamination to worry about.

This low level of liability is creating an impediment for foreign private industry purchasing Canadian nuclear industries. Under U.S. law, a foreign victim of an accident caused by an American headquartered company can sue for damages under American law if the foreign law is insufficient by international standards. These changes bring the legislation in line with minimum international standards, which is $650 million. We know the government brought this to the minimum international standards, the bottom of the international average.

For amounts above the $650 million, a special tribunal would be set up by the Minister of Natural Resources and further funds would come out of the public purse, which is the taxpayers' pockets. What that means is that a nuclear operator would only need to pay out the maximum of $650 million, while the public would be on the hook for the rest, possibly millions or even billions of dollars in the case of a nuclear incident or accident.

My colleague and I presented amendments to the bill because we felt strongly that it was our duty as members of Parliament to look after the public good and the public interest. We do not believe taxpayers should be on the hook for billions of dollars in case of a nuclear accident.

I talked about the liability framework in the United States. Canada is moving from $75 million, a woefully inadequate liability, up to $650 million. However, in the U.S. the liability can be as high as $9 billion. In other countries, such as Germany, Japan and Switzerland, they have unlimited liability. They understand that the costs of a nuclear accident outside of a nuclear facility could be devastatingly high. We know this because many of our reactors are in populated areas.

The Pickering reactors are located in a very densely populated area. Many of the businesses, homes and schools in the area are close enough that if there were a significant accident or incident, they could be negatively impacted to the tune of more than $650 million. The price of homes in that area are quite high. The future incomes of businesses in the area could be at risk if the area were to become contaiminated because people would not go into the area for years to come. All kinds of future costs could be implicated as well.

Those are the reasons we wanted to have unlimited liability, such as those in other European countries, or to at least have a $9 billion liability, which is what it is in the U.S.

When the bill came to committee we heard from several witnesses. I would like to read what some of the witnesses had to say just to give members a sense of what we heard at the committee and why it is so difficult to support this bill in its present form.

The first witness, Professor Michel Duguay, from the electrical and computer engineering department at Laval University in Quebec City, said:

The new bill will send a signal to all stake holders and the public that nuclear power is expensive and dangerous. The U.S. commission that had investigated the nuclear accident at Three-Mile Island had found that the principal cause of the accident was the attitude held by the plant operators that the nuclear reactor was safe. In Canada, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission...has done a great deal to convince nuclear power plant operators at all levels that nuclear power must be approached with utmost precaution. In its Annual Report for 2002, page 6, Atomic Energy Canada Limited..has acknowledged that the old CANDUs’ positive coolant void reactivity coefficient...poses a grave danger that must be avoided in the new reactor designs.

Those words strike fear in the hearts of many people when we hear them because we know what grave danger means in the case of a nuclear accident.

He goes on to say:

In view of the danger posed by the old CANDU reactors, and in view of the much larger damages anticipated in the case of core-meltdown accidents, anywhere from the 10 billion-dollar US liability limit to the one trillion-dollar estimate of the Pembina Institute in Canada....

What he was saying was that $650 million was a drop in the bucket compared to the amounts of money that could be needed in the case of a major accident.

Professor Duguay continues to state:

I find that in formulating this new Bill C-5, there are two important aspects. One of them is compensation for damages suffered, and the other is the expansion of nuclear power.

What he was referencing was that the money was not enough, obviously, and that the expansion of nuclear power was an issue. We know the Minister of Natural Resources has told the committee that the government was looking at nuclear power as a clean energy source.

I find that quite interesting because that was raised during the committee's study of the tar sands. It was one of our first studies that I was on as a member of that committee.

That made me wonder whether the government was thinking of using nuclear in the oil sands to melt the tar to produce the bitumen that we are shipping daily to the U.S., using a form of energy that has its own particular problems, such as the disposal of the waste. The issue of nuclear waste has never been resolved in this country. Therefore, to call that a green, clean source of energy is a misnomer, and yet the government likes to look at nuclear as a way out of our greenhouse gas emissions.

That is something that needs to be highlighted here because we are investing, as saw in the last budget, in nuclear. The budget had quite a lot of money for nuclear but very little for real green alternatives, such as solar power, wind power, wave generation, geothermal and all kinds of things that truly are green, clean sources of energy that have very little impact and leave a much smaller footprint on our planet. The government should be supporting more of thoses sources of energy in this country.

If the passage of the bill allows the expansion of nuclear power in this country it will be a big step backward for us in our quest to have a greener and cleaner energy source in many ways. We need to ensure that it not only does not create greenhouse gases, which it does not in that respect, but we need to look at it for all other things, such as the waste, the mining that takes place and the tragedy, human and otherwise, that it could inflict if there were to be an accident. If it is not a green source of energy we should not invest in it so heavily. We should be thinking of much cleaner, greener ways to go.

Another witness who came before our committee was Gordon Edwards, the president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. He spoke to the committee and we met with him on a few occasions. In his submission to the committee, he said:

As a participant in the deliberations of both the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning and the Select Committee on Ontario Hydro Affairs, I can assure the committee members that the rationale for this bill, C-5, is based on the potential damages of fuel melting accidents. Without fuel melting, it is not possible for a nuclear accident to have off-site property damage exceeding $10 million.

However, the consequences of core melting accidents can typically run into the tens of billions of dollars or even hundreds of billions of dollars and can make large regions of land uninhabitable for a considerable period of time.

In the case of such a catastrophe, Bill C-5 limits the liability of nuclear operators to a very modest amount. It eliminates all liability for nuclear equipment suppliers, even if they supplied defective equipment that caused the accident, yet it does not address any important measures that would limit the overall financial liability to the Canadian taxpayer or the social liability of any affected population.

To me, that paragraph outlines many things: the insufficient liability amount and the long term effect on the human population, on businesses and on the taxpayer should there be a need to pay more than $650 million in the case of an accident.

He mentioned that hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation could be required. Therefore, $650 million is woefully inadequate. We have an opportunity now, when the bill is before us, to increase that limit from $650 million, which is the base international standard, to a much higher amount so that Canadian taxpayers would not be on the hook.

Mr. Edwards further commented that:

The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility feels that it is important for the elected representatives of the people to ensure that the nuclear industry is held publicly accountable, and to ensure that the best interests of Canadians are not compromised in order to serve the interests of the nuclear industry. We believe that the figure of $650 million has no sound scientific or financial basis, and that this arbitrary amount serves to distract the Committee from a much more important question:--

I will stop there with that paragraph. Again, I have to say that it is the members of this House who are responsible for ensuring public security and safety, and also accountability with the public's money. If we were to agree to the bill and it were to pass, and there was a nuclear accident and taxpayers were on the hook for any moneys over the $650 million, it would be on our heads. It would be because we allowed that to happen. We would be not just financially but morally responsible for making that decision. That would be a travesty. It is something that we ought not inflict on the Canadian public.

That is why for the most part we cannot support the bill. As I said earlier, the act needed to be updated. Currently, it is woefully inadequate with the amount at $75 million. We have an opportunity now to increase the liability or not to have a cap of $650 million so that the Canadian taxpayer will not be left on the hook.

The amendments we proposed at committee would have brought our country in line with countries, like Germany, where there is unlimited liability on their nuclear industries. Those amendments were important because they would encourage safety in the nuclear industry. They would make the nuclear industry more accountable. The industry would then be on the hook, not the taxpayer. Why are we putting the government's finances in jeopardy?

It is important to note that all Canadians want this Parliament to move toward cleaner, greener solutions for our energy needs. Unfortunately, this bill is going to pass, because it has Liberal and Conservative support, and it will increase nuclear power production around the country.

Instead, we could be investing much more in alternatives for our energy needs, things that would not have such an impact on the planet, things like solar power. We could help people invest in their homes to reduce their energy consumption. We do not seem to be doing much of that. There is no real program that I know of in this country that would help people invest in their own homes to reduce their energy consumption. We really need that type of program. Canadians need help with getting into things such as solar power. People need some help to make these changes to their homes, perhaps new windows and better insulation. People need help in getting rid of their old oil furnaces and converting to a greener source of energy. Ordinary families need some help with those kinds of things.

Unfortunately, the eco-energy program does not quite cut it. I have had many calls from people who have tried to get an assessment. They have found that not much of what they are trying to invest in is covered. Heat pumps and other green sources of energy are very expensive, around $18,000. When people are only getting up to $1,300 back, it is not much of an incentive to make the change.

Canada could be doing much more and investing in cleaner energy rather than going down the nuclear route.

[Gary Goodyear, Conservative, Cambridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member and yet again I am trying to be, shall I say, civil because one assumes that a member of Parliament does his or her research and actually has a sincere effort to tell the truth to the Canadian public. Here is the truth.

I personally have applied to some of the government programs for funding to upgrade furnaces and make my own home greener. Contrary to what the member is telling Canadians, there are in fact a lot of programs that are available to make homes greener and more efficient.

Perhaps the member could do some homework and provide really good answers to her constituents. That might get her constituents onboard with helping the country go green. The fact is if a member is not going to do his or her job, then naturally the member's constituents will not know what to do.

I might also offer the member an idea. She has said there are absolutely no programs in the country; I believe that is exactly what she said, no programs to help the country go green. Let me brag about Tree Canada. I would be happy to table this document. If the member would do her research and do her job for which she is receiving a reasonable salary, she would know that a person can actually calculate his or her carbon footprint and offset the footprint by planting some trees.

If the motives are simply to spread misinformation and scare tactics and all the stuff the NDP members always do, then the member is doing her job correctly.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member, and I am sorry I do not know the name of his riding. I am sorry if it seems as though I am chuckling at his intervention.

It is Canadians, my constituents, who are telling me that these programs do not work. I keep bringing the subject up.

[Gary Goodyear, Conservative, Cambridge, ON]

They work for me.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am so happy for the member that they work for him. Perhaps one has to be a member of the Conservative Party for these programs to work, I do not know.

I receive mail from my constituents telling me that they have applied for these programs.

[Gary Goodyear, Conservative, Cambridge, ON]

Table it.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will table that correspondence at my earliest opportunity.

The member talked about a tree program and that is great, but where I come from, all the trees are being cut down. We keep trying to plant trees and let them grow. There is such a contradiction in what the member says.

I have to say that I have many examples of how these programs are not working for ordinary Canadians. The amounts of money are not significant enough to allow them to invest. They have to make ends meet on their ordinary family salaries. They cannot afford to make the changes necessary to green up their own homes and our communities.

I have asked the minister to increase the amounts. Unfortunately, that has not happened.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member has talked a fair bit about the propriety of the $650 million limit. If I heard her correctly, I believe she suggested that there was some evidence that liability could be in the billions of dollars. I think she also mentioned Paris and Brussels.

I took the opportunity to read the speech by the Minister of Natural Resources and I would like to quote from it:

In the case of the Paris-Brussels regime, the maximum compensation is approximately $500 million Canadian..... The Vienna Convention sets the minimum liability limit at approximately $500 million Canadian.

In the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence, he provided information with regard to studies that were done on Quebec's Gentilly-2 reactor and Ontario's Darlington plant. The study said that in the worst case scenario, the cost of an accident could range from $1 million to $100 million.

What is the basis for her estimates that the liability limit could be inadequate and that the liability could be some billion dollars?

With respect to these other jurisdictions, which the minister indicated had limits to $500 million, she represented them as having unlimited liability. It would appear to me that either the member has given incorrect information to the House, or the minister or the parliamentary secretary has given incorrect information to the House. I would like to know who is giving the correct information.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member actually identified different countries than I identified and that the minister identified. I identified Germany, Japan, Austria and Switzerland as countries that have unlimited liability. It is the U.S. that has liability that could be as high as $9 billion.

Let us consider the areas where some of our nuclear facilities are located. Some experts have said that nuclear facilities should not be in populated areas where there are families, homes, businesses and schools and that they should be further away from populations to limit the impact. They have also suggested that if we are going to be building new ones, they should be built underground. If there were to be an incident nearby, the human cost, the cost of people's homes, the cost to businesses and future loss of revenue could be quite high. For a business that generates a couple of million dollars a year or even more, the costs could add up very quickly. If an area were contaminated for a number of years or even forever, then the future costs to those businesses could be quite high.

That is what I am basing my statistics on. That is also what the people whom I quoted are basing their representations on.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative government's handling of the Chalk River incident shook the confidence of many Canadians with respect to our nuclear industry. Many of my constituents expressed their concerns to me. I think we would all feel more confident if we were to leave it to nuclear scientists and engineers to decide where nuclear safety resides rather than leaving it up to politicians.

Given the firing of the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission by the Conservative government, I am wondering, as are my constituents, does Canada still have an independent nuclear safety regulator? How accountable is it now? How transparent are the mechanisms to ensure the safety of the operations of the nuclear industry in Canada?

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Victoria for that question as I did not get a chance to speak about this in my intervention on Bill C-5.

She is absolutely right when she says that Canadians need to have confidence that the Nuclear Safety Commission can work at arm's length. However, I do not think we have that confidence. We lost that confidence back in January with the Conservative government's firing of Linda Keen, the nuclear safety commissioner at the time, in the dead of night.

Unfortunately, that left Canadians wondering what was going on. How can we have confidence in this industry when things like this happen? That was a very sad day. We know that the commissioner was trying to look after public safety and security and unfortunately she was let go from her job for doing just that.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all members for such a spirited and fulsome debate on this issue, but because of the debate the issue has been almost exhaustively discussed, I believe. Therefore, I move:

That this question be now put.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed that the motion has been made to put this question, because we have just started to debate this today after a bit of a lapse. We had a couple of speeches, one from the minister and one from the member leading off the debate, but this is an important bill.

It is an important bill from the standpoint that it is another example of where legislation in Canada has gone without an update for an extended period of time. We have to understand why this happens and whether or not we have left ourselves exposed. In this bill, we go from a civil liability limit of $75 million up to proposing $650 million.

We have the same problem in other legislation with which I am involved. Neither the Access to Information Act nor the Privacy Act have been updated in 25 years, yet those pieces of legislation deal with significant matters related to Canadians. They are important to Canadians. Those matters have not been kept up to date with the changes in our world, both the 9/11 mentality and the technological changes.

I suggest to the member that it is important to hear not only from the principal members dealing in natural resources but from parliamentarians with regard to some of the other important issues related to legislation that has not been kept up to date. We need to hold the government accountable.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Mr. Speaker, while I thank my hon. colleague from Mississauga South, my point remains the same, which is that there has been, I believe, fulsome debate on this issue.

In response to the member's question about how legislation from time to time needs to be updated, that is certainly correct. Because of that, I would underscore the fact that this needs to be dealt with promptly and expeditiously. I would also suggest that all pieces of legislation coming before this House are, I believe, quite exhaustively discussed within respective caucuses.

I believe my hon. colleague from the New Democratic Party said earlier in her presentation that the position of each of the parties is well known. I believe that to be true. I believe that by continuing the debate all we would be doing is restricting the ability of this House to deal with an important piece of legislation in the expeditious manner it deserves.

Therefore, I think my motion that the question be now put is quite appropriate and should be dealt with at this time.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there are three reactors in different provinces. In Ontario, there is Ontario Power Generation in Bruce. In New Brunswick, there are the operators at New Brunswick Power. In Quebec, it is Hydro-Québec.

This piece of legislation addresses an important issue. As I indicated in my question for the parliamentary secretary, it is a piece of legislation that has not been updated for a very substantial period of time.

I know there are only a few minutes remaining before question period, but I think it is important for Canadians to understand what we are debating. Bill C-5 is an act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident. It establishes a specific civil liability and a regime with respect to nuclear incidents and repeals the current Nuclear Liability Act, which provides the regime today.

This act, which will repeal the Nuclear Liability Act, is very similar to that act. It does make operators of nuclear installations exclusively liable but, as I indicated, it increases significantly, from $75 million to $650 million, the extent of their liability and the financial security they are required to maintain. The establishment of a form of civil liability and a requirement to pay compensation in respect of damage caused by a nuclear incident is in line with the efforts to manage and minimize the risk involved in the use of nuclear material.

The bill establishes a specific liability regime applicable in the case of a nuclear incident and sets out the terms and conditions in respect of the civil liability and the compensation to be paid for any damage caused in such circumstances. It also provides for the establishment of a tribunal to administer the claims arising from the nuclear incident.

I was very interested in this and did a little research. The bill states specifically that it is binding on the federal government and on the provinces and it excludes two types of circumstances. The first exclusion includes incidents resulting from an act of war, hostilities, civil war or insurrection, but not a terrorist activity as defined in the Criminal Code. The second exclusion is damage to a nuclear installation or any property located at the installation and used in connection with it if the operator of the installation is responsible for the damage.

Earlier in the debate, there was some question with regard to the liability exclusion of suppliers of equipment that would be used in these plants. As someone who is not an expert in this area, I am not exactly sure about this and certainly would want to ask this question. In the event that there is a fault with regard to the equipment supplier, the operator itself, the purchaser of that equipment, would have legal recourse. I am not sure how far the umbrella has to go to insure all those who are directly or indirectly the source of the problem and the cause for the liability and the costs and damages to be incurred.

Because of the time constraints, I am not going to be able to deliver all of my speech, but in preparing for this debate today I noted that the minister laid out the main principles of the bill. The responsibility of providing an insurance framework for the nuclear industry falls under federal jurisdiction. That is one of the reasons why we need this. It is a framework that is in existence today. Both the current legislation and Bill C-5 apply to nuclear power plants, nuclear research reactors, fuel fabrication facilities and facilities managing nuclear fuel.

There are three principles involved that the legislation tries to emulate. Those are the principles of absolute and exclusive liability of the operator, mandatory insurance, and limitations in the time and amount. These are the kinds of things that are consistent with legislation internationally.

I understand that we are going to break now. Unfortunately, I will not be able to be in the House to continue my speech due to committee responsibilities, but I appreciate having at least this brief time to address the House on Bill C-5.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, be read the third time, and of the motion that this question be now put.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-5 at the third reading stage. The Bloc Québécois thinks that this bill is important to protect citizens and not to promote nuclear energy. I want to make that clear.

Before I begin my remarks, I would like to thank the people who worked on this bill: the researchers, the members of the committee and the witnesses, as well as all the legislative staff who helped prepare this bill.

Before I explain why we support this bill and defend the amounts in it, I would like to give an overview of the current nuclear energy situation in Canada.

The Minister of Natural Resources recently spoke to the Economic Club of Toronto about the merits of nuclear energy, including a new generation of reactors. By the way, where are those reactors? It is a secret, like all those other things the government keeps secret. Later on in his speech, he mentioned that it would take decades to find a safe disposal site. We agree with him there. It is clear that a site will not be found quickly.

Furthermore, the global partnership launched by Mr. Bush for the reprocessing of irradiated nuclear fuel, which Canada has joined, is light years away from becoming a reality. I would remind the House that, in France, this project was in the works for 15 years before it was abandoned as unworkable. By relying on all the other countries, President Bush thinks it is feasible. So far, no progress has been made on this. Everyone thinks that we will simply be left with nuclear waste to transport and dispose of.

This bill establishes a limit of $650 million in compensation and we think this is a fair amount. In any case, we could not put this system in place and ask for any more than the $650 million requested, because the insurance companies would never agree to it. As it is, reinsurance will be needed to make up the difference.

We do not think that we could have a situation like that of the United States where full responsibility falls to the companies. With a common fund that varies between $9 billion and $11 billion, they share responsibility in the event of an accident. That is not the kind of approach we have taken here. Instead, we decided on an insurance plan that cannot exceed $650 million. We think this represents a marked improvement over previous legislation, which provided for $70 million or $75 million.

This bill, however, has some major gaps. Of course, the government and the entire population should be able to provide all the money needed in the event of an accident. Unfortunately, the calculation of probabilities would suggest that an accident is likely to happen sooner or later, since one occurs every 30 years. Let us hope that it is not in Canada. If, however, that is the case, $650 million will not be enough. It will be the entire population that will have to pay in order to continue compensating the people affected by the disaster, the conflagration—fire is usually the result—or the radiation.

But the law does not provide for compensation by insurance companies in case of war or sabotage, including terrorist acts. We know that right now, terrorist activity is the greatest threat to nuclear power. That is what both Canada and the United States fear most. Since 2001, Canada's budget for protection from terrorism has quadrupled. I will review the numbers shortly. These costs are not included in the price per kilowatt hour.

These costs are not included because they are for protection, for security agencies. Those budgets do not fall within the Department of Natural Resources' purview.

Information about this energy source is utterly contradictory. Our minister insists on telling us that it is clean energy. Yet it generates waste, and there is a significant accident risk. About 60 accidents happen every year in Canada. They are usually minor, but major accidents could happen.

We are told that radiation is not a problem, even with uranium 235 mining. That is not true. As miners work, radon, a colourless, odourless gas, emanates from the mine walls. As a result, the miners are exposed to radiation. Health-wise, that is even more dangerous than asbestos. The inescapable result is cancer. Mines can be ventilated, but as we all know, it is very hard to ventilate tunnels at the very bottom of mines, where there is the most radon. It is dangerous for miners and for those transporting the ore.

Since 2006, the government has had big problems with nuclear energy. I will list them.

In September 2007, the safety report seriously called into question nuclear safety across Canada. That is why we are now trying to change and comply with international safety standards. Because of them, it will cost much more to renovate existing plants.

There was the isotope crisis. The safety of the Chalk River laboratories was called into question. Then there was the firing of Ms. Keen, the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, who was highly qualified but annoyed and embarrassed the government. There was the disorganized crisis management on site.

There was also the study on privatizing Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, an issue that still has not been resolved one way or the other. The latest problem was the failure of MAPLE. It was announced on May 16, not long ago, that the MAPLE reactors would not be brought on stream, because they could not be made functional.

There is still the fragility caused by terrorism. I will come back to this, because it is true. Terrorism targets only two types of energy: nuclear energy and liquefied natural gas at liquefied natural gas terminals. Only in these two areas can terrorism really hit hard. Some people do not believe that and think that hydroelectric dams can be terrorist targets. This would be rather surprising, though. During the last war, people had a hard time destroying hydroelectric dams. Rest assured that terrorists will not attack dams.

However, in the case of nuclear power, you do not need a huge plane to destroy the small buildings that protect the pools of water used to cool nuclear waste. That can be done very easily. It would also be very easy to blow these buildings to pieces by dropping a bomb on one of them. Hence, the threat of terrorism against nuclear power lurks everywhere. We need only think of the transportation of MOX. Wherever there is radioactivity, there can be terrorism.

Furthermore, waste management poses a problem. The minister told us that it will take decades to resolve. He just appointed a commission, the largest we have ever had: some 70 to 75 people will be involved. It will take years to identify a solution.

I would like to bring up another point pertaining to nuclear power. It is a source of energy and that is a provincial jurisdiction. We believe that nuclear energy must be managed by Quebec.

We accept that the safety standards may be Canadian. We are just as interested in preventing Ontario nuclear power plants from blowing up. Yet, I will reiterate that energy is a provincial jurisdiction. By the way, Hydro-Québec is doing a very good job.

Let us go back to the issue of waste. According to the Minister of Natural Resources, Canada is far from finding a location for burying the waste because no community has agreed to have a waste disposal site in its area.

Therefore, we support this bill but with some reservations. The bill must not promote nuclear power. Canadians are not convinced of the future of nuclear power. According to surveys, in spite of all the promotion of nuclear power and all the lobbying, the fact remains that a majority are still against it, particularly in Quebec, where citizens strongly oppose it.

Before we decide to promote nuclear energy, we would have to really consult the public. That includes experts, people knowledgeable about energy and the people who live next to reactors, which is important because they would be the first to be impacted by an accident.

We would also need to consult with the people living along the route where the waste would be transported. We remember the 150 municipalities that were against the transportation of MOX in Quebec. The people living in the province where the waste will be buried should also be consulted.

All of these people need to be consulted, not just the pro-nuclear lobbyists with huge sums of money that often comes from governments. In the United States, Bush invested $18.5 billion in the promotion of nuclear energy.

Given that there are 22 nuclear plants in Canada, it seems reasonable to offer the public insurance that will give them a minimum amount of protection. This should not be used to build other plants, but should protect the ones that already exist.

According to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Gentilly-2 in Quebec respects and surpasses the regulatory requirements in all of the safety categories. That is great, but it does not mean that there will never be an accident. In fact, there was one recently.

The budgets allocated for nuclear safety may have quadrupled since the September 11 attacks, but authorities believe that there are still flaws in the system that could one day pose a threat to national security. That is not very reassuring.

We know that security measures at Gentilly-2 have been stepped up since 2001, but Hydro-Québec has been reluctant to reveal the costs. We can imagine why, even if this corporation does a good job. Even the authorities admit that there is always a possibility of a terrorist attack at any of the existing plants.

I have here an excerpt from a report issued by the CNSC that shows the possibility of accidents in Canada. Earlier I was saying there are roughly 60 accidents every year. An accident occurred two months ago—and the document from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission talks about an “accident”—involving a fueling machine removing fuel from one of the reactor channels in order to access a process tube and replace the spacer blocks. When it was being moved, the back of the fueling machine broke off and pushed the lift truck against a pillar, which shut the machine off.

The fuel clusters were not affected, but they could have been. If that had happened, they would have spilled outside the cooling water, which could have caused a major accident.

It does not take much to cause an accident. A more serious accident could occur at any given time. Nuclear power is still not safe and is still dangerous.

That is why we want to pass Bill C-5, to protect these generating stations. We would not have to pass such a bill for wind energy. There is no risk of anyone being hit on the head by a rotor blade. We would not have to pass such a bill for solar energy because it is not dangerous. The worst that can happen is that a panel or a pipe breaks. With geothermal we can produce large quantities of electricity and we would not have to legislate that energy either. Why? Because there is no risk of catastrophe with geothermal plants. I toured one this winter in New Zealand. It has been there for 50 years. They have to replace a few pipes now and then, but there is no danger. The risk of catastrophe only exists with nuclear energy and natural gas terminals, as I was saying earlier.

Fortunately, no radiation leaked from the nuclear generating station during this accident. And the term “accident” does in fact appear in the document. I am not making it up.

I heard my colleague say earlier that if facilities were built underground, it would be less dangerous. That does not solve all the problems. It does not solve the problems with transporting MOX; or with mining and transporting uranium 235; or with safely disposing of spent radioactive materials; or with the use of cooling water and the possibility of leaks after an earthquake. It also does not solve the problem of potential terrorist attacks, or the risks of sabotage, even if facilities are built underground. So it does not solve all the problems. That is why a nuclear power plant, underground or above ground, is a time bomb.

Earlier I spoke about the transportation of MOX. There are 150 municipalities that have spoken out against this type of transportation because they say it is very dangerous. There is currently an international movement on the quality of safety, called the Integrated Safety Review, which is a cut above what we have now. Yes, safety is a good thing, but the problem with this type of safety review is that it increases the cost of facilities by two or three times the estimated amount, especially for facilities in need of repair.

I will use the example of a facility I know, the Gentilly facility. The cost of renovating this facility had been estimated at $1.5 billion. Aggel and Baly, people whose job it is to assess the cost of work to be done on nuclear facilities, estimated that if the new standards were applied, the cost would rise to $2 billion, a significant increase. They also say that this price could very likely go up to $3 billion, double the original estimate.

However, all that is for a very limited length of time, because that is the problem. I had a graph that I would like to show the House. A nuclear facility produces electricity at peak capacity for only a brief period of time. Looking at the table, we can see that the first nuclear reactors came on line in 1970 and reached peak production in 1995. Since then, they have been declining steadily. They are less and less efficient. Even if they are renovated, they will not last much longer.

Mr. Speaker, I see that I have only a minute left, but I could have talked about nuclear energy all afternoon, as it is an extremely important issue.

At present, safety is not what it should be. The newspapers recently reported that an additional $93 million was needed for safety.

I would like the money spent on nuclear safety to be invested in green energy sources such as wind and geothermal energy. The government would see that other types of projects cost far less and are much safer. We are pro-safety. If the government is really pro-safety, it should not be building any more nuclear facilities.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from the Bloc for his presentation. I have worked with him over the past two years and I know his great concern about creating an environment and an economy where we can move to a green future. It is certainly within the context of this debate. I know his concerns around the expansion of the nuclear industry. He spoke to the need to bring these new energy forms onto a common playing field. That is something I agree with as well.

It is one of the reasons we have put forward so many amendments to this bill, to try to get to a point where we could have a bill that truly represents the real costs of nuclear energy. Across the world, many other countries are taking a different tone about the level of liability that needs to be held by the industry. In Germany, for instance, there is unlimited liability. In the United States, the liability limit is some $10 billion.

Why does my honourable colleague support this bill even though it does not really bring the nuclear industry to a level playing field in terms of its own responsibility for the liability that may ensue from any kind of accident occurring within a plant?

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Western Arctic for his excellent question. We support this bill and hope that it will be adopted. We believe that we have asked for as much as we can. We cannot go any further in terms of insurance. This bill was drafted with that in mind. We could not ask insurers for $2 or $3 billion because then we would not have any insurers. We had to be realistic.

I tried to show that we are not necessarily pro-nuclear and that there has to be a thorough assessment of the impact of nuclear development before proceeding. However, we think that $650 million is a realistic, achievable figure for the 22 existing power plants.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my honourable colleague for his presentation. I also want to thank him for his excellent work on committee. He is a valuable member of our committee. He was a member of the committee when we conducted the study on AECL earlier this year.

I want to hear his comments on the government's decision about 10 days ago to cancel the MAPLE project without offering any plan or solution to ensure the supply of medical isotopes that many Canadians and citizens of the world rely on. How does he feel about that decision and how does he feel the government is handling it?

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question. I really appreciate his work with the committee.

Currently, the government is at an impasse. MAPLE cannot proceed because the expertise necessary to complete the project is lacking. They aimed too high, too fast. On the other hand, they have to deal with reactors that are at the end of their life cycle.

The government has a hot potato on its hands, as they say. It does not know what to do with it and is just hoping that the existing reactors will last long enough to find an alternative. I have to say that I find that pretty amateurish.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my hon. colleague for his fine speech and I would also like to congratulate him for his work in committee. We are at third reading and this is a bill that has really been examined from every possible angle.

We agree with the members who say that $650 million is not enough. In my opinion, the status quo is also unacceptable, since the current amount of compensation is $75 million. This is completely unacceptable and illustrates the negligence shown by this federal government and previous governments that did nothing about this situation.

I know my colleague is equally concerned about nuclear safety and recent events have been very worrisome.

Can he tell us about his concerns regarding the statements made by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which, as we learned from La Presse, has said that it does not have enough financial and human resources to properly carry out its mission?

Can he please comment on what was revealed in yesterday's edition of La Presse?

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Beauharnois—Salaberry for her very insightful question. I touched on this quickly earlier, saying that in the past year, CNSC has had to increase its safety and staffing budget by $2.8 million.

Their budget is $93 million. That was in the papers and it seems realistic to me considering the risks involved. However, we have to realize how expensive nuclear energy is for all citizens. I am not talking about those who pay for electricity, because they pay for it whether it comes from natural gas or wind power. People who buy electricity do not pay for safety. That is another government budget and everyone has to pay for safety. It is quite alarming, but in the meantime, we can be glad that the CNSC is being vigilant and calling for increased safety. There is a better chance of avoiding accidents with a call for increased safety and if we use the integrated system I mentioned earlier that meets the international standard. Canada is lagging behind in that respect.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, in reference to my previous question to the hon. member, I want to go back to that because he stated that the insurance companies would not be able to put forward the type of coverage that would be required for the industry if they had a larger amount than $650 million. In the United States, the Americans extend the coverage to almost $10 billion. Certainly, many of the reactors in Canada are located in areas that are adjacent to cities, much like the United States.

The position of the industry has been that the insurance companies are not willing to cover the larger amount. How can we be sure? How do the companies that run the reactors in the United States achieve this level of liability insurance within their country? Why is it so that we as Canadians in our country cannot achieve the same thing through our insurance companies?

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the comments by my colleague from Western Arctic because this gives me the opportunity to point out that in the United States, there are 144 nuclear generating stations that share what they call one “pot”. They pool all their money together, between $9 billion and $11 billion. That is why this varies, since it is based on the assets that are invested.

There is no insurance policy. They do not deal with an insurance company. They never would have gotten such insurance from any company. They pool their money together. Here in Canada we have just 22 generating stations. Even if they pooled their money together, they obviously would not come up with $9 billion or $10 billion. That would force them to close. It may be a good idea, but that is not the issue. This is a matter of protecting the public.

The insurance companies have said that when it comes to protecting the public, they cannot go any higher than $650 million. It will be hard enough to find insurers. We will have to find reinsurers to get to $650 million.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, this is a challenging topic for the House. One of the things I have heard in this discussion about Bill C-5, an act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, is that we should support the new limits proposed in this bill because they are better than the old ones. It seems to me that argument, in itself, is fundamentally flawed because it is like saying half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.

We have seen other pieces of legislation proposed in the House of Commons that we subsequently had to go in and fix because they were inadequate. One of them was the voter identification piece of legislation, which disenfranchised over a million rural voters. Because the House did not perform its due diligence, we passed a piece of legislation that was deeply flawed.

In addition, we are being asked to say that we have trust and confidence in the current Conservative government to manage this particular file. Of course, the whole shemozzle around Chalk River was such that I would argue that Canadians do not have confidence in the government to deal with this in a fair and reasonable manner.

New Democrats have been raising issues and concerns around this piece of legislation. In particular, I want to talk about the very good work that the member for Western Arctic has done. He proposed many amendments to try to improve this piece of legislation and, unfortunately, they were not supported by members of the House.

In addition, I know that the members for Vancouver Island North and Victoria have also raised concerns around some of the challenges in this piece of legislation.

I want to talk a bit about where this bill came from. In order to facilitate the development of the nuclear industry in Canada, the federal government has developed legislation to limit the amount of damages a nuclear plant operator would have to pay out should there be an accident causing radiological contamination to property outside the plant area itself. Such legislation is necessary as private insurers refuse to compensate for damage due to a nuclear accident or incident.

The current legislation dates from the 1970s and is woefully inadequate with a liability limit of $75 million. By comparison, a new mine usually has to post an environmental bond of approximately $50 million. This low level of liability is creating an impediment for foreign, particularly American, private industry for purchasing Canadian nuclear industries.

Under American law, a foreign victim of an accident caused by an American headquartered company can sue for damages under American law if the foreign law is insufficient by international standards. These changes bring the legislation in line with minimum international standards. It is important to note that.

We look to Canada often to become a leader in any number of areas and, sadly, what we have seen over this last two years in particular is an erosion of Canada's leadership on many files, such as international human rights obligations.

We have certainly seen the government abandon our leadership role around the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by refusing to sign on to it, one of only three countries left. Australia reversed its position.

On the environment, we have certainly seen the government stonewall in every way possible with the Kyoto protocol and trying to demonstrate it is a leader as it is actually rejoining the age of the dinosaurs, I would suggest.

Bill C-5 limits the total liability of a nuclear operator to $650 million, which is the bottom of the international average. For amounts above that number, a special tribunal would be set up by the Minister of Natural Resources and further funds would come out of the public purse. This basically means that a nuclear operator would only have to pay out a maximum of $650 million while the public would be on the hook for millions, possibly billions, of dollars in case of an accident.

I mentioned the fact that the member for Western Arctic put forward 35 amendments and I am going to talk a bit about those amendments. One of the clauses he proposed was in relation to the removal of the $650 million international bottom line standard and actually having the full gamut available.

In that context, I want to quote from the speech given by the member for Western Arctic:

One of the key amendments that we are looking for is to take out any limit on nuclear liability. Unlimited amounts would probably be the preferred method to deal with it, just as Germany does. It has an unlimited liability on nuclear facilities. That means that whatever the costs are, when there is an accident those who are responsible for the plant will need to pay those costs.

The $650 million limit set in this bill pales next to that of our major trading partner, the United States of America, which has an $8 billion to $10 billion liability ceiling on its nuclear facilities. Most of our nuclear facilities are located in highly populated areas in southern Canada, areas similar to where the nuclear facilities are located in the United States.

The Conservative members often tout U.S. policies on things, so surely they would want to be in line with one of our major trading partners on this very serious issue of nuclear liability. If, after examining the issue, the United States has determined that $8 billion to $10 billion is a reasonable amount for nuclear liability, that would seem something Canada should also seriously examine, although, as the member for Western Arctic has proposed, there should not be a limit on the nuclear liability.

I want to put this in the context of where this came from. The Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage tried to address some of the very serious concerns around civil liability around the world. This is a bit of background on what was happening:

In September 1997, the government took a significant step forward in improving the liability régime for nuclear damage. At a diplomatic conference at IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] Headquarters in Vienna, 8-12 September 1997, delegates from over 80 States adopted a Protocol to Amend the 1963 Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage and also adopted a Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage.The Protocol sets the possible limits of the operator's liability at not less than 300 million Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) (roughly equivalent to 400 million US dollars). The Convention on Supplementary Compensation defines additional amounts to be provided through contributions by States Parties on the basis of installed nuclear capacity and UN rate of assessment.The Convention is an instrument to which all States may adhere regardless of whether they are parties to any existing nuclear liability conventions or have nuclear installations on their territories. The Protocol contains inter alia a better definition of nuclear damage (now also addressing the concept of environmental damage and preventive measures), extends the geographical scope of the Vienna Convention, and extends the period during which claims may be brought for loss of life and personal injury. It also provides for jurisdiction of coastal states over actions incurring nuclear damage during transport. Taken together, the two instruments should substantially enhance the global framework for compensation well beyond that foreseen by existing Conventions. Before the action in September 1997, the international liability regime was embodied primarily in two instruments, i.e. the Vienna Convention on Civil liability for Nuclear Damage of 1963 and the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy of 1960 linked by the Joint Protocol adopted in 1988. The Paris Convention was later built up by the 1963 Brussels Supplementary Convention. These Conventions are based on the civil law concept and share the following main principles:

There are a number of principles outlined in these conventions, but I just want to talk about a couple of them.

One is that the liability is channelled exclusively to the operators of the nuclear installations. Another is that the liability of the operator is absolute; for example, the operator is held liable irrespective of fault. Another is that the operator must maintain insurance of other financial security for an amount corresponding to his liability. If such security is insufficient, the installation state is obliged to make up the difference up to the limit of the operator's liability.

It is on this last point where we are very concerned that Canadian taxpayers may be on the hook for the difference between the $650 million and the millions and millions over and above that amount which could be incurred in a nuclear incident.

We often hear Conservative members talk about being concerned about the taxpayers' purse and accountability. I would suggest they make sure to bring in legislation that actually does protect taxpayers from being on the hook for a potential incident.

I want to turn for a moment to the economics of nuclear power. One of the things that is important in this consideration is the age and the state of nuclear facilities, and the kind of investment that is made for future nuclear stations, if that is the direction the government should choose to go in. However, I know that many members in the House and certainly many of my constituents do not support nuclear power as a viable option.

In its paper “The Economics of Nuclear Power”, Greenpeace provided an analysis of a variety of elements that go into building and maintaining nuclear power stations. I am not going to deal in depth with a number of them, but the executive summary states:

The civilian nuclear power industry has been in operation for over fifty years. During such a long period, it would be usual for technological improvements and experience to result in learning and subsequently enhancements in economic efficiency. However, the nuclear industry has not followed this pattern.

It provided an analysis on the rising construction costs, rising construction times, falling construction demand and untested technology. It talks about generation III and III+ reactors and the fact that this is untested technology for the longer term.

Of course, when we are talking about liability, we want to understand a variety of factors in terms of the condition of the nuclear industry in Canada. In talking about an unfavourable marketplace, it states:

The economics of nuclear power have always been questionable. The fact that consumers or governments have traditionally borne the risk of investment in nuclear power plants meant that utilities were insulated from these risks and were able to borrow money at rates reflecting the reduced risk to investors and lenders.

Again, it comes back to insurance. The taxpayers could be on the hook. They are in a position where the industry itself is not bearing the true cost of what it takes to maintain and operate a nuclear power plant. In this case I would argue once again that the limit to liability should be removed. It is the nuclear industry itself that should have the full responsibility for insurance around operating these plants.

This paper, “The Economics of Nuclear Power”, goes on to talk about a nuclear renaissance. It states:

The much touted “nuclear renaissance” assumes that new plants will be built cheaper than the alternatives, on time and to cost, that they will operate reliably and that the cost of dealing with long-term liabilities such as waste disposal and decommissioning will stabilize. However, wishing for an outcome is not sufficient to make it fact. Until nuclear power actually meets all these criteria on a sustained basis, the additional risks of nuclear investment will be large.

It goes on to talk about the fact that the nuclear industry only survives because of significant subsidies. It states:

It is now 29 years since the last order for a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. and 34 years since the last order for a plant that was actually completed. Utilities suffered heavy losses in the 1980s as economic regulators became increasingly unwilling to pass huge cost overruns from nuclear projects on to consumers, forcing utilities to bear the extra costs. The introduction of power markets has meant that plant owners are now fully exposed not just to the risk of cost overruns but also to plant unreliability.

Again it is all of these factors that have to be considered when we are talking about potential risk to the taxpayer in Canada.

I want to talk a bit about decommissioning. Decommissioning of these plants is a long and complicated process. Many times the costs for decommissioning are passed on decades into the future for future generations. Of course, when the costs for decommissioning at today's current rates are considered, they are often completely out of line with what the eventual decommissioning costs will be.

With respect to funding long term liabilities, the Greenpeace paper, “The Economics of Nuclear Power”, states:

There is a moral imperative for the “polluters” to take all reasonable measures to ensure that those that have to perform the cleanup are given sufficient money to do the job. This imperative has three main dimensions:

Estimates of the expected cost should be conservative or pessimistic, especially where the cost is not well established so that funds are not inadequate because the cost is greater than expected;

Funds collected from consumers should be placed in very low risk investments to minimize the risk that the funds will be lost. Such investments inevitably yield a low interest rate;

Funds should not be accessible by the company that owns the plant other than for decommissioning purposes.

The Greenpeace paper refers to the experience of the United Kingdom:

The experience of the United Kingdom in dealing with long term liabilities is salutary, with costs consistently underestimated and provisions not adequately safeguarded.

There is certainly experience throughout the world which says that the true cost and liabilities for operating these plants are not borne by the plant operators. Costs are often underestimated, in the construction phase and subsequently in the decommissioning phase and at some point taxpayers are on the hook for this. That does not seem to be a responsible way to proceed with this.

In a conversation about nuclear power and nuclear liability, one of the other things that has to come up is whether or not this is the best use of taxpayers' money and whether or not we should actually be investing our time and our energy in alternative energy strategies. The document, “The Economics of Nuclear Power”, talks about energy efficiency and renewable electricity sources:

Energy efficiency must be the cornerstone of future energy policies. The potential for energy efficiency is huge. According to the French Ministry of Economy, changes in the production, transmission and use of energy (including transport) could result in a halving of global energy consumption--from the business as usual scenario--resulting in the saving of 9,000 million tonnes of oil equivalent...per year by 2050.

This is in terms of the conservation end of it and using more efficient appliances, more efficient automobiles, more efficient home heating, and more efficient building and retrofitting of housing and commercial and industrial buildings. We need to pay full attention and put our resources toward improving energy efficiency in this country.

The other piece is renewable electricity sources. In the context of a global study, it was found that hydroelectricity and wind energy are expected to deliver the biggest increases in electricity production by 2020. In the context of renewable energy sources, Canada is lagging behind the rest of the world.

My province of British Columbia is fortunate because a significant portion of its electricity comes from hydroelectric sources. The dams were built many years ago so the environmental damage has already been done. British Columbia is in a fortunate position because it has a fairly clean energy source.

Many of the provinces in Canada, such as Ontario, have been under pressure to build new nuclear facilities because they have not invested in some of the other more environmentally friendly, cleaner, renewable energy sources. That is why this bill is an important piece of legislation. If people are starting to propose the addition of new nuclear facilities, it is important that the plant owners bear the true cost of building those plants.

Canada does not have a comprehensive strategy from coast to coast to coast to look at the needs of Canadians in terms of electricity sources. Recently, a newspaper story stated that the government of Nunavut is spending 25% of its budget on diesel because it has not had the support of the federal government to develop alternative energy strategies. As fuel prices climb in this country communities are going to be increasingly marginalized because they do not have access to other tools and resources that we should have been developing over the last 20 years.

The member for Western Arctic proposed a number of amendments in order that the bill would better suit the needs of the Canadian public. Because those amendments were not supported, the NDP is not in a position to support this piece of legislation.

[The Deputy Speaker, Bill Blaikie]

Before I entertain questions and comments, it is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Hull—Aylmer, Minister of the Environment; the hon. member for Kitchener Centre, Ethics; the hon. member for Gatineau, Official Languages.

Questions and comments. The hon. member for Beauharnois--Salaberry.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I share many of the same concerns as the NDP member, and I understand her worries about this bill. However, I think that she agrees that the status quo was no longer acceptable.

I am very disappointed today. When we talk about nuclear liability, we should also be talking about nuclear safety. But this morning the NDP sided with the government to keep the Standing Committee on Natural Resources from talking about nuclear safety at the Chalk River laboratory, isotopes and the MAPLE reactors. It is discouraging to see the NDP talking about the importance of nuclear liability, yet this morning they sided with the Conservative government against a study we had committed to.

I would like the deputy who just spoke to tell us where the consistency is between this morning's decision to block the nuclear review and her interest in nuclear liability. I would really like to hear her explanation.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is not my understanding of what happened. I know the member for Vancouver Island North has been pushing hard for a review of this matter. I hardly believe that we would be aligned with the Conservatives on issues around renewable energy and nuclear liability. It does not seem possible given the context of what we have been talking about.

We do share concerns around the inadequacy of the current limits. However, it is unfortunate that the Bloc was not able to support the amendments put forward by the member for Western Arctic. Those amendments would have ensured we were able to protect the liability of Canadian taxpayers from nuclear incidents.

[Shawn Murphy, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to get the member's views on what is happening internationally. Canada, for quite some time now, has not had a new nuclear facility, nor have that many been built in the United States. However, in other countries there have been quite a number of new nuclear facilities and new technologies vis-à-vis the disposition and storage of waste, especially in France.

We are certainly under no obligation to follow what is going on in some of the G-7 or G-20 countries but would this legislation conform to what is going on in this area in other developed countries?

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my understanding is that we are again at the bottom of the international standards with this particular legislation and once again Canada is in a position of playing catch-up with other countries.

The amendment put forward by the member for Western Arctic to remove the $650 million liability and make it an unlimited liability that the plant operators would be responsible for, would have been an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate some leadership.

I talked about some of the new generation of technology when I was speaking to this. Some of the newer generation of technology is still relatively unproven. I cannot remember in which country it was being implemented, but the Generation III and III+ reactors are being implemented. However, these reactors have not been around for a sufficient period of time to demonstrate whether they will be efficient enough or whether the cost will justify them, particularly in light of the liability.

Because Canada, in the past, has not appropriately funded places like Chalk River, we are way behind the mark on this. We probably are years behind in terms of taking any kind of leadership role.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a comment and ask the member a question.

Unfortunately, the member for Beauharnois—Salaberry said that the NDP was somehow in cahoots with the Conservatives by agreeing to study the issue of greening of electricity in Canada, which we are very interested in, while all the time the nuclear liability bill was at committee, the Bloc was agreeing with the Conservatives and not supporting our amendment. I am confused that when we agree on one hand and disagree on the other that we are somehow in cahoots.

When I spoke to the bill earlier, I mentioned that some of the programs the government had in place, such as the ecoenergy program, were inadequate and that members from my community and other communities had written to tell me that.

The hon. member for Nanaimo—Cowichan spoke about alternative energies to nuclear, which we should be advocating, but the member for Cambridge basically told me that I was not doing my job and telling people that these programs were not working well.

I just received an email from a woman telling me that the program does not include solar panels, wind or electric heating. She has provided the link so that he can better understand the program. She called on the member to issue an apology to me, which I found quite flattering.

I just wonder if the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan could expand on some of the things that she is hearing in her riding from constituents who are not able to access the programs because they are inadequate.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Vancouver Island North for her work on trying to promote green renewable energy sources.

On Vancouver Island many homeowners are suffering because of the rising fuel prices. People are having trouble deciding whether to pay for food or heating.

With regard to accessing the programs the Conservative government put forward, I have heard consistently from people in my riding that it takes tremendous effort for very little return. Many people have simply given up, if they can even find the information to begin with.

I would echo the constituent of the member for Vancouver Island North who wrote her about the challenges with the program. If we are truly serious about this, we need to actually put money into retrofits and ensure they are accessible and available, particularly for middle and low income families.

We also need to ensure that programs around fuel efficient cars are such that they do support the greening of the auto sector, along with a number of other initiatives that would help us actually conserve energy and make us much more productive and efficient in those areas.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are debating Bill C-5 today at third reading, which is quite an important bill in the scheme of things.

The need for the bill was generated over a number of years. Suffice to say that the nuclear power option and the use of nuclear power plants for energy production began here after the second world war and was highly regulated under a statute that stayed pretty much the same for most of those years, and, as in so many other areas, an update or a modernization is required. This particular bill addresses, for the most part, the liability component of the envelope.

The area is highly regulated. No matter what we do involving the nuclear industry, it is always highly regulated. Some people in Canada do not believe we should be as reliant on nuclear energy as we are. The fact is that in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, there is substantial reliance. I think in Ontario, one-third of the current power needs are generated by nuclear energy. I am saying that to indicate that the nuclear generation option is not going away. We will continue to rely on it for many years and some of our provinces have made that decision.

To be sure, there are other sources of energy. We are capable of improving our production of hydroelectric energy. We continue to generate electrical energy from gas. We may be using coal in some parts of Canada. Our neighbour to the south is certainly using it in some parts the country. Wind and solar options are there too but nuclear will remain.

Is it efficient? Is it cost effective? Is it clean? Is it safe? Is it renewable? All those questions are there and are part of the continuing debate.

The bill does not alter any of those but it does recognize that there have been a lot of changes in Canadian society, in the world, in the financial world, in the insurance world and in our perspectives on nuclear energy and the risks associated with it that caused us to modernize the statute that governs this very regulated industry.

If people wanted to produce some solar energy, some wind energy in a particular province, they would call it co-generation and plug it into the electricity grid, and they could probably do it without much regulation. However, if they were to try to do some nuclear generation, they could not move without a licence in their back pockets or maybe a dozen licences.

I should also say that Canadians, whether or not they know it, are actually quite reliant on some radioactive processes, both for health care and for some industrial processes. Radioactivity and radioactive isotopes are found in many of our communities. They are closely controlled and serve us all very well, whether we actually know it or not.

To be sure, there are some background radiation sources with low level radiation. They are found in various places across the country, including where uranium is mined or has been mined and where there are tailings. We generally manage those things fairly well and the Government of Canada is quite involved in that. Wherever it is higher than background level of radiation, the Government of Canada believes it has a jurisdiction and it acts.

The bill itself re-establishes a revised liability scheme for civil liability and compensation for this envelope of activity. It is worth pointing out that the previous statute had a maximum liability for an operator of a paltry $75 million.

These days, when it comes to potential liability for anything, whether we have some bad peanut butter, or drive a car, or a truck, or a train or fly an aircraft, $75 million is not a lot of coverage for potential liability. That has been recognized now for some time. The bill would correct that by increasing the limit up to $650 million.

Some may say that is not a lot either. However, the bill was reviewed by the standing committee of the House of Commons and that limit was selected after looking at the basic principles of nuclear liability.

I will reiterate the four principles for the record. First, the operator is the party that is liable, nobody else. Second, the operator of the nuclear facility is exclusively liable for damages if there is an accident. Third, the operator must carry insurance. Fourth, the liability is by statute limited. There are time limitations and dollar limitations, in this case running up to $650 million. This is important. Those who supply materials to the nuclear operator do not face liability for second and third party liability. They can safely deliver the commodity or service to the nuclear operator and they do not have to deal with the potential liability if there is an accident.

Fortunately we have not had any serious accidents in Canada. There have been accidents in two, three or four in various places around the world. The one most people will recall is Chernobyl. The implications of that have been experienced right around the world for all these years.

The factors involved in picking this number include the foreseeable risk. That means the amount chosen was based on what an operator might anticipate as a risk and not from a catastrophic unforeseen event. Our nuclear reactors all have second and third backup fail-safe systems.

This legislation would bring Canada up to par and to the same level as most of the other countries that produce nuclear energy, certainly the western countries. We would get to the $650 million limit not in one slice, but in several years of phase-in, which would be done by regulation.

Under the bill, the government and Parliament will be able to review this every five years. Things may change some more in the coming years.

The statute takes account of what are actually huge changes in the insurance industry. The insurance will have to be obtained only through an approved insurer. The government and the House have recognized that there are other ways of insuring these days, which perhaps were not available 50 years ago. They include government guarantees, letters of credit, some types of self-insurance and the big one of reinsurance.

In some cases some carriers of insurance will not insure unless they have the ability to reinsure, and that means spreading out the risk to shareholders and investors in different parts of the jurisdiction or even around the world. A lot of major insurance contracts now are reinsured to spread the risk around the world. The reinsurance mechanism, which is now an industry standard, can be used here where an approved insurer will not insure without the reinsurance piece.

The insurance and civil liability also cover the movement of radioactive materials, either the uranium coming in if it is above the level and the spent uranium in the fuel rods or whatever else might be radioactive and transported. There have not been any accidents that I am aware of right now, but there can be with these things and people can be harmed, so we are insuring against those too.

It is notable that since the nuclear industry began, we have realized that sometimes the harm associated with an exposure to radiation will not be seen for many years. Therefore, the time limitation on a claim for bodily injury from exposure to radiation is now pushed out to 30 years. The other limitation for property damage is 10 years, but for bodily injury and death there is a 30 year limitation period.

In the event that a nuclear accident crossed a provincial boundary, if we did not have this legislation, we would probably have litigation going on in two separate provincial court systems. There is a provision in the bill that where there is a boundary straddling circumstance, the claim may be made in the Federal Court.

The last thing I want to say about that is in the event of a major accident, the government may establish a nuclear claims tribunal, in other words, to take it out of the courts and establish a special tribunal to deal with actual liability claims and any awards that will have to be made.

What the government has provided for in the bill and what the House has approved is a certain amount of free market interplay with the insurance and reinsurance scheme. In theory, that should keep the insurance costs down or at least competitive and the nuclear station power operators will have the benefit of having improved accessibility to insurance and improved cost efficiencies.

The proposed bill also provides for a reciprocating arrangement with other countries. There is always the risk that a nuclear operator is a corporation that straddles international boundaries or the nuclear operation may be close to a boundary. For example, in my riding of Scarborough—Rouge River, the very east end of the city of Toronto, is only 10 or 20 kilometres from the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. The generating station is on the shore of Lake Ontario and that itself is only a few kilometres from the boundary of the United States of America.

There is the ability under this statute for the Government of Canada to enter into an agreement with another country to deal with the possibility of nuclear accidents and liabilities in a reciprocating agreement where it would accept our procedures and we might accept its. The ability is there and in the increasingly global environment, that is probably a good thing.

I commend the committee that looked at the bill. I cannot assume anything about third reading, but my party certainly will support it. My hope is that we will get to third reading fairly soon.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, be read the third time and passed, and of the motion that this question be now put.

Nuclear Liability Compensation Act

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to some of the issues that my hon. colleague brought up. We were concerned with many of them. We put forward amendments, both at committee and in the House, over the time we dealt with the bill, which is a considerable length of time. One of them is the reinsurance provisions.

The hon. member alluded to the reinsurance provisions within the bill and said that the insurance companies could reach out to other insurance companies. If they felt they could not take this risk on themselves, they could reinsure with other insurance companies.

However, in the bill the federal government is empowered to be the reinsurer of the nuclear facilities. If they are unable to accomplish the insurance with the insurance company, the government can step in and become the reinsurer. In other words, it can take over the liability of the insurance for the particular facility. We had a lot of trouble with this clause. We did not see this as setting up the nuclear industry as separate, distinct and on its own two feet. We saw this as the government would be brought into insuring high-risk nuclear facilities.

How does this match up to understanding that the industry will work in an unsubsidized, unsupported manner from the government? How will this phase, which we tried to eliminate, prevent government from holding the liability for the nuclear plants that are not up to the standards that regular insurers would cover?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member, either on his own or with his party, was not comfortable with the Government of Canada stepping in, or I suppose a provincial government could as well, as a reinsurer or a guarantor. I take it he is referring to the guarantee piece for a government. My understanding of the bill is a government could become a guarantor of a insurance contract or be a surety for a reinsurance contract.

The member is correct in suggesting that having the government do it is a non-market mechanism in many respects will appear to be a benefit or a subsidy to the nuclear industry. However, it is also a fact that it is highly unlikely we would have any nuclear capability in our country if it were not for a government infrastructure that regulated it in the first place. Most people will recognize that the essential component of the nuclear industry carries a lot of risk with it. It is simply not something we can carry around in our back pocket. Therefore, the presence of the government should not be a surprise.

I know the bill offers the potential, with government approval, of normal insurance-reinsurance mechanisms so the risk is spread around and the costs of the insurance are kept within reason.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I want to refer to subclause 26(1) in the bill. It states:

The Minister may enter into an agreement with an approved insurer under which Her Majesty in right of Canada reinsures some or all of the risk assumed by the insurer under insurance referred to in subsection 24(1).

Subclause 26(2) states:

The risks that may be reinsured are those that, in the Minister’s opinion, would not be assumed by an approved insurer without the agreement or those that are prescribed by regulation.

Subclause 26(3) states:

The reinsurance agreement may provide for the payment of premiums to Her Majesty in right of Canada.

Quite clearly, we see that the government then becomes the reinsurer. It is collecting the premiums. It is assuming the risk. This is not a question of a guarantee. This is a question of the government actually providing the services of the private sector in insurance.

We tried to remove this from the bill so we would have a more level playing field for nuclear energy, where nuclear energy had to stand on its own two feet. Does the member not think this should be excised from the bill?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

No, Mr. Speaker, the government role is there. The member has read the sections. The government is capable of reinsuring. The government, by that same wording, is apparently capable of seeking other reinsurance itself to reinsure its own reinsurance.

The insurance risk is therefore spread around. It is done partly in the market and partly with government. To the extent that government alone takes on the risk, I accept that there is a potential saving to the nuclear operator or a potential risk placed on the taxpayer account.

Is it a subsidy? It does not have to be called a subsidy, but it certainly is government participation in assuming a part of the risk of a nuclear operation and potential liability.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my hon. friend and high school colleague a very important question. We have just had information that the MAPLE reactor, which was going to enable us to diversify our ability to produce radioactive isotopes for medical purposes, is now not going to be opened. In fact, it is going to be closed after many millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money have been used to make sure that this reactor was going to be up and running to take the pressure off our 50-year-old NRU reactor at Chalk River.

What does my hon. colleague think about the fact that the government has decided not to open this reactor at all? Does he believe that the government should forthwith try to enable Canadians to have access to a more diversified supply of radioactive isotopes that can be used for the medical procedures that so many people rely on?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Yes, Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague and I are high school mates from many years ago.

I would regret it if something the Government of Canada did or did not do would not facilitate the orderly and reasonably market-oriented production of isotopes for health care and other purposes. Canada has been a leader in this field for many years.

That area of industry would not be here if government had not enabled it, facilitated it and got it running in the first place. We have a lot of skills in it. I would regret it if the government feels it is not able to foster increased production, because the population of the world is growing and medical use of isotopes is growing. I would regret that.

I would call upon the government to look at it again. In my view, the government should not have cold feet. I only have to mention the Avro Arrow and I do not have to go into any other adjectives, but this is a field where Canadian leadership has been strong. Our skills are strong. I would really strongly encourage the government to ensure that we continue to be strong and productive in exporting to the world these very valuable isotope commodities.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, many people may not be aware that Canada is the largest producer of uranium. I know that in his province the Speaker knows this very well.

Does my colleague feel this is an opportunity for Canada to do a better job not only of marketing our uranium production but also of marrying that with our fine ability to produce CANDU reactors? Does my colleague feel that the production of CANDU reactors and nuclear power can be one element, just one, in the array of solutions that we have to move us away from greenhouse gas emissions and the burning of fossil fuels from which those come?

I personally feel that in order for us to deal with greenhouse gas emissions and reduce global warming we will require an array of solutions. There is no one magic bullet, but nuclear power certainly has its place, and Canadians have, quite excitingly, an area of excellence in the nuclear field.

Does my colleague feel that the Government of Canada, through the Department of International Trade and the Minister of International Trade, could do a better job of being able to export this capability of our CANDU nuclear reactors and our ability to marry that up with the sale of uranium to reduce the burning of fossil fuels internationally?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as my colleague knows, the marketplace has caught up with Canada's wealth of uranium. That commodity now has been substantially bid up on world markets, to the point where we can hardly recognize the pricing any more, but the same thing has happened with oil, nickel, copper and many other commodities.

Clearly, our wealth in this particular commodity, as well as our world recognized expertise in medical radioactive isotopes, are pluses for this country in the 21st century. These are 21st century jobs.

As the member points out, the challenge of greenhouse gases is a huge one. As a globe, we are looking down the gun barrel at a huge greenhouse gas problem.

Although the nuclear power generation envelope is expensive and complex and carries risks with it, on the question of greenhouse gases it is a no-brainer. Very low greenhouse gas is associated with the whole stream of production of nuclear energy. There are certainly some greenhouse gases, because the uranium has to be mined.

I would just caution the government to take note that in the field of nuclear fission and the production of nuclear energy using uranium, whether it is the Candu system using heavy water or the other systems in use around the world, these ought to be promoted for use responsibly. It is not every country that can take on the challenge of producing energy using uranium, but many countries can and I think many countries should.

Canada has an expertise. It has an export. The same holds--

[The Deputy Speaker, Bill Blaikie]

Order. I cannot get hon. members to wind up when they will not look at me.

Resuming debate. The hon. member for Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure today to speak to Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident.

The bill would replace the 1976 Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act and would establish a clear regime in the event of a nuclear accident. The bill establishes a compensation and civil liability regime to address damages resulting from radiation in the event of a radioactive release.

I want to speak a little about the nuclear industry, how it relates to the bill and Canadians, and how it relates to our energy consumption and industry.

Before I go into that, I want to speak about Canada being a world leader in uranium, uranium being the substrate utilized in our reactors. Canada, as I said during questions, is the world's leading producer of uranium. We produce 22% of the world's uranium, which is quite exciting for us.

What is very interesting is that the electricity generated from our Canadian uranium worldwide avoids more than 650 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually. It is really quite amazing that the utilization of uranium actually reduces that much carbon dioxide, which, as we know, is one of the greenhouse gas emissions.

Uranium is a metal and is found in abundance in certain parts of the world. We are lucky that we have it in our country. It is able to generate very large amounts of energy. We know about the possible costs of nuclear utilization. We know what happened in Chernobyl. Perhaps a little later on I will get to how that disaster happened.

However, nuclear energy does not pollute the air and neither does it produce smog or rain. It does not produce any greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide, methane or nitrous oxide. Nuclear energy in Canada avoids the emission of about 90 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year.

What does that mean in terms of cars, for example? Essentially it is equivalent of taking 18 million cars or trucks off the road. That is a staggering amount when we apply it to the real world. The amount of uranium we produce through our reactors in our country is the equivalent of taking 18 million cars off the road every single year, which is about 12% of our greenhouse gas emissions. It also reduces by 10% the amount of smog that would be produced if those cars were allowed to continue on our roads.

Much is made of the factor of radiation emissions from nuclear power plants. It is very interesting that a lot of mythology surrounds it, but I think it is wise for us to put it in context. We know there is a natural supply of radiation in the world. Radon is ubiquitous in nature, and the amount of radiation that we receive from travelling in a plane, for example, is quite extraordinary.

Many of us travel by plane to come to work in these hallowed halls. For those of us who travel from the west coast of Canada to Ottawa, we receive, from a one-way flight, the equivalent of 15 to 20 times the amount of radiation a person would receive if he or she lived on the perimeter of a nuclear power plant. On one trip from Vancouver to Toronto, the amount of radiation we pick up during that one flight, and not a return flight, would be 15 to 20 times the amount of radiation we would pick up if we lived on the perimeter of a nuclear power plant for a period of one year. If we were to travel once across the country one-way, it would be the equivalent of living next to a nuclear power plant for 15 to 20 years. It is quite phenomenal.

It is also important to know that in Canada we have quite a good nuclear safety regulation process. We have not had any substantial accidents in our country, unlike others. The big problem most of us have and are concerned about is the disposition of the spent nuclear rods.

These materials are still of danger. They are buried in the Cambrian Shield, for example, deep within the earth's core. It is done quite safely. There are concerns of course as to the transportation of those materials, but we have very good procedures in our country.

The same cannot be said for other parts of the world, and one of the challenges that I think everybody has, and that I might say is receiving short shrift in terms of the ability of our government to address it in its foreign policy perspective, is the loss of fissile material.

We know, for example, that one of the objectives of terrorist groups is to acquire fissile material, not necessarily to build a bomb, but in essence to use what is called a dirty bomb where they actually take the nuclear material, pad C4 or dynamite around it and blow it up. The effect is that this nuclear material is spread in an isolated area, affecting people in the immediate vicinity of the blast zone, and also there are long term effects of being exposed to nuclear material which can be an array of cancers and other health problems.

The challenge therefore is how we can secure that material, and I will give one anecdote. The Russians had backpack nuclear devices, small nuclear devices that were on backpacks, and when asked where these backpacks were, a key general in the Russian army, a very senior general, said, “I do not know”. Russia cannot account for the backpack nukes that they built during the cold war. That has to be very worrisome to most of us.

Therefore, when the government actually gets around to appointing a foreign minister on a permanent basis, one of the goals of the minister should be to work with his or her counterparts in the United States. I know for a fact that Congress is very concerned about lost nukes and lost fissile material from other parts of the world, particularly Russia and Eastern Europe where it is much easier to acquire this material and the controls on this material are more difficult.

I mentioned Chernobyl. Many people like to equate the fact that because Chernobyl occurred, somehow we are going to have a Chernobyl in Canada. What happened in Chernobyl was that the actual workers in the institute were playing a game. They had turned off all the fail-safe mechanisms, turned off all the redundancies to stop an event from occurring to see how high the temperature would go within the reactor core, with catastrophic results.

However, that was a human failure that occurred, not a failure of the system itself. We know that we can always pervert a system if there is enough determination to do that.

The amount of waste that we have within our own reactors is relatively small and the amount is quite well controlled. The benefits, as I mentioned before, in terms of the production of energy and electricity is vast. The benefits to our environment are quite considerable and it is very important to actually be aware of this.

If we are going to be able to meet our greenhouse gas emission targets through Kyoto or beyond Kyoto, then nuclear power will be a part of that. What is also interesting to know is that the cost to actually manufacture power and through the life span of a nuclear reactor, the costs are equivalent to other alternative forms of energy, such as wind, solar and hydro power. That is important to be aware of because those who choose to demonize nuclear power need to be aware of this.

The other aspect of excellence that we have in our country is in the production of nuclear isotopes that are used in the medical field, and I think it is important for us to know that we as a country produce more than 50% of the medical isotopes in the world.

When the situation occurred not so long ago, with the minister making some grave errors at the end of last year in dealing with the nuclear isotope catastrophe that we had and the shutdown of our nuclear reactor in Chalk River, it bespoke of the fact that we lacked a redundancy in the system. As a physician, I frankly did not know that we did not have a redundancy in our system, so in that time of crisis we were trying to get isotopes from places like South Africa, which produces them too.

In the face of this, we had the production of the MAPLE reactor, but we have learned in the last 24 to 48 hours that the MAPLE reactor is now not going to open up.

What this means for Canadian patients and for those doctors who work in the care and in the diagnosis of patients who are ill is that we do not have the redundancy we need in acquiring the isotopes that are absolutely essential for the more than 60,000 procedures that occur every single day in the care of those who are ill in our country.

I would submit to the government that it has to come to the House and tell the House and the Canadian public what it is doing to ensure that we have redundancy in the production of radioactive isotopes in our country. If it does not do that, and if we have another problem with this 50 year old reactor at Chalk River, I might add, then Canadian patients will be left out on a limb.

Few things are more frightening for patients than to have to get these tests but more frightening to them is to be let down at the last minute that they cannot have the tests because they do not have access to these nuclear materials. It is heartbreaking for the patient. It is heartbreaking for the person's caregiver.

We know MDS Nordion supplies over half of the world's isotopes for the diagnostics and treatment of some very serious illnesses including numerous cancers. It is also used in the diagnosis of a number of diseases both malignancies and non-malignancies. We are also a leader in the development of gamma technology that is used for the elimination of food borne pathogens such as E. coli which can cause an array of problems.

I would only submit that it behooves the government to get on this right away. The Minister of Natural Resources must come to the House and tell the House and tell the Canadian public what he is doing to deal with this problem as quickly as possible.

On the energy security issue, I know that we will have to deal with a number of alternate forms of power including tidal power, wind power and hydro power. I want to draw to the attention of the government a really critical problem that is occurring right now in my province of British Columbia. It is going to wipe out the Similkameen Valley.

The Similkameen River that runs through the Similkameen Valley comes from south of the border. The United States has an option to build a high level dam on the river. That is going to back up the water and cause the destruction of the Similkameen Valley, destroy aboriginal lands owned by them, and destroy a park that is in the middle of that territory. In effect, the flooding of this area is going to wipe out the ability of a new park to occur in southern British Columbia.

What we have heard from the government on this is nothing. The people of the Similkameen Valley are deeply concerned about this, yet there are options. There are in fact three options. Option one is a high level dam that will result in the destruction of the valley, the destruction of aboriginal territories, the severing of a potential national park in half, the destruction of critical habitat, and the destruction of a number of species, flora and fauna that are significant and that are endangered and specific to the valley. The second option is to build a mid-level dam. The mid-level dam can be an option because it will not result in flooding. The third option is a low level dam that would be a run of the river dam.

The last two options, the mid-level dam and the small dam, are options that the government can negotiate with the United States to ensure that it has its power needs met, whereas we ensure that the integrity of the Similkameen Valley is going to continue. However, what is not an option is for the government to remain silent and not to bring this up with the U.S. government.

This requires the urgent attention of the Government of Canada. We have heard nothing on this whatsoever. I would like, as a British Columbia member of Parliament, to ask the government to come to the House as quickly as possible to inform the House and the Canadian public what the minister is going to do to address this particular problem.

It is grave, it is critical, and it requires the minister's and the government's utmost urgency, otherwise we are going to have a very big problem in British Columbia. It will be an environmental disaster, it will be a political disaster, and it will be an economic disaster.

The next issue concerns the oil sands. I know many of the members in the government come from the beautiful province of Alberta. The oil sands are in an area of some potential. They are in an area that is fraught with a lot of difficulty and could produce an environmental catastrophe.

The water issue alone is enough to make Albertans deeply concerned about this particular issue. That perhaps is why Alberta is looking toward the development of a nuclear reactor so it can get some of its energy needs from the reactor.

If the tar sands continue to go the way they are going the water security of the people of Alberta will be deeply damaged. Their ability to actually engage in farming and agriculture production that they have done so ably for so long will be compromised, and the beauty and environmental integrity of what I consider one of the most beautiful parts of the world will be damaged. This does not have to happen, but what it requires is a government that is willing to get off its backside and engage the private sector that wants the government to do it, to address the challenges within the tar sands.

If the government does not do that then the development of the tar sands without any consideration whatsoever for the environmental and larger economic concerns of other industries in Alberta will be a catastrophe for the people and province of Alberta as well as the people of Canada and for the world. The environmental damage that would be inflicted on the world and our country by that particular project would be so profound that it would damage the ability for us to get a hold of our greenhouse gas emissions in the future for a very long time to come.

This is not a given but it does require leadership and it does require the government working with the private sector. I want to emphasize that the oil producers in Alberta are smart people. They know the problems that they face and they would like to work with the government to resolve those problems. The people of Alberta know that and they want this to happen, too, but what they have received from some of their elected officials and from the government is dead silence. That is not an option.

Lastly, I want to address two other options. One is the issue of tidal power. Our country actually, interestingly enough, is a leader in this field. Many of the phenomenal scientists who have been involved in tidal power have actually exported their talents to other parts of the world such as Great Britain. Great Britain has overcome some of the initial scientific problems and obstructions that existed with tidal power. There were rusting problems, problems in terms of tidal movements being translated into the energy that is produced and also some security and consistency in the way that it is done. But those interestingly enough have actually been overcome, overcome I might add by Canadian scientists.

Now, our job is to bring those scientists and technologies back to Canada and to utilize tidal power. My riding of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca is on Vancouver Island. When I am back home on the island, all I see is potential energy that is going to waste and I ask myself, would it not be remarkable if we were able to harness the energy and utilize it, particularly in coastal areas?

It would be clean without any production of greenhouse gases. This could be one of the major exports that we could have, one of the things we could use within our own country to reduce our dependence on carbon-based fuels, but also it could be a phenomenal export potential for our country because many of the people of the world actually live in coastal areas.

One can imagine the potential that exists if we were able to capitalize and become world leaders in the area of tidal power. We are doing some of that in fact in my riding of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca. We have an area near Race Rocks but that kind of superb cutting edge science and research needs the attention of the federal government to ensure that we are able to maximize that potential, and utilize and export it to other countries.

The Liberal Party will be conditionally supporting the bill as it moves forward. Our critics will keep an eagle eye on it to make sure that it meets our demands in the interests of Canadians. If it continues to be a good bill, and answers our questions and those of our citizens, then we will support it through to the end.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca talked quite a bit about the Alberta tar sands and how much greenhouse gases were being produced by the production there. He also mentioned how this was having a devastating impact on our climate and our greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the things we know is that the National Energy Board recently approved two more pipelines, the Alberta Clipper and the Southern Lights pipelines, that will take raw bitumen directly to refineries in the U.S.

Does the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca think that is a good idea for Canada? Once those pipelines are built they will increase production of the tar sands probably 10 or 20-fold, which will have an even more devastating impact on the climate.

The other thing we know is that the production there is having a serious effect on the climate and the water. We know that first nations in that area are very concerned about their health. Strange cancers are showing up in the first nations of that area and it is having a devastating impact on their communities. It is also the issue of jobs and the environment that are at risk.

I am curious to know if the member thinks that we should continue to increase production in the tar sands to this extent.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think this is an either/or situation. I think we have an option.

As I said in my speech, the unrestrained development of the tar sands does not suit the people of Alberta, the people of Canada nor the world on a number of levels, not only from an environmental perspective, such as the release of greenhouse gas emissions, damage to water supplies, pollution of water supplies and the diminution of water supplies, but it also releases cancer causing and teratogenic materials that are having an effect on people who live in the area.

What we need to do is ensure that if the tar sands go forward we address those concerns. We need to look at ways to pursue carbon dioxide sequestration. We need look at ways to ensure that carcinogenic and teratogenic materials that are produced as byproducts of the industrial production of the tar sands will not be released. We also need to ensure that the health and safety concerns of not only the people who live in the region but also the workers are addressed.

An exciting thing about it is that we do have options. An exciting thing is that the private sector, the companies that are involved in this, want the federal government to work with them. The people of Alberta want the federal government to work with them. What I think is so heartbreaking for the people of Alberta is that they are not seeing the leadership within their own province that would enable them to do that.

Albertans have a Prime Minister from their province but he has a tin ear to this particular issue. That is utterly irresponsible.

There are solutions and perhaps we can join with the member to implore the government and the Prime Minister to get on with it and deal with this issue because time is running out.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, last night we listened to four or five hours of overblown rhetoric by the Minister of Finance, apparently exercised about a carbon tax. He seemed to know more about the Liberal plan for greenhouse gas emissions than any other Liberal in the chamber, neglecting, of course, the fact that he already imposes a carbon tax of 10¢ a litre on every litre of gas that the people of Canada buy.

The inconsistencies of the finance minister were made obvious after about four hours when he did not realize that his own finance department had already priced carbon at $65 a tonne. Even he, however, admitted, after about four hours of rhetoric, that carbon had to be priced.

Regardless of the finance minister's reluctance to deal with reality, I would ask the hon. member whether he sees a role for nuclear in the whole exercise of trying to come to grips with the pricing of carbon and the issue of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would be remiss if I did not tell the public that the member's private member's bill on poverty reduction just received royal assent. That was a cooperative effort on both sides of the House, but the member was the lead because it is his bill and he deserves a lot of credit for completing that extraordinary effort.

One of the things I find really sad is how science and fact do not guide public policy very often. Canada has world-class scientists with extraordinary minds and I believe we need to tap into their ideas and solutions. I believe our role as members of Parliament is to tap into those great minds and study their ideas for the benefit of the public we serve. Extraordinary people living in our country have amazing ideas that should be brought to life, if even on a pilot project, that could benefit Canadians in many ways. I would implore the government to do a better job of utilizing our scientists.

It was a sad thing when the government closed the office of the science advisor and let Dr. Carty go. Why on earth would the government close the office of the science advisor to the Prime Minister, one of the stellar scientists in our country? It is unfathomable to me but the Prime Minister chose in his wisdom to do that.

Nuclear power can be a very potent tool. It is one of an array of non-greenhouse gas emitting tools that allows us to meet our energy needs, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, improve our environment and reduce our smog factor. It also affects the price of carbon. If we are going to be using carbon credits, the utilization of nuclear power, as with hydro, tidal and wind power, would enable us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, acquire a lot of carbon credits and keep the price of carbon down.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the member's speech. He is not on the natural resources committee but his interest is keen and his base of knowledge is obviously very extensive.

I would like to ask him about solar energy. He talked about tidal power and unused or underutilized energy sources. Gleusdorf, Austria, with a population of 35,000, has as much installed solar energy capacity as all of Canada with our 33 million people.

I would like to ask the member if he shares my disappointment that to date the Conservative government has not yet seen fit to even incrementally wean us off our reliance on oil and gas and move toward renewables like solar, wind and tidal?

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague has been a leader on this issue, not only for his constituents but here in the House. I thank him for mentioning one area that I was remiss in not mentioning and that is the issue of solar power.

The member is absolutely right. We did a lot of things to enable people to acquire other alternative options in terms of energy. He is absolutely right in terms of the use of solar. A very large chunk of Japan's energy source comes from solar. It is interesting to note that in Germany and in Japan they are constructing buildings that use 70% less energy than the equivalent buildings that we build in North America.

There are a lot of options and ideas out there. We just need to get on with it and employ those ideas for our country and our citizens.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, once again I rise to speak to Bill C-5, the nuclear liability act. It is an act that has been rattling around the House of Commons for the better part of a year and, in that year, our position has not really altered all that much on the bill.

Yes, we recognize the need to increase the liability limits for nuclear power, very much so. We know that the liability limit that was in place before is simply not enough. However, the $650 million is a number that we have not been able to accept as a limit to the liability within the system and we have talked about that to a great degree.

I will not get into that right now because it is only part of the bill. We put forward many amendments on numerous other subjects, which I will get into as I go along, but they show that this bill, in reality, limits liability in more than one way. It limits liability and continues a Canadian practice of ignoring the impacts of nuclear accidents in the country, the impacts on workers in the uranium mining industry over many years and the impacts on our soldiers when they were put in harm's way in the face of nuclear explosions in the 1950s and 1960s.

There has been a consistent pattern over many years of downplaying the impacts of nuclear problems in the country. At the same time, contrary to what many of my colleagues have said, the nuclear industry is one that has never really made its way. In the half century that it has been a big part of the energy system in Canada, it has relied consistently on subsidies from government. It is an industry that has been plagued with overruns. We see this once again with the cancellation of the MAPLE reactor, a simple, small nuclear reactor going in place way over budget, to the point where we have now given up on it.

In the nuclear industry we have in place right now, we are looking at massive retrofits to existing plants at huge costs that are continuing to escalate as we move along. When we think of the nuclear industry, we are not thinking of an industry that has a great track record of performance in providing cheap energy for people across this country, and that is a reality. Therefore, when we talk about setting up a nuclear liability act to put things on a level playing field, we should take that seriously and we should look at how we are doing it.

At the same time, we should look at our record of dealing with people who have been exposed to nuclear radiation in this country in the past and ask if we are doing enough in this bill to protect them. To that end, I will go through some of the amendments that we proposed within the bill, taking away from the liability amount and speaking to some other items.

We proposed a number of amendments, such as to clause 24 which talks about alternate financial security that companies can put up in place of insurance under this bill. Up to 50% can be provided in alternative financial security. Once again, it is in the hands of the minister to deem correct the conditions by which the security is put up. Therefore, the minister has a great deal of latitude to choose what the financial security is for the nuclear plant. It does not all have to be insurance. Fifty per cent can be alternative security.

What is wrong with that? If there is an accident, the victims need to wait for the liquidation of the financial security in order to get compensation. The government, which puts up 20% of the funds for compensation, is on the hook at the very beginning with the money that it puts forward to the people who are seeking compensation out of the system.

We have problems with that because it clearly takes away from the notion that we would get away from government supporting the industry and the industry would stand on its own two feet through the insurance companies.

Then we could go to subclause 30(1), which states:

An action or claim must be brought

(a) in the case of an action or a claim for loss of life,

(i) within three years after the day on which the person died...

It does not talk about the survivors. The wage earner dies in an industrial accident at a nuclear site and the survivors have three years to effect that claim. Is that fair to the survivors? Perhaps the industrial worker simply gets cancer 10 years after exposure to the accident in the plant and dies. Does that mean his survivors do not get compensation?

Subclause 30(2) states:

No action or claim may be brought

(a) in relation to bodily injury, after 30 years from the day on which occurred the nuclear incident to which the action or claim relates...

Thirty years is not enough. We see that with the soldiers who were exposed to the nuclear weapons in the fifties. They are coming back now today with claims, long after 30 years, because it has shown up in their system. Once again, this is limiting the liability and it is limiting the ability for compensation to be paid.

In any other case, it is after 10 years from the day on which the nuclear accident occurred. If it is not bodily injury, if it is contamination of a site, if it is the fact that someone uses contaminated material from a site to perhaps build another site somewhere, or to use it in the building of residences, which has been a very common occurrence right across the country, and I can point to Uranium City where that happened, the liability and the ability to be compensated for mistakes that have been made is gone after 10 years. Once again, it is the limitations.

Then we could go to clause 32. A person who started off suing the operator, but after a certain period of time had not seen action, would have to start all over again. People who are suffering from things which are very difficult to determine or may take years to determine, such as cancer or radiation sickness, will have great difficulty going through multiple processes to get fair compensation.

This clause would allow a nuclear operator to delay having to pay compensation by throwing legal roadblocks in place. Wait long enough and working Canadians will suffer and compensation for the people who look for it will be unavailable.

Once again, the bill creates a situation where the claimants are at a greater risk than the company.

Clause 34 states that the maximum amount paid may not exceed 20% of the difference between the totals set out and total amounts paid by the operators. Therefore, interim compensation for people who are previously ill can only amount perhaps to 20% of what they require to cover their compensated loss. Once again, this speaks to favouring the company over the people who may be involved in the claims.

We also had a lot of trouble with clause 47. The tribunal, which has been set up to review these things, may refuse to hear any claim referred to it if it considers them to be frivolous or vexatious. This is patently unfair under the rules of our courts. Federal courts can only reject an action if a person has persistently instituted vexatious proceedings or has conducted a proceeding in a vexatious manner and only with the consent of the Attorney General of Canada. A tribunal will simply be able to say to a victim looking for compensation that the claim is vexatious, that it does not have deal with it. Where is this serving Canadians when it comes to establishing compensation?

Once again, this is the part of the bill with which we have a great deal of difficulty. I guess my colleagues in the other parties seem to be quite comfortable with it.

Subsection 50(2) states:

The Tribunal may, in order to process claims expeditiously, establish classes of claims that may be determined by a claims officer without an oral hearing and designate as a claims officer anyone it considers qualified.

A claims officers circumvents accountability, creating an easy opportunity for the system to be corrupted. A claims officer is used when small amounts are contemplated. When a tribunal is created, it means the damage from a nuclear incident is massive on a scale that we could tie with Three Mile Island, or Windscale or something of that nature. Therefore, where does this sit for claims officers?

Subclause 63(1) states:

If a regulation made under paragraph 68(b) respecting pro rata payments or establishing maximum limits is amended, the Tribunal shall inform the Minister of any change to applicable reductions that is to the advantage of any claimant who was not fully compensated in accordance with the previous regulation.

These are simply weasel words. This is something that we could not support because it opens up too many opportunities for the situation to be misused.

Clause 65 talks about the fines that could be levied on somebody who did not achieve the proper liability insurance. Subclause 65(2) states:

No operator is to be found guilty of the offence if it is established that the operator exercised due diligence to prevent the commission of the offence.

In other words, if somebody tried to get insurance and did not get it, that would be okay. If a company were unable to get insurance, if the previous insurance company, which had agreed to the risks, determined those risks were getting greater and chose not to reinsure with that company, it would be okay because it had tried.

That is not the kind of legislation we like to see. We want companies to have insurance, no exceptions. If they want to run their plant, they need to have all the paperwork in place. What is wrong with that, in a Canadian context?

I see we are pretty well finished now, so I will leave the rest for later. I am sure the debate will continue.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

I thank the hon. member for Western Arctic. When we return to the study of Bill C-5, there will be seven minutes left for the hon. member.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Secretary of State and Chief Government Whip]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Pursuant to Standing Order 45(7), there is an agreement among the whips of the recognized parties to further defer the recorded division on concurrence in the third report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration to 3 p.m. on Tuesday, June 3.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

It being 5:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of private members' business as listed on today's order paper.

The House resumed from May 29 consideration of the motion that Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, be read the third time and passed, and of the motion that this question be now put.

Nuclear Liability and compensation Act

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Order. When this matter was last before the House, the hon. member for Western Arctic had the floor, and there remain five minutes in his time for debate on this matter. Accordingly, I call upon the hon. member for Western Arctic.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I believe that we should be returning to routine proceedings.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

I am afraid the hon. member did not hear the motion. It was that we proceed to orders of the day, so we are on orders of the day. Routine proceedings are done.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would seek unanimous consent to go back to routine proceedings. I believe that people were leaving the chamber and they did not hear the motion. There was a lot of noise and people did not hear what the motion was about, and we were standing. I would seek unanimous consent that we return--

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

I will ask. Is there unanimous consent to revert to routine proceedings?

[Some hon. members]

Yes.

No.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

No, so the hon. member for Western Arctic has the floor on debate.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, once again I stand to speak to Bill C-5, the Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act.

In my previous speech, which was about a month ago, I took the time to describe all the amendments that we proposed on this bill. Our concern is the impact on the ability of people to obtain compensation in the event of a nuclear accident. Much of the bill favours the nuclear industry over those who may be seeking compensation from the industry in the case of an accident or any kind of incident at a nuclear plant.

The nuclear industry is heating up in this country. There are proposals in two provinces in western Canada for nuclear reactors. The movement toward nuclear energy seems to be gaining some steam in the country, yet none of the basic issues that speak to the concerns Canadians have over the development of this industry have been addressed. There is still no plan for waste disposal. The roles of government and private industry in the nuclear industry have not been clarified. We still have not determined whether the nuclear industry is cost effective in this country. Over and over we have subsidized the development of nuclear energy. At the same time this bill does not give proper coverage and protection for the liability that could occur with a nuclear accident.

A $650 million liability limit is the minimum possible for Canada to match with international agreements. We have said over and over that that is not good enough. The United States, our closest trading partner, carries liability far in excess of $650 million for each plant in that country.

The Conservative government is moving ahead with a bill that does not adequately do the job. We have pointed that out over and over again. We have attempted to work with the government on amendments in committee and here in the House. We have been stonewalled by the government. We have been stonewalled by the official opposition as well. The Liberals have not shown much responsibility.

[John Baird, Conservative, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Call them “the Liberal”. There is only one of them here.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot comment on people's attendance in the House of Commons. That is against the traditions of the House. I would hope hon. members would not encourage me to do that.

The Bloc is supporting this bill as well. This bill is a half-hearted attempt to set a proper liability limit. There is an attempt within the bill to provide many outs for companies in case of a requirement for compensation. It is difficult for private individuals to obtain the kind of compensation that would be necessary as a result of a nuclear accident.

It is simply not good enough to have time limits of three years or ten years in which people could expect to see an impact from nuclear accidents. We already know that 30 and 40 years later people are coming forward with health issues from nuclear accidents. People are bringing forward situations where nuclear material has been transported from one area to another and it ends up in housing units or it has been used for fill in some cases. These incidents eventually have an impact on people's lives.

When the limits within Bill C-5 are set to such a short term, it opens the door for companies to avoid being responsible. Of course that is good for the companies, that is good for the surety of the industry, but it is not good for Canadians. As a member of Parliament who has been elected by individual Canadians and not by companies, I am here to try to bring clarity to this bill as it impacts on Canadians. We are frustrated with trying to move forward with some very basic amendments to various terms within this bill for the past year and a half. It has been difficult.

We have seen with the Chalk River incident in December the importance of a strong nuclear safety agency. We have seen the necessity of ensuring that we protect Canadians, that we protect investment and that we protect the direction this country takes with nuclear energy.

There are many reasons not to support this bill. We will continue to debate it today and perhaps tomorrow, and if we can carry this through, this bill will remain unresolved for a few more months. Perhaps Canadians will have a chance to speak up and influence the government.

If the Conservative plan is to sell off Canada's nuclear industry and if this bill is simply to allow foreign companies to purchase the assets of AECL, this issue should be up front. Canadians should understand why we are doing the things we are doing in Parliament, but that is not the case. The government continues to move this bill forward in a fashion that suggests it is simply for other purposes.

[Brian Fitzpatrick, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to part of the member's speech. I am not quite clear on this, but he seems to be opposed to any private ownership in the nuclear industry and he wants control retained by the government. Maybe he could clarify this. It was my impression that the New Democrats were absolutely opposed to any nuclear development, period, whether it was done by the government or by corporations. I would like that clarified. If that is the case, it seems to me there is a lot of sucking and blowing going on at the same time.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of issues my colleague raised. One of them is the position of the New Democratic Party on nuclear energy. Quite simply, nuclear energy is part of the Canadian energy mix. It exists now and will exist in the future. Our concern is to ensure the nuclear industry is operated in a safe fashion but also to ensure that the problems the nuclear industry has yet to address are addressed.

We have not seen a resolution of the problems that the nuclear industry has with waste. That has not happened, so why would this be seen as a good area to expand in and provide, as the Conservatives did in the last budget, $300 million for the ACR-1000 nuclear reactor? We are not in favour of that. We are not in favour of continuing to subsidize an industry that has been in place for over 50 years.

The industry cannot get its act together to produce equipment at a price that matches that of its competitors, whether it be wind, solar, hydro, clean coal or anything else. If the industry cannot do that, why should the government support it? The government is deliberately subsidizing that industry and then it will turn around and sell it to the Americans. What kind of deal is that? That is simply a bad deal for Canada and for Canadians.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member is on so many committees, but I am not sure of whether he was at the natural resources committee when minister appeared before it.

Two issues were raised, the first issue being the $600 million compensation cap that was placed through the legislation. I am not sure whether it was the member who asked the question, but the minister was asked why the government would put that cap on when a major nuclear incident would have such larger and more expansive implications geographically.

Is the member aware of what the answer was? What would the appropriate amount and mechanism be, if it were entrenched in the legislation, with which the New Democratic Party would be satisfied?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, originally we were looking at the amount that was in place in the United States, our closest neighbour, of some $10 billion in liability. The Americans have a system of sharing the liability among all the existing plants. A system like that in Canada probably would have been preferable to this minimum liability limit. That is exactly how it was portrayed by the minister when he was in the committee.

He said that this was the international minimum standard that the government would go with because it would be accepted by the international community. However, places like Germany, where it has experienced major problems with nuclear reactors, has an unlimited liability for anyone wanting to put one in place.

The reason why the government will not go in that direction is it would make it less attractive to sell AECL. There is a higher liability limit on the plants in Canada. The true costing of the nuclear industry would be more evident in the cost in insurance.

What we see is a compromise to keep the costs down for the nuclear industry. At the same time, the government, in this budget, is recklessly throwing more money into the industry.

We really have not had a national energy debate where we can match up one new form of energy against the old ones.

[John Baird, Conservative, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

We have a new national energy program this morning.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, it is an interesting thing in Parliament that whenever one talks about the future, some tend to refer to the past. We need a debate on energy in Parliament. We need it now. We have $140 a barrel oil. We have many choices in front of us and we have to make those choices in a reasonable fashion, with Canadians understanding all the costs.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Western Arctic because I know he has paid a huge amount of attention to this issue. Because of his riding and the interest there, he is one of the people in this place, and certainly within our caucus, who pays very close attention. I agree with his comments. We need a proper debate and a context in terms of a national energy policy.

We see these piecemeal attempts coming forward that do not give us any grounding or context in terms of what is going to happen in Canada. One of the concerns we have, and what we have heard from the community, is the fact that the Conservative government has big plans for the nuclear industry in Canada and that it has been offered as a solution to the question of greenhouse gases. We see this in Alberta with the oil sands. This is not an existing status quo and it puts a cap on things.

The question of civil liability and compensation for nuclear industry damage is looming. Not only is it a serious situation in the status quo, but also where it leads us in the future.

Could the member for Western Arctic reference that in terms of what we might possibly face in the future in the expansion of the nuclear industry in Canada, so the question of liability will become an even greater issue?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting when we talk about the expansion of the nuclear industry. Peace River is looking at a huge 4,000 megawatt plant. That is probably linked into the plans to develop transmission capacity in Alberta to Montana and on into the United States. Perhaps, if we look at it in a longer sense, what we would do is provide an opportunity in Alberta to develop nuclear energy, without the kind of safeguards and liability that the United States has, and then export that power to the United States.

In some sense, that project is still much in doubt. Saskatchewan has suggested that it would like to look at a nuclear reactor. I think what is driving this is its understanding now that clean coal with sequestration is an enormously expensive process, and it is going to get cold feet on that pretty quickly too.

The Conservative government threw a quarter of a billion dollars toward this project and the Saskatchewan government threw in $750 million. The industry has only put $300 million. They are going to produce a 100 megawatt clean coal sequestration plant in Saskatchewan. My goodness, that will never be cost effective. Therefore, perhaps they are going to the nuclear reactors because they do not see this is going to be, in the long term, a very attractive potential.

What we have not done is put it in context. If we do not do that, people will continue to propose projects and look at things in the short term, which may make no sense at all in the long term.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-5, the so-called nuclear liability bill is an obvious misnomer. It purports to provide some security to individuals, corporations and communities impacted by the failure of a nuclear power site and provide them with financial compensation for the consequences of that failure and the contamination that inevitably would flow from it. That is the way the bill is being sold. However, the reality is just the opposite.

The bill has nothing to do with protecting working families, neighbourhoods or communities. It is all about making it easier for private interests to build nuclear plants. It is part of the government's agenda, as it was part of the former government's agenda to some significant degree, to privatize the nuclear industry in Canada and to sell off the existing operations in a variety of forms, basically to shift all control to the private sector. Any new operations would similarly be owned and operated by the private sector.

There is a fly in the ointment, if I can use that analogy. The reality is the government cannot get financing in the private sector for the nuclear industry for the construction of new plants or for the renovation of existing plants so they meet operational standards because of the potential for a catastrophic financial risk to the lenders if there is even a minor leak of radiation from a nuclear power site.

It is quite clear that the legislation is totally about protecting the interests of the private sector nuclear industry and the people who would finance it. To suggest otherwise is to either be grossly ignorant or dishonest.

I spent some time on a standing committee a few years ago reviewing the waste management organization bill, which was legislation to establish a government organization to deal with potential sites for the disposal of nuclear waste. In the course of the hearings, which went on for quite some time, some of the information that came forward talked about the consequences of contamination from nuclear power sites.

One of the stories I always remember was about a small nuclear plant, one of the original plants built some time in the early fifties in the United States, that was not properly managed. There were small continuous leaks so the entire site was contaminated, something in the range of about 20 acres. Eventually the plant was shut down.

In the 1990s, after the plant had been shut down and sitting dormant for quite some time, through court orders in the United States it was required that the plant be cleaned up. By this time the private operator had gone bankrupt and was out of the picture, so the federal government and the state government had to take on the burden. At that time, there was no liability insurance available for nuclear plants.

There was no requirement, when that plant was built, to establish a fund to deal with the consequences of a leak or to deal with the cleanup once the plant had closed. There was no money there at all, so it was borne by both the federal and state governments in the United States.

They did get rid of the entire building, which of course was contaminated, but then they had to deal with the site, the soil. Their method of dealing with it was to go down to I think something like 20 feet, truck it to an incinerator and burn all of the soil. What was left, which was still radioactive contamination, was then buried and stored at another nuclear plant site. The price tag for this in the early nineties was $13 billion, and there were no buildings that they had to deal with; that was just the soil.

Let us look at what we would be dealing with if we had a Chernobyl-type disaster, and actually we do not really have to go anywhere near that far.

I want to say, as a bit of an aside, that whenever I think of Chernobyl I think of a meeting I was at of the Essex County Federation of Agriculture in the fall this past year. It was the tradition to have a presentation from an outside group on a variety of topics. There have been a number of interesting presentations over the years, but this last year a family from the Chatham area told about the experiences they had in helping the children of Chernobyl.

What happened after Chernobyl was that there was an immediate evacuation of the area of, I think, a 40 or 50 kilometre radius around the plant, especially downwind, and I have to note that the Minister of the Environment just made a comment about turning the lights out in Saskatchewan. I am sure he is quite capable of operating in the dark because I think that is the way he normally operates.

Back to Chernobyl and a serious issue. When they did this evacuation, they did it in part with the local climatic conditions, in particular with the wind pattern. So people downwind were even more removed.

But then what happened after a number of years, even though the entire site, thousands and thousands of acres, was still contaminated, families started moving back, almost out of desperation and, of course, began producing crops, which continued to be contaminated with radioactive material.

So this family in Chatham and a group they had been helping with had been told that if they could get them out of there, even for a short periods of time, it would reduce substantially their risk of getting cancer from the radioactive exposure they had. And so, there is this international program in Canada, and this family is part of the group, that has begun to assist by bringing both elementary and secondary school-aged children over to other countries.

Ireland is a big participant, as is the United States and Canada. We take students out of that contaminated area during their summer vacations, and just because they are in Canada or in a safe zone for six weeks or seven weeks of the summer, it will dramatically reduce, we are being told by the experts, the potential for them to get cancer, at least at an early age, even though they will go back into the exposure for the balance of the year.

When I think about that story, I also think about who is paying for that. It is not the nuclear industry because it has no liability. The Soviet regime did not require any of that. It is not the current government of Russia or Ukraine because they do not have the resources, Ukraine in particular. This is entirely being funded by this non-profit organization. In fact, the group was there that night to ask for financial assistance. It was interesting to see the emotional response from all of us and a substantial amount of money was raised.

Let us then transpose that to Canada and say we have a significant spill of radioactive material. Whether we take the site at Bruce nuclear or the ones on Lake Ontario near the Toronto-Oshawa area, if there were not money to take care of the area around Chernobyl and there still is no money, imagine what it is going to be like if we have that kind of a disaster in Ontario? What is $650 million going to do?

That is what the absolute maximum limit is under this legislation. It would not do much for that site in the United States that cost $13 billion back in the nineties, which would probably be a $20 billion figure now. It would not do anything for all of the families, individuals and children who would be affected because the $650 million would be gone in the twinkle of an eye.

Think about what it does. We have nuclear plants sitting right there on Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Any substantial spill would significantly impact on the Great Lakes all the way through into the St. Lawrence. We know that contamination, that radiation, has a lifespan that is beyond the comprehension of our current science.

We hear scientists talk about half life. What they are really saying is we do not know yet, in spite of the nuclear industry being six or seven decades old, how long the contamination will last. We get estimates of 1,000 to 10,000 years, but any nuclear scientists of any substantial credential will say that they just do not know, that those are minimum ranges of how long the contamination will last.

Again, think about the nuclear plants at Bruce and Lake Huron. I know that area fairly well. I have family there and I have spent summer vacations in that area of Kincardine, Port Elgin, and South Hampton. Think about what $650 million would do and more importantly what it will not do. It will not deal with anywhere near the property damage and losses that would be consequential from a spill. It will not do any appreciable good for all those claims we are going to have from people who will no longer be able to work and will suffer cancer, early deaths, et cetera. What about all the medical treatment they are going to require? In a situation like this we look at literally the potential for the collapse of our health care system. I know that sounds dramatic, but it is the reality of a substantial spill. That $650 million just does not cut it.

It does not provide protection for individuals, for businesses, for communities, for the province, or for the country. So why are we doing this? We are doing it to try to facilitate the expansion of the nuclear industry and we are doing it to make it possible to privatize the nuclear industry.

If the bill were to go through, and it probably will because it has the support of the government and the opposition parties, other than the NDP, it would actually expand the risk levels. So the $650 million again becomes more of a joke because it would make it possible, which it is not right now, but it would make it possible to expand the nuclear industry.

There is no question that we need legislation in this area, but the legislation should be that there is unlimited liability on the part of the nuclear industry for the consequences flowing from a spill, a rupture.

If we dumped garbage on our neighbours' property, our laws say to us and society says to us that we must pay to clean that up. We do not turn to the government and say it should clean it up. We do not turn to the neighbours where we dumped it and say that it is on their property now and they can clean it up. If one of their children falls and cuts their foot or their hand on the glass that we have dumped on their property, we are responsible because it is our actions that have caused that. That is the tradition in our law, going back to the common law system and the parliamentary system in England for hundreds and hundreds of years.

This legislation says to this sector of the economy that it can get away with that. If it dumps its waste through its negligence on the neighbours' property, whether it is the whole of Lake Ontario and Lake Huron or the neighbours who live downwind in Toronto and Oshawa, it will have not have to pay them beyond this amount. We know the amount is ridiculously low.

In effect, with this legislation, we are giving a permit for the industry to expand and in effect, we are saying to the nuclear industry, we will impose some limited liability on it, but it does not need to worry about it too much because beyond that it is safe. Then the governments, individuals, corporations and businesses will have to pick up the rest of the tab. We know the rest of the tab is many billions of dollars. That is the reality of what we are dealing with.

I want to refer back again to the work that we did in committee with the waste management organization. The risk level continues to rise because we continue to increase the sheer volume of waste that we have from our current plants and of course we will continue to do so if we build any new ones. From all the work that we did in that committee and the reports that really precipitated the work of that committee, there is no safe storage mechanism in the world for nuclear waste.

The Americans have not figured it out in the U.S., which would arguably be the most advanced country in terms of the work that it has been done on nuclear waste and how to deal with it. They have not figured out how to deal with it safely and securely with full protection for society. They have not been able to do it.

It is not simply the length of time that the material remains contaminated by radiation. It is the actual nature of the contaminated material itself. We have no way of dealing with it. We know we can reduce it somewhat in volume, the nuclear rods in particular. We have developed some technology to reduce that part of it by reusing it. There is very limited reduction, but there is a little bit.

Whatever we have been able to do in that regard has been more than offset by just the sheer volume that is being created as the nuclear plants continue to function and provide us with energy.

The risk is going up, literally on a daily basis as the plants continue to operate and continue to produce radioactive material. In this legislation, we would be limiting the liability, so we can only expect that the risk will continue to rise, in particular, if new plants are built.

I was about to say 50 years from now, but let me say for sure that in 100 years or 200 years from now, those societies will look back at what we did here since the early fifties and wonder if we were crazy.

My answer to them would be no, we were just reckless. We were reckless to go down this road in the first place. We were reckless because we see this as a panacea, a solution, in the sense of increasing the use of nuclear technology for energy production. We were reckless because we know we have alternatives that, arguably, even now, and probably for a few years, are less expensive than the nuclear alternatives. We know that if we pumped more money into research and development of alternative fuel sources that we could be even more quickly dealing with this issue.

This is not an answer at all to the problem with which we are confronted, whether it is energy production or it is a--

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

It is with regret that I must interrupt the hon. member, who had 20 minutes but has taken 22 minutes. We will have questions and comments and I am sure he will have a chance, under this period, to say what he did not have a chance to say.

Questions and comments. The hon. member for Vancouver East.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, when the member for Windsor—Tecumseh speaks in the House with his knowledge and depth of understanding on this and many other issues, I think we all listen very carefully.

I would like to raise with him a question that concerns us very much in our caucus. He pointed very well to the long term nature and impact of nuclear accidents, incidents, storage, spills and all the rest of it, which concerns us in terms of the length of time that we are debating and what the bill before us applies to in terms of liability, but we are also very concerned about where the nuclear industry is going in Canada.

We have the issue of the status quo and what we now know exists in our country, but there are also moves afoot by the government and possibly other governments in terms of supplying energy to the United States, which is a huge problem. We need to take into account, as we debate the bill, that we may see an expansion of the nuclear industry in Canada.

We need to ask a question. Will the bill be adequate? We know that the current bill that is being amended was clearly inadequate. Everybody agrees that a significant change was needed in terms of the liability but the serious question is whether the changes that are being brought forward in Bill C-5 would begin to address even the status quo.

With the increase or expansion in the nuclear industry and capacity in Canada, we may, unfortunately, see an increased risk in terms of accidents, spills and situations that are dangerous, and then this bill becomes very critical.

Could the member comment in terms of what he might see as we move toward the future and the dangers the bill has because it is so limited?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, crucial to the debate is how our risk assessment is conducted by the nuclear industry, both for existing plants as well as new ones. It is not just the potential for new plants, which is a reality I think we will be confronting, it also involves existing plants because parts of a number of them are not functioning now and a lot of proposals on the political agenda are for them to be reactivated at very substantial cost. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum and usually several billions of dollars to get a reactor back online once it has been shut down and then the restoration has to be done.

The way the financing industry works, if we need to go to the private sector to borrow money, one of the things it looks at is what happens if it does not work and it has a mortgage or security against the property. In law in Ontario and in all of the common law provinces, when one places that kind of security on a property and there is default, the lender assumes ownership responsibility. As part of that ownership responsibility, the lender must face the consequences of the cleanup.

Therefore, a big financial institution could tell, let us say, the people at Bruce Nuclear that it is prepared to lend them $2 billion but that there is no way that it will accept responsibility for billions more dollars if there is a contamination. The institution could ask for a limitation on the liability because it wants the security of knowing it will not have to pay an additional $650 million if a disaster or any kind of substantial consequential leak from a rupture occurs. The lenders are really pushing for this.

People may wonder why a company would not just go to an insurance company and buy insurance. I will point out that there is fixed liability in the United States but it is $10 billion. The nuclear industry has been able to get insurance. We hear from the nuclear industry, which the government has bought into, that Canada could not get that kind of insurance, that the limits could not be set that high. I do not understand that.

Canada's insurance industry is as active and vibrant as it is in the United States. Given that we compete with the Americans with regard to producing energy, it seems to me that we should at least be playing on the same level playing field as they are. It is always the term we hear, mostly from Conservative economists, that we want to be on a level playing field but this is one of the times we would not be. It is to the detriment of Canadian society that we are not prepared to follow those rules even though they are demanded of us in so many other areas.

Therefore, even if we were to fix it at $10 billion, it would be a substantial improvement over this bill by a long shot.

The other thing it does is it forces the financier to look closely at the safety measures implemented by the operator. There is another check and balance, if I can put it that way, by that methodology and the greater the liability the closer that scrutiny is.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to speak to Bill C-5 regarding nuclear liability.

What is the cost of cleaning up a nuclear accident? We had a nuclear accident in the 1940s in New Mexico and a series of nuclear accidents in the 1950s in Russia, in Chalk River, Ontario and in Illinois. If I have time later, I will go through some of the examples.

However, the nuclear accidents that captured the public's attention the most were Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Windscale.

I pay a lot of attention to Chernobyl because we have seen a huge increase in the rate of thyroid cancer in children and families in Chernobyl. I know a lot about thyroid cancer because I have thyroid cancer and after studying the disease I noticed that one of the causes was exposure to nuclear reactors, nuclear waste or nuclear radiation.

Thyroid cancer is one of the fastest growing cancers in the world, aside from skin cancer, although both have a growth rate of about 5% per year.

What is the cost of helping survivors of this disease? Once the thyroid has been removed, people will need to take certain types of drugs for the rest of their life. The cost of the drugs, in a country where there may not be adequate health care or pharmacare, could be enormous. Therefore, it is absurd that the bill would limit the liability of a nuclear accident to only $650 million. It costs so much more, not only for each individual, but also to repair all the damage that is inflicted by a nuclear accident.

The liability for a nuclear accident in U.S. is $10 billion. The Canadian amount of $650 million is at the bottom of the heap according to the international standard. Yes, Canada is well known to be at the bottom of the heap with regard to the international standard, not only on nuclear liability but also with regard to nuclear waste. Nuclear waste lasts for thousands and thousands of years. It is a good comparison to look at something that lasts for that length of time versus something that is so much about our future, our children.

The children of Canada are our first concern because they are our future. Canada is not only at the bottom of the heap in terms of nuclear liability and the $650 million limit if this bill passes, but we are in fact putting our children, in terms of our investment in a national child care program, also at the bottom of the OECD heap.

In terms of liability, in Germany there is no limit. Not only Germany but a lot of European countries are moving more toward unlimited liability limits. As the world is going in one direction, Canada is going backwards as usual by saying that we are going to cap the liability at $650 million. Also, no private insurance would be made available.

That actually says to a lot of the cities and areas around nuclear plants that they are only worth $650 million. If there is a nuclear accident, it would cost billions of dollars in damage, personal injury and death, so who would pay? Let me answer that question in a minute, because this is the critical situation. If it is not the corporation that is paying, who is paying?

That is why the New Democrats, at the committee and at report stage, moved 35 amendments. We took the Liberal Party at its word. In the House of Commons in October of last year, the Liberal critic said:

--this is a very important bill and I will be recommending to my caucus and my leader that we support it and send it to committee. In committee we will be doing our job as official opposition listening to stakeholders and experts, and we will review the bill in detail.

However, as usual, the Liberals are missing in action. They try to say that they really are worried about the nuclear industry, but they are not sure whether they are saying yes to nuclear industry expansion. They were saying that maybe the liability was too low, maybe they would amend this, and maybe they would study it.

After all of that discussion, what did they do? They did not bring in any amendments whatsoever. We are not surprised, are we? The Bloc did bring in a few amendments, which were nothing that would fundamentally alter the bill, but it did not matter, because the amendments from the Bloc and the New Democratic Party were defeated. Why? Because the Liberals did not support any of them, even though they said publicly that they were extremely concerned about nuclear safety.

As members may recall, when there was a shutdown at AECL, the Liberals were saying that safety is really important. They said that we must invest in safety. As for the history of AECL, for example, there was hardly any investment in the last 15 years. What the Conservative Party is doing right now, after firing Ms. Keen because she said that perhaps it was not very safe, is to sell AECL and privatize it.

I notice that the Conservatives have not met an issue that they do not want to privatize. They are privatizing the airline industry safety measures in Bill C-7, which we are debating. It is about privatizing airline safety so that the airlines would police themselves. The Conservatives are saying not to worry, to let them do their own thing.

On immigration, it is the same thing. They are saying to privatize it, to give the contracts to the visa office and let those private companies deal with it.

It is the same thing here in Bill C-5. If there is a problem, the government is saying, we will let the taxpayers pay for it. But $650 million is not enough. It will take many billions of dollars. Who is going to carry the costs of cleanups?

Who is going to carry the cost of cleaning up of the Great Lakes if Pickering has some trouble? Who is going to clean up the environment? Who is going to deal with the people who develop ill health? It will be the taxpayers, not the industry. The government does not worry about taxpayers. It will let the industry do its own thing. In fact, this legislation is a big yes to the nuclear industry.

I note that the Conservatives want to sign on to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and turn Canada into a nuclear waste dump for those who do not have space for nuclear waste. Canada is a big country. Maybe they can put some of it here, because after all, if there are any problems, the liability would be capped at only $650 million. Do not worry about it, that is the attitude, and do come to Canada, even though we know there is no long term nuclear waste storage solution in the world.

For example, let us look at cleanups. There are huge and expensive cleanups. Port Hope is stuck with a huge number of problems that it has to clean up. The Northwest Territories is another example.

Nuclear waste remains deadly even after thousands and thousands of years. The bill in front of us is saying that the government will not have to worry about this waste, that taxpayers can handle it. That is extremely unfortunate. Why? Because many of the municipalities in southern Ontario are saying no to this kind of reckless behaviour.

Let me give the House an example. Twenty years ago, Guelph had a record of being one of the best cities in terms of dealing with waste management. Now, with the new mayor, the entire city is focusing on how to have zero waste. Guelph wants a big reduction in the amount of waste.

Last weekend, a conference was held in Niagara Falls. It was put together by the Ontario Zero Waste Coalition. The coalition is looking at a situation in which companies that have waste take on the responsibility for that waste. For example, Interface is a big carpet company. If someone buys a new carpet from Interface, it takes the old one back.

We are seeing a trend toward this, which is that people and companies must take care of their products, whether it is the waste or the packaging. That is the direction the world is taking. We should do the same thing with nuclear waste.

If there is a nuclear installation, we want make sure that its waste is taken care of and that if there is an accident, the liability limit is unlimited, or at least to a standard that is extremely high, in the billions of dollars, for example, not this measly $650 million in Bill C-5.

That is why I am astounded that the Liberals and the Bloc will not do everything they can to block this bill. This bill really limits the civil liability and compensation for damage in the case of a nuclear accident. We know there has been a series of accidents in the past. I have a long list of them. How can it be possible that on the last day of this sitting of the House of Commons we get no debate but only complete silence from both the official opposition and the Bloc?

Are they not worried about their residents, their voters, discovering that in the last few sitting days of the House of Commons before the summer break we allowed a bill of this nature to pass? How can we possibly do that?

Do we think that people in southern Ontario, where there are big nuclear plants, are not worried that if there are even more nuclear reactors being built the company liability would be only $650 million? What is the worth of a city? Let us look at Guelph. What is the worth of the Great Lakes? What is the worth of Aurora, right beside Guelph? I went to the University of Guelph for a short period of time. There is the city and the zoo and a great number of places. In Pickering, it is the same thing.

How can we say that if there is an accident it would cost $650 million and we could repair everything that is damaged? Just for the lake itself, cleaning up the water would cost $650 million, never mind the health damages and contamination of all the buildings in the area.

Let me tell members about some of the nuclear leaks. I will start with recent ones. In Tennessee in March 2006, 35 litres of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked during a transfer into a lab at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin. What happened? The incident caused a seven month shutdown and required a public hearing on the licensing of the plant.

A company wanting to build a new plant and seeing a liability of only $650 million perhaps might think that it could skip a few safety standards. Maybe it would not do everything that it should to ensure that it has the safest nuclear facility because, after all, the liability is only $650 million.

Further, by the way, the bill also says that a person would have to take action within three years of becoming aware of damage, with an absolute limitation of 10 years after an incident. In the case of bodily injury, the limit is 30 years.

However, we know, and I know personally, that cancers and genetic mutations, et cetera, will not appear for at least 20 years following exposure. That is why in Chernobyl for the first 10 to 15 years it was not very obvious. It was only 20 to 30 years later that we began to see the huge rates of thyroid cancer, other cancers and genetic mutations in the future generations, with the children suffering.

By that time, according to this bill, it would be too late. No one could sue or do anything because of the time limit.

The bill also restricts liability to Canadian incidents except when there is an agreement in place with another country and the operators are Canadian. What happens if the operators are not Canadian? They could be German, Chinese or American. Does it mean that the operators would not be liable? That is outrageous. How can we possibly allow this bill to pass?

I have at least 14 pages of nuclear accidents since 1945. There are hundreds of them, and each of them has had serious implications. Let me list another one. In 2005, in Illinois--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Order. I will have to move on to questions and comments.

The hon. member for Mississauga—Erindale.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, frankly I am quite disturbed by what I heard from the member. The member consistently throughout her speech misled Canadians, fabricated allegations and fearmongered. If she keeps that up it is going to ruin her chances of winning the provincial leadership of the NDP. She needs to stick to the facts and act as a responsible member of Parliament.

She said that nobody from the Liberal Party debated this bill. She said that nobody from the Bloc debated this bill. She said that nobody asked serious questions or acted responsibly. She knows that she was not at committee. She knows that this bill transcended partisan politics. Committee members worked together, listened to witnesses, experts, nuclear scientists. Yes, there is a legitimate debate about at what amount the liability limit should be capped and other issues. There are legitimate questions and legitimate debates, but the member is misleading Canadians, misleading her constituents. She is trying to stall this bill. Why? What will happen if she stalls this bill? The liability will remain at $75 million. How is that good for Canadians?

Host communities of nuclear power plants said that they support this bill and are waiting for its approval. What is she doing? Why is she stalling? Why is she being an obstacle to the communities that are hosting nuclear plants?

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I noticed in the old days when we were debating other accident prone projects, such as Adams Mine, the home area, for one reason or another, would make a decision as to what it supported and did not support.

What I have said is clear. I said that the Liberal Party did not put forward one amendment, not one at committee. It is true. I also said that all amendments, whether they were Bloc amendments or NDP amendments, were defeated. Why? Because the Liberals and the Conservatives voted together to strike all of them down. That is what I said.

I was asked why would I stand against this bill. Had the Liberal member heard me earlier on, he would have heard that I have a particular interest in nuclear reactors. Why? Because the fastest growing rate of cancer is thyroid cancer. The number of people who have thyroid cancer is dramatically higher in places like Windsor and Sarnia, places that are close to huge amounts of pollution and degradation of the environment.

That is why I am personally interested. I know that nuclear reactors and nuclear waste cause thyroid cancer. That has been proven. That is why I am very interested in this bill. That is why in the last two days of this sitting we should not allow this bill to pass.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, first of all it is unfortunate that the member for Mississauga—Erindale did not even bother to listen to the response from the member for Trinity—Spadina, given that he asked the questions.

I listened to the whole speech by the member for Trinity—Spadina. I want to thank her for sharing very personal information about her own life and the fact that she is a survivor of a thyroid cancer. I know that the member for Trinity--Spadina did an incredible amount of research and that is why she is very knowledgeable of the relationship between thyroid cancer particularly and the nuclear industry. As she has pointed out, thyroid cancer is one of the fastest growing cancers. I do not think it is always easy to share one's own personal experience, particularly when it comes to one's health and family. I want to thank her for being very open about that because I think the more awareness there is about thyroid cancer and other cancers and their direct relation to environmental concerns, the better. There are genetic links as well, but in terms of the environment, there is such a strong relationship.

The member pointed out that the Liberals had really done nothing to address this bill. I would like to draw to her attention that the member for Mississauga—Erindale said last year:

This is a very important bill and I will be recommending to my caucus and my leader that we support it and send it to committee. In committee we will be doing our job as the official opposition listening to stakeholders and experts, and we will review the bill in detail.

I am not sure that happened and so here we are. The NDP put forward 35 amendments in committee. We did not see any substantive changes from the Liberals to improve this bill which is seriously flawed.

Maybe the member for Trinity—Spadina would like to comment on that.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not understand how we can say that we are extremely concerned about the environment, that we will shift taxes, that we will do everything we can to protect the environment, that we will tax more, move things around and give corporations at least $1.7 billion here and there and yet say to Canadians that if there is a nuclear accident, they should not worry about it, but they will be picking up the tab. I have not seen any cleanup of any nuclear accident that cost less than $1 billion. Normally if it is a big accident the cleanup costs billions of dollars. How can we say we will limit it? How could any member of Parliament of any party possibly stand here and say that they are extremely concerned about our planet, are extremely concerned about the future of our water and our air quality, and that is why they will support this bill? I do not understand it.

I want to point to one incident. On April 26, 1986, in Ukraine which was then in the U.S.S.R., there was an explosion and complete meltdown. It started with a mishandled reactor safety test, which led to an uncontrolled power excursion causing a severe steam explosion, meltdown, and release of radioactive materials at a nuclear power plant approximately 100 kilometres north-northwest of Kiev. Fifty fatalities resulted from the accident in the immediate aftermath, most of them being cleanup personnel. The people who went in to clean up died. There were nine fatal cases of thyroid cancer. Members will notice that I have been talking about thyroid cancer. Five fatal cases of thyroid cancer in children in the Chernobyl area have been attributed to the accident. The explosion and the combustion of the graphite reactor core spread radioactive material over much of Europe, not just in Chernobyl, but much of Europe.

How many people were evacuated? A hundred thousand people were evacuated from the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl and an additional 300,000 from the areas of heavy fallout in Ukraine and Russia. There is an exclusion zone of 3,000 square kilometres encompassing the whole site, which has been deemed off limits for human habitation for an infinite period of time; not for one year, five years, or ten years, we are talking about forever.

We have seen studies by the government, by UN agencies and by environmentalists--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Order. Resuming debate. The hon. member for Vancouver East.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak in opposition to Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident.

As the House has heard from other members of the NDP today, we are very concerned about the bill. We are on the second to last day of Parliament and the bill has been around for a while. Extensive work has been done in the committee. The NDP brought forward 35 amendments to try to make some improvements to it because we felt it was so significantly flawed. Unfortunately, we did not have the support of other parties for those amendments, so here we are.

Yes, in truth, we in the NDP are trying to stop the bill. We do not think it should go through. I am certainly going to put forward my two cents' worth today.

I am from Vancouver East, British Columbia. People in B.C. have always lived in an environment with the potential of nuclear accidents because to the south of us there are nuclear facilities. There is the Hanford facility in Washington State, which has been the site of serious accidents in the past. I know people in communities in southern British Columbia live with much concern about their future and the future of their children because of the nuclear industry and what happens when there is an accident.

Nobody wants an accident to happen and we need to have the maximum number of precautions to ensure none do. However, the bill before us deals with the question after the fact. What happens if there is an accident and what is the liability?

First, members of the NDP agree 100% that the current legislation, which goes back to the 1970s, is terribly inadequate. It set a liability limit of $75 million, which in today's terms would be nickels and dimes in liability for the nuclear industry. The new bill sets the liability limit at $650 million.

Some may look at that and say that it is a big improvement and suggest that we should go for it. However, when we scratch the surface of the bill and start to examine it in terms of international law and context, the limits contained in the bill on a nuclear operator of $650 million is at the bottom of the international average. To me that immediately raises questions. Why would we place ourselves at the bottom of an international average? Also, why is this bill being put forward at this point?

We have heard concerns from communities, environmentalists and people who are opposed to and worried about the nuclear industry. They say that the bill has more to do with the Conservative government's plan to sell off Canada's nuclear industry and then set up an insurance scheme, and it knows the current act and scheme is completely inadequate, that takes the liability away from operators and puts it in the public purse.

By setting the cap at $650 million, we know there is a provision where a special tribunal could be set up by the Minister of Natural Resources and if further funds were required, they would come out of the public purse. This basically means that a nuclear operator would have to pay out a maximum of $650 million and the public would be on the hook for millions and possibly billions of dollars in the case of an accident.

Right off the top, the numbers do not work. If we are going to amend the act, and it should be amended, then let us do it properly. Let us ensure we set the liability at a level that is within the context of what happens in the international community.

We are also very concerned that Canada is signing on to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and that this could turn Canada into a nuclear waste dump. There could be all kinds of contamination as a result of that as well. Some of my colleagues today, the members for Trinity—Spadina, Western Arctic and Windsor—Tecumseh, have spoken about what we see as the long term impact and effects of this bill. Let it be said that the $650 million is very inadequate.

We worked very diligently in committee to seek amendments to the bill. We put forward over 35 amendments to try to improve the bill, the accountability, the discretion of the minister, the level of liability and so on. It is a surprise to me that those amendments failed and here we are today with the bill at third and final reading.

When we look at the history of the nuclear industry globally, but certainly in North America, a long record of incidents have taken place. My colleague from Trinity—Spadina referred to a list of nuclear accidents that we have been referencing.

When we read that list, which is 14 pages long, it is pretty scary to know these incidents have taken place with a fair amount of regularity over the decades, beginning August 21, 1945, at the beginning of the nuclear age.

It was in Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, U.S.A., where a criticality accident with a plutonium metal assembly happened. Harry Daghlian was hand stacking tungsten carbide brakes around a plutonium metal assembly. The plutonium assembly compromised two hemispheres with a total mass of 6.2 kilograms, just short of bare critical mass. While moving a final brick, the experimenter noticed from neutron counters that the final brick would make the assembly supercritical. At this point, he accidentally dropped the brick onto the pile, providing sufficient neutron reflection to result in a supercritical power excursion. The experimenter quickly removed the final brick and disassembled the assembly. He sustained a dose of 510 rem and died 28 days later.

I do not know all the science behind it, but it seems to me it is important to reflect on these things because that happened in our modern day age. This is in the era of the beginning of the nuclear age in our world and we can see that these accidents have taken place, beginning in August 1945. Some of them are seared in our brains as we have watched images on television, particularly Chernobyl. I am reading from the list.

Even in Chalk River on May 24, 1958, there was fuel damage. Due to inadequate cooling, a damaged uranium fuel rod caught fire and was torn in two as it was being removed from the core at the reactor. The fire was extinguished, but not before radioactive combustion products contaminated the interior of the reactor building and, to a lesser degree, an area surrounding the lab site. Over 600 people were employed in the cleanup.

There was an incident at Hanford Works in Hanford, Washington on April 7, 1962. This is the one I am more familiar with, not that I was there but because Hanford is very close to Vancouver. It is something that peace and anti-nuclear movements in British Columbia have watched for a very long time because millions of litres of contaminants are stored in Hanford.

It is a vast area in Washington state. It is surrounded by security and fences. It is obviously not publicly accessible. There is an international boundary, the 49th parallel, but when it comes to a disaster, that boundary does not mean anything. These contaminants can get into the groundwater, wells, rivers and the air, so these are a very serious situations.

In April 1962 there was a criticality incident with plutonium solution. An accident at a plutonium processing plant resulted in a criticality incident. Plutonium solution was spilled on the floor of a solvent extraction hood. Improper operation of valves allowed a mixture of plutonium solutions in a tank that became supercritical, prompting criticality alarms to sound and the subsequent evacuation of the building.

Exact details of the accident could not be reconstructed. The excursion continued at lower power levels for 37.5 hours, during which a remotely controlled robot was used to check conditions and operate valves. Criticality was probably terminated by a precipitation of plutonium in the tank to a non-critical state. Three people had significant radiation exposures.

The list goes on and on.

Probably the most infamous one, and one that had global proportions, was on April 25, 1986, the complete meltdown at Chernobyl. This involved a mishandled reactor safety test, which led to an uncontrolled power excursion causing a severe steam explosion, meltdown and release of radioactive material at the Chernobyl nuclear plant approximately 100 kilometres northeast of Kiev. Approximately 50 fatalities resulted from the accident and in the immediate aftermath, most of those being the cleanup personnel. In addition, nine fatal cases of thyroid cancer in children were attributed to the accident.

The explosion and combustion of the graphite reactor core spread radioactive material over much of Europe. I am sure like many people, I remember the images of that accident and the fear the people felt. One hundred thousand people were evacuated from the areas immediately surrounding Chernobyl, in addition to 300,000 from the areas of heavy fallout in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

An exclusion zone was created surrounding the site, encompassing approximately 1,000 miles, or 3,000 kilometres. It has been deemed off limits for human habitation for an indefinite period. I know there have been documentaries about what happened at Chernobyl by people who have gone back and filmed this vast area, which is now, in effect, a dead zone where human habitation cannot take place.

These are very serious matters and a bill like this gives us cause for reflection about the nuclear industry in Canada. The bill is setting the stage for expansion in Canada. In fact, I asked my colleague from Western Arctic earlier, because he is our energy critic and he is very knowledgeable on this issue, far more knowledgeable than me, what he thought about the bill in terms of what it meant for the future. He pointed out that Bill C-5 was really the tip of the iceberg.

We know nuclear energy is being looked at as a solution to greenhouse gas for producing energy sources. He informed the House of the situation at the Peace River nuclear plant being contemplated, with transmission capacity that could go to Montana. Again, we see a pattern of decision-making and privatization that is linking us with the enormous energy needs in the United States.

These issues are linked. What begins as a bill in terms of what appears to be a question of liability is linked to a much larger question as to where the government plans to take us in the nuclear industry and the kinds of expansion plans contemplated.

People in my riding are very concerned about that. People feel adequate safeguards are not in place today. We have had the whole debate in the House about what happened at Chalk River with the shutdown of the reactor and the crisis it created for medical isotopes. We saw the debacle that took place with the Conservative government when it fired the head of the organization. This is all part of a greater scheme of a privatization and a sell-off of these nuclear resources to put it in private hands.

On the one hand, we have to debate that. We have to examine that from a public policy perspective. On the other hand, we have a responsibility, as parliamentarians, to ensure the legal framework is put in place, whether we talk about public policy or private operations, and that the liability will be adequate.

I hope that I have provided information today to alert people to the fact that the bill really does not go far enough. It is something that will pass, we presume, unless we can hold it up and that is what we are going to try to do. I think, as we now move into new decades of nuclear expansion, it makes one wonder if we will be again back at the drawing board if we do have a significant incident in this country.

God forbid that that ever happens, but if it does happen, will the provisions in this bill have the capacity to deal with the claims that would result when people in a local community, businesses, livelihoods, people's health and children's health are impacted by such an accident?

It is interesting to note that in the U.S. the liability is $10 billion. That is actually shared among the plants. It is a joint effort. That is more than 10 times higher than what we are talking about in this country. Again, we have to question why has the limit been set at $650 million. It just seems to be woefully inadequate.

We would like to see the bill not move forward, not pass. We would like to see further consideration on this question of liability. We would like to see discussion and some really clear plans from the federal Conservative government as to exactly what its intentions are with the nuclear industry here in Canada.

While we would certainly agree that the current bill has to be changed because the liability is so low, we do not think this particular bill will do the job. It needs to be contained within a much broader policy debate about the nuclear industry. The paramount question in that debate and in any legislation that comes forward is the public interest.

It is not the interest of the nuclear industry. It is not the interests of the people who want to just suck up more and more energy and more and more capacity for energy, it is not the interests of U.S. multinational corporations who might be looking to Canada as a place where they want to do business. The primary concern is public health, the public interest, and the interests for future generations.

In that regard, the bill seems to be very short-sighted. I want to thank my colleagues, the member for Vancouver Island North and the member for Western Arctic, who have been our two primary critics. They worked really hard on this bill. They went through it, every clause. They figured out that it was very limited and it was something that we could not support. At committee, they went to bat and put in a number of amendments. It was very surprising that those amendments were defeated by the government and by the other parties.

I know the Bloc put a few amendments and we certainly appreciate that. However, at the end of the day, the bill has not been changed. So we move forward now with a bill that is very limited.

Therefore, we will be speaking on this and we will be pointing out these deficiencies. We want to draw people's attention to the fact that the bill is now at this very critical stage. We are going to certainly do what we can to make sure that it does not pass, not because we do not want to see a liability set but because we want to make sure that it is being done in a proper way. That it is going to be done in a way that protects people so that if there is an incident, an accident, that people will actually have the capability to make a claim and receive some sort of compensation. It will not be at the discretion of a tribunal that the minister sets up, but a due process and a fund will be created which will protect people. Surely, that is the most important thing that we are considering here today.

I urge my colleagues to consider those concerns that we have. I am very proud of the fact that we have taken the time to look at the bill and to come to the conclusions that we have based on what we believe to be in the public interest of Canadians, and that is why we will be opposing the bill.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for taking the time to address this issue and to ensure that she gets her point of view on the record.

I note that many of the other members of Parliament from the different parties have chosen not to speak on this issue. There has been this overwhelming silence in many cases from both the Liberals and the Conservatives about what this bill means. I say thanks very much to my colleague for putting forward her point of view.

When we talk about liability within the existing structure, as long as the Canadian government is the main owner of the nuclear facilities in Canada, in reality what that means is that there is almost unlimited liability for the nuclear industry because the government is backing it up. What we are doing with this bill is creating a situation where we are going to use the minimum international standard, so we can open up the opportunity for other companies to take on the responsibility for our plants or take them away from the government.

In the United States there are laws where if a company works in a country where the laws do not match the international standards, the American company may be judged by the American laws. That puts them in a situation where they would be judged under the liability of $10 billion.

By the government moving out of nuclear energy and turning it over to the private sector, we are actually limiting the liability that Canadians have. We are setting in many distinct rules which are going to make it very difficult.

[John Baird, Conservative, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

What does this have to do with the carbon tax?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I am getting sort of a short shrift from my Conservative colleagues here in the House on this issue. If I can once again get the--

[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.

[Leon Benoit, Conservative, Vegreville—Wainwright, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's presentation and most of it was just over the top rhetoric, causing completely unnecessary concern among Canadians when it comes to nuclear power.

However, one thing I really have a concern about is the way he portrayed people who worked at nuclear power plants, and that is completely unacceptable. He portrayed them as Homer Simpsons running the plant. He may think it is funny, but people who operate our power plants are extremely well trained, capable people. The member should apologize for that portrayal of workers at nuclear power plants.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I only point out the empirical evidence of the nuclear accidents in recent history that give great cause for concern.

If I spoke frivolously about the people who work at nuclear power plants, it is out of sympathy not out of any malice. Just like when I worked in the asbestos industry and it lied to me about the health hazards of asbestos, people who work in the nuclear industry on the front line are at risk and I believe they have been lied to about those risks. Most of these incidents do not talk about the community being contaminated. Most of these incidents resulted in the workers being contaminated and, in many cases, being killed by the nuclear risk associated with their job.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, once again it is my pleasure to appear before a full House to speak to Bill C-5. I notice my friend, the hon. member for Prince Albert, who knew I was speaking, decided to listen to my speech today, and I thank him for that.

First, I want to zero in on Bill C-5, speak a little about it and try to put it the context of what we are dealing with when we look at energy.

In an overview of Bill C-5, the Conservative government is taking what some would say a cavalier toward nuclear safety, and this recklessness is being supported by the other two opposition parties.

The bill will shortchange ordinary Canadians who get sick and die from a nuclear accident, or may lose all they own because of contamination or lose a family member who dies from cancer or radiation sickness.

The $650 million cap on compensation is not sufficient. The United States has a limit of $10 billion. Germany has an unlimited amount. Many countries are moving toward unlimited amounts. No private insurance is available, and it has been estimated that a nuclear accident would cost billions of dollars in damage, personal injury and death.

Let us look at nuclear safety. Despite assurances from the nuclear industry, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Windscale all show that the potential for a nuclear accident is real. Later on, if I have some time, I will once again give an account of some of the accidents that have happened in this industry.

The safety of nuclear installations must be paramount. We have already seen the government willing to put the lives and property of Canadians at risk to keep unsafe nuclear reactors running.

The nuclear industry is not really a green choice, as opposed to what some people might want us to believe. Nuclear waste remains deadly for thousands of years.

A few weeks ago I gave a brief statement on depleted uranium and the effects it had on those who used weapons containing depleted uranium, not only the soldiers of those armies who use these weapons, but civilian populations in countries such as Iraq.

Canada exports uranium to the United States with supposed assurances that it will never be used for weapons. However, experts say that some of it actually creeps into depleted uranium weapons, which then endangers the lives of people in those areas.

The last time I spoke with regard to depleted uranium, I mentioned a film which graphically illustrated the damaging effects. I have asked the government to ensure that we become a leader in banning and abolishing all the depleted uranium weapons in the world.

A person exposed to a used nuclear fuel bundle will be dead within an hour. There is no long term storage solution that has been found for the waste. The processing of fuel and waste has resulted in widespread contamination requiring expensive cleanups, and I cite the example of Fort Hope, Ontario and Rayrock Mine in the Northwest Territories.

Before moving on, I will mention that some people on this continent and in the world are tracking nuclear power reactors and the effects they have on surrounding populations. It would be very wise for our government to explore the possibility of doing a comprehensive study, at least in our country, and perhaps coordinating it with our neighbours to the south, to see what effects there are on the health of people who live in the surrounding areas of nuclear reactors.

Approximately a month ago I met with Dr. Leuren Moret from the United States. She has been quite heavily involved in the nuclear industry and is one of the leaders in the world exposing the danger of depleted uranium. She has been coordinating and looking at studies that link the effects on health with nuclear reactors. In addition to cancer, there is some evidence pointing to the correlation between high rates of diabetes and the proximity to nuclear reactors. Whether this is in fact the case, whether this is science, I am not sure, but these concerns warrant an investigation.

Our country should take the lead on this and say that we will challenge the world to investigate the fact that some people may suffer and die from the effects of living too close to nuclear reactors. As we move on in this debate, this is one of the things at which we could look.

The answer is not in building more nuclear reactors. In the budget the government has been investing in nuclear energy. It seems there is quite a lot of money for nuclear energy, but very little for green alternatives, such as solar power, wind power, wave generation, geothermal and all kinds of things that truly are green clean sources of energy, which have very little impact and leave a much smaller footprint on our planet. The government should be supporting more of these sources of energy in our country.

If the passage of the bill allows the expansion of nuclear power in our country, it will be a big step backward for us in our quest to have a greener and cleaner energy source in many ways. We need to ensure that it not only does not create greenhouse gases, which it does not in that respect, but we need to look at if for other things, such as the waste, the mining that takes place and the tragedy, human and otherwise, to which I just alluded, that it could inflict if there were to be an accident.

It is not the green source of energy we should invest in so heavily. We should be thinking of much cleaner greener ways to go. I will outline a few points from our NDP plan for the environment in a few minutes.

Bill C-5 limits the total liability of a nuclear operator to $650 million, which is the bottom of the international average. This is not enough.

Before outlining some of the tragic instances of nuclear accidents that have happened, it is important for us to realize there is another way of conserving energy and making our planet much more conducive to the environment. One way is what our party has proposed, and that is a cap and trade system. This is a mechanism at the heart of the Kyoto protocol. In fact, both candidates for the president of the United States have embraced cap and trade, making it a key tool in the continental fight against climate change. Cap and trade has already been tested in Europe and the NDP's plan builds on the lessons learned there.

My colleague, the hon. member for Outremont. was at an OECD conference in Europe. He said that the Europeans were embracing cap and trade as the way to conserve energy and fight climate change. They were not holding on to the fallacy of trying to put a tax on carbon so ordinary people would suffer, as my colleague from Winnipeg Centre pointed out.

When we called on other parties to reject the Conservative's dead on arrival clean air act and work together to build better legislation, the resulting legislation was deemed a breakthrough bill by environmental groups. The centrepiece of the bill was a carbon pricing regime. However, that is not enough. In addition to this method, which works, we need to create jobs in the green environment sector.

We would propose a green collar jobs fund be established that would allocate $1 billion per year to train workers, displaced workers and new entrants to the job market, so they could be provided with the skills that would be necessary to power Canada into the new energy economy.

The green collar jobs fund would be used to leverage training apprenticeships and investment partnerships from provincial and territorial governments, from first nations, Métis and Inuit communities, and from the private sector. For my hon. Conservative friends I repeat, from the private sector.

High skills training would be needed for such areas as installing and maintaining energy efficient and renewable energy technology for alternative cars and fuels, manufacturing parts for wind turbines and other new energy technologies, and energy efficiency auditing expertise.

It is a shame that a Canadian solar power private enterprise has to go to Germany to set up business because there is not enough incentive available in our country. Parallel to this, tax breaks are being given to the big oil companies that are reaping billions of dollars in profits. Something in this equation is not right.

At the same time, as we see with this bill, we are limiting the amount of liability in a nuclear accident. As my hon. colleague who spoke before said, there is something wrong in this equation.

In the province of British Columbia, where I come from, we had BC Hydro in control of our public water and our power system. The current government in British Columbia is slowly dismantling the public trust of our waters and our energy and creating what it calls public-private companies to damn the creeks, create energy and sell it on the open market.

I want to emphasize the importance for senior levels of government to take the lead and the initiative. The time is gone when we could just sit back and say that we would let the market take over and let private enterprise run our energy system. It is up to each and every one of us to--

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

I hesitate to interrupt the hon. member for British Columbia Southern Interior, but it is time to move on to statements by members. I assure him he will have seven and a half minutes remaining in the time allotted for his remarks when debate on this subject is resumed.

Statements by members. The hon. member for Fleetwood—Port Kells.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, be read the third time and passed, and of the motion that this question be now put.

Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Before question period the hon. member for British Columbia Southern Interior had the floor and there are seven and a half minutes remaining in the time allotted for his remarks.

I therefore call upon the hon. member for British Columbia Southern Interior.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am a little disappointed that there are not more members here when they knew that I would be making this speech. In any case, I will do my best. I know that the members who stayed are very interested in what I have to say.

In the first part of my speech, I was trying to give an overview of our environmental plan. I was talking about how we can avoid the nuclear industry by creating green jobs. Before going on, I would like to put all of this in the context of what I call political will.

Anything that comes from the government, such as bills and so on, can sometimes diminish the government's power and give more powers to large, multinational companies. What I am seeing is a struggle between big business and the will of the people. Bill C-5 is an example, because it sets a limit of $650 million, instead of truly protecting people and society.

I would also like to point out that this is all going on in the context of what I call the Friedman philosophy, which talks of privatization, deregulation and a government that is pulling out of programs for which it is responsible.

Before I continue, I would like to share with my colleagues a book, which no doubt some of them have read and if they have not, I am sure it would be good, depressing bedtime reading. The book is entitled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, in which she outlines exactly what I have been trying to get at, the role of the corporate sector in dismantling our societies, not only in our country but in the rest of the world.

In case I do not have time to continue in outlining our plan for the environment, I would like to give a few examples of what has happened in other countries of the world with regard to the nuclear industry.

For example, on April 10, 2003, in Hungary, partially spent fuel rods undergoing cleaning in a tank of heavy water ruptured and spilled fuel pellets at Paks Nuclear Power Plant. It is expected that inadequate cooling of the rods during the cleaning process, combined with a sudden influx of cold water, thermally shocked the fuel rods, causing them to split. Boric acid was added to the tank to prevent the loose fuel pellets from achieving criticality. Ammonia and hydrazine were also added to absorb iodine.

On April 19, 2005, in Sellafield in the United Kingdom, there was a nuclear material leak. Twenty metric tonnes of uranium and 160 kilograms of plutonium, dissolved in 83,000 litres of nitric acid, leaked over several months from a cracked pipe into a stainless steel subchamber at the THORP nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The partially processed spent fuel was drained into holding tanks outside the plant.

Most recently, on March 6, 2006, in Erwin, Tennessee, 35 litres of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked during transfer into a lab at the Nuclear Fuel Services Erwin plant. The incident caused a seven month shutdown and required a public hearing on the licensing of the plant.

What we are seeing is the nuclear industry is by no means 100% safe. The fact that even if there is the slightest accident, this can cause havoc on the environment. As I was trying to point out earlier in my speech, this can cause irreparable damage also to the health of individuals.

There is an alternative, and I started to outline this alternative in my speech just before being stopped. At that time, I was speaking about the fact that, in addition to establishing a cap and trade system, we could create green jobs and also continue to make sustainable consumer choices more affordable.

We need a national energy plan that would make a better building retrofit and energy efficient strategy, which would constitute a groundbreaking, historic construction project for Canada in every community, creating thousands of new local jobs, making Canada a world leader in building efficiency skills in technology.

I referred to the fact that a few months ago, a Canadian solar power company was forced to set up shop in Germany because Germany was providing the Canadian company with incentives to develop this industry, where there were no incentives in our country. This is really a shame on our future and on our country, that we are not able to promote clean, efficient energy in our country.

I would like to go further and say that there are now approximately 12.5 million homes in Canada. Green Communities, an environmental organization involved extensively in residential home audits and retrofits, estimates that home energy efficiency improvements can result in greenhouse gas savings of four tonnes a year per house.

What is our strategy? Our strategy is a new program for retrofitting low income homes to replace the program that was cancelled by the government. We also want to expand and revamp the co-energy programs by providing low interest loans and improved grants for energy efficient home and building retrofits, modelled on the city of Toronto's successful better building partnership using revolving funds.

We also feel that we should amend the Canadian building code to add energy conservation and efficiency to the criteria.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The legislation that we are currently debating today deals with nuclear liability not with energy efficiency, so I will challenge the hon. member to demonstrate relevance with his remarks as he is going on about the NDP energy efficiency plan.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for British Columbia Southern Interior only has about 35 seconds left in his time slot, but I will remind him that at third reading a member's speech is supposed to be confined to the actual legislative properties of the bill. In the last half minute that he has remaining, I would ask him to tie his remarks to the bill before the House. That would be appreciated by the House.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague for reminding me of that. I just got so involved and excited about this wonderful plan that we have that I just could not help but talk about it. With respect to Bill C-5, we have to be very careful. It is not advantageous for our country to adopt this bill the way it currently stands.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives are trying to walk the clock down here. They say there is no reason we should be talking about a plan for conserving energy because we should be talking about liability. That strikes to the very heart of why there is such a mistrust of the Conservative government.

Conservative members are so into promoting big energy projects at whatever cost. They are basically opening up Canada as the energy powerhouse for the U.S. market despite serious concerns as opposed to what my hon. colleague was talking about. He spoke of the need to move energy away from one or two huge megaprojects projects and diffuse it where it would leave a much smaller environmental impact and would actually be more sustainable.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague what he thinks is behind the Conservative lust, whether it is the pillaging of the tar sands, or whether it is the selling of the nukes to any private company that comes along to create these megaprojects that have a massive impact? The average citizen has to wonder whether the Conservative Party is basically just a hand puppet for the oil and gas sector and now the nuclear industry.

Perhaps my colleague could explain to us why he thinks there is this particular predilection for big energy and irresponsible energy projects in the Conservative mindset?

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I believe our challenge in the 21st century is between the corporate sector, the banking sector and those that put pressure on elected officials, and on the other hand, the ability of elected officials to continue serving people by making wise, constructive policy decisions. I have stated this before and I stated it last night when I was participating in a food security forum in Renfrew.

What is driving the government's agenda is corporate influence that exploits at all costs, that pollutes our lakes as we heard today in question period. The corporate sector does not worry about selling our energy to the United States. It continues to funnel cheap energy to the United States while at the same time importing 90% of oil east of Ottawa, which we are currently doing and which makes absolutely no sense. The reason this is happening is the fact that there is no political will to have some kind of national strategy for green energy. We need to ensure that we do not follow along in the corporate footsteps.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence]

Mr. Speaker, I will be really brief because I just cannot stand this anymore. Does the hon. member have any idea that the oil patch contributes directly and indirectly 500,000 jobs in Canada? Does he have any idea or appreciation of the fact that his pension plan and every pension plan in Canada depends on investments in the oil patch to pay out the kind of income Canadians need in their retirement? Does he care about any of that or is this just simply more NDP baloney?

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I will go to the hon. member for British Columbia Southern Interior, but questions and comments should be relevant to the bill before the House.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important, and I will mention this, that it is possible to have industry in this country, but this industry has to come under the surveillance of the elected representatives.

The fact that we have uncontrolled pollution in the oil sands is not acceptable. The fact that it is providing jobs certainly helps our economy, but there are also foreign jobs that are taking away jobs from Canadians. I think any megaproject has to have oversight and we have to look at it step by step to ensure that it serves our best interests and not the interests of those big oil corporations.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the member's speech on the NDP's energy plan. I think it was very interesting. The other hon. member also talked about the oil sands.

I sit on the natural resources committee. We visited and did a study on the oil sands. The Minister of Natural Resources, at one point, said that nuclear might be a way to go because it is a clean source of energy, as he calls it.

My concern is that we are going to be looking at more and more nuclear facilities across this country, especially in Alberta, where we can use that energy to melt the tar to make the bitumen that we are going to ship, unfortunately, straight to the U.S. We are building new pipelines and this is going to further increase our greenhouse gas emissions coming from the tar sands.

The government sees nuclear as a way to get us out of these emissions because it sees it as clean energy. However, there are a lot of problems with nuclear. It is extremely expensive. It always has cost overruns and it can be seen as dangerous.

Notwithstanding the fact that we have nuclear facilities in this country that are aging, there are more and more problems with them, and some of the licences are running out. I think we are going to see in the very near future the possibility that we could be using this nuclear liability act more and more. I wonder if my hon. colleague could comment on any of those things.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I basically agree with what the member says. We have to be very careful as we move into the future. We have a chance in this country to become world leaders in the whole area of environmental technology. We must be careful how we proceed and we must make some very hard and fast choices.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I notice my colleagues from the Conservative Party are taking it personal when we talk about megaprojects. I have never met someone who would be personally slighted about something like the Athabasca tar sands, but perhaps they are.

I wonder again if the member has a sense that this is again a government that will do anything to protect the mega energy boondoogles and yet, it would not cry a tear for the hundreds of thousands of workers who have been laid off in Ontario and Quebec during this manufacturing crisis. Does he see this strange duplicity that will bend over backwards and cry tears for the Athabasca tar sands and yet say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of jobs, particularly in southern Ontario in the auto belt, where our Conservative members have run and hid under their Prime Minister's desk rather than meet workers who have been laid off in Oshawa, the London area, and Windsor?

These are very serious issues. We are talking about the complete extinction of an entire industry in Ontario and yet, we see Conservative members who will not even go and meet their constituents who are seeing the complete loss of, say, the GM plant in Oshawa. At Ford, I met with the CAW workers in London. They said that the Conservatives are completely missing in action.

Does the hon. member have any thoughts on why this strange duplicity?

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I am not sure if that has anything to do with Bill C-5. There was a point of order raised previously about relevance, so I will give the floor to the hon. member for British Columbia Southern Interior to respond, keeping in mind the rules of relevance regarding the third reading stage of the bill.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, obviously, I must respond to a question. I think it is up to those who are asking the question to realize whether or not it is relevant.

The comments are very well taken. This is not an isolated incident we are viewing with one aspect of industry. We are looking at the global picture.

What we see, to answer my colleague's question, is the lack of political will to really provide a strong direction in this country. We see basically a strategy that involves sitting back and letting the market rule.

This is the same strategy we are seeing in my province of British Columbia and unfortunately across this country. That same strategy is being seen in the battle between the corporate sector, which is driving the agenda, and the idea that we actually have people elected who can work on behalf of all of us here in Canada.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise to speak today on behalf of the New Democratic Party on the issue of Bill C-5 and--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Order. I do apologize. I forget to mention, before I recognized the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay, that the first five hours of debate have expired. We are now at the portion of debate where the allotted time for speaking is ten minutes, with a five minute question and comment period.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry to hear that I have only 10 minutes. I was led to believe that I was going to speak for 20 minutes. I do not know if I can raise all the issues that I really wanted to raise in 10 minutes, but I will do my best. If we allow each other just a little leeway, we can probably get through this in a very healthy fashion.

It is very important to talk about this issue of liability. I have some background on the issue of liability in terms of megaprojects. I will speak to that in a moment.

The issue here is that we have to address the problem we are dealing with, which is of course whether we need to move toward a much larger nuclear strategy, along with the mega tar sands development. It is the problem of how to address energy. Once we start to address a megaproject, we of course have to deal with the liability. We have to look at what is driving this.

We get this strange schizophrenic response from the government party all the time. It tells us that we always oppose things that it brings forward. We normally do, because it seems to be a party, as G.K. Chesterton said, that is completely blinded by “the horrible mysticism of money” and pays no attention to community or the values of a balanced approach.

The government accuses us of opposing, but when we propose alternatives, it says we are speaking about things that are irrelevant. We are somehow boxed in. If we try to actually propose things and engage the government members in a dialogue, they often get upset and leave, or they try to raise points of order. So I will stay very focused.

Of course, as we know, the issue of liability with the nuclear industry is that the present liability is woefully inadequate. This is probably the one point that we will agree on with the government. We have a real problem with low liability in this country.

Where we begin to diverge almost immediately is that if the government is going to move toward the privatization of nukes, we know it needs to have some very large industrial partners that will step into the breach and assume this mercantile approach to nuclear energy.

The problem being faced is that there is a very low liability, so what the government does is peg a new standard for liability. What is that standard? It is the minimum norm of the international average, which is $650 million. If we agree with this new norm, we suddenly would be in a position whereby U.S. investors would now start to take interest in privatized Canadian nukes, whereas before they would not because of their own liability problems and their inability to protect victims from lawsuits.

We have already begun to diverge from the Conservative track. The Conservatives are obviously interested in privatizing nukes. They are obviously interested in opening that door as quickly as possible. They need to be seen raising the liability issue just so they can actually get credibility with investors.

Yet from the democratic point of view, we are looking at how we ensure that a development is sustainable and how we ensure that development actually protects the interests of Canadian communities, Canadian individuals and the Canadian environment.

We look at the $650 million liability and the record of industrial nuclear accidents across the world and we recognize that $650 million is a pittance if something goes wrong. We look to other jurisdictions that actually have set serious standards for liability. In Germany, there is unlimited liability. In Japan, there is unlimited liability. The U.S. has a limit of $9.7 billion. That is a heck of a lot more than the $650 million being offered by our government.

Once again we see the government diving to the basement in terms of standards that would protect communities and then telling the investors not to worry. Do not worry, says the government to them, if something goes wrong, if someone pours a coke down the front of the machine and the whole thing goes ballistic, guess who will be on the hook for it? It will not be the plant, the investors or the corporation. It will be the Canadian public who will pick up the tab.

Of course that is a win-win if one lives in the world that these gentlemen--and some women--live in, which is the world of being there to privatize and support the complete interests of the big energy interests, whether it is the Athabasca tar sands or the nukes.

We are looking at pathetic minimal standards. We are also seeing that this is a very lax and very loosey-goosey bill. It would allow the government and the industry to get through the approvals process like a groupie with a backstage pass.

The New Democrats tried to bring forward a few clear amendments that would actually begin to address this imbalance. We brought forward 35 amendments to try to bring about balance. That is our job as opposition members. It is not our job to be toadies to the Conservative Party. Our job is to bring balance to a very unbalanced government approach, so we brought forward 35 amendments.

We wanted to work with the government and say that if there are going to be nukes, let us look at liability and let us look at how we can ensure that the public is protected. Of course the Conservatives were not interested in balance. They were looking at opening the door to the massive expansion of the nukes.

Of course, as has been suggested here and by many people in the media, this is an agenda that is really driven by the fact that whatever the Athabasca tar sands development needs, the Athabasca tar sands development will get. Therefore, we have a government that will suddenly bring in a bill on limiting the liability of the nukes so they can be privatized and we can move forward in that direction.

This is the problem we are dealing with: an unbalanced approach by the government. What is driving it, of course, is the fact that the Conservative Party has presented itself to the Canadian public as a front for big energy projects at any costs, without any scrutiny, for whatever there needs to be, whether it wants to dump the waste in a lake or approve massive expansions of projects that increase massive amounts of greenhouse gas without proper scrutiny.

Then, of course, we are expected to sign off on nuclear liability that does not have any of the real clear provisions that will protect the public.

We have the problem and we have what is driving it, but the real issue, as I have said, is that if we are going to oppose, we have to propose. The issue the New Democrats are very concerned about is the billions and billions of dollars that are spent on nukes. We consistently have seen massive overruns time and time again.

There has never been a nuclear project that has come in at even close to costs. Billions have been spent in Ontario, and now billions are going to be spent in Ontario under Dalton McGuinty's government, and that money would actually be better spent in limiting the energy environmental footprint from one massive project to many smaller projects.

My colleague had begun to speak about this earlier. He spoke about the need for retrofitting and for looking at alternatives. In the region I live in, we have mine shafts in the centre of town that go down 8,000 feet. This is a perfect climate. Any community that has had coal mining or hardrock mining is a perfect climate for creating geothermal energy. Geothermal is sustainable. It does not rely on the nuclear industry. This is the proposition that we are trying to raise and it is perfectly in line with this.

However, I want to get back to the issue of liability because it is very important. We had a megaproject boondoggle in the Abitibi-Temiskaming region in Ontario. It was the Adams Mine dump. It was created as this wonderful gift for investors, whereby the largest dump in North America would created using an abandoned iron ore mine on the heights of land above the farm belt of Temiskaming. Millions of tonnes of garbage would be dumped in there even though 350 million litres of groundwater flowed through every year and the risk of contamination was over a 2,000 year lifespan.

However, the reason this crazy crackpot scheme was allowed to get to first base was of course that it was under the government of Mike Harris. Many of his cronies are here now in the House. The other thing was that the government limited the environmental assessment. It refused to let the public have full disclosure, but two things eventually killed the project.

One was massive public protest by farmers, forestry workers and first nations people. I am very glad to say that I was one of those people involved in that, but when it came to city council, written in the very fine print of the contract, which was not supposed to be made public, was the issue of liability. Who was on the hook if something went wrong?

It was actually the New Democratic members of the Toronto city council who stood up and said, “Wait a minute”. They said it was the consumer who would be on the hook, the taxpayer. Then that whole chimera, the whole deck of cards, came tumbling down, and the mega boondoggle fell apart. Once the members of the public knew that they and the City of Toronto were on the hook for the unlimited liability if something went wrong, nobody wanted to touch it, and not an investor in North America or the world would pick up the project.

The issue of who is on the hook for the liability is always crucial. If we actually went to the kinds of liability provisions that are needed with any nuclear project, not one private investor in the world would be loony enough to get involved in such a project.

The NDP remains absolutely opposed to this bill. We remain absolutely appalled that the government is not interested in dealing with the amendments necessary to protect the public interest. We remain very vigilant against attempts by the government to fast track any privatization of the nuclear industry that limits liability.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to the presentation of the hon. member opposite.

I was on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and I studied Bill C-5 with the rest of the hon. members.

The Bloc Québécois certainly shares some of the concerns of the hon. member opposite with respect to the $650 million compensation amount. This was cause for much debate in committee. Unfortunately, none of the witnesses who were asked to appear before us swayed us or even suggested an alternative, perhaps because data on that amount was not available at the time. Neither the Bloc, the Liberal Party, nor the NDP asked the witnesses specifically to address the $650 million compensation amount. The only thing the witnesses said was that, unfortunately, it was not currently possible to insure and reinsure the compensation in the event of an incident.

I would like to know what my colleague has to say about that. Since we did not have the opportunity to hear from witnesses and to debate this here in this House or in committee, can he share his sources with us? What witnesses, in his view, could have come to testify and contribute to our debates?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was sorry that in my speech I did actually focus a fair bit on the Conservative Party and not on the Bloc Québécois. I did not want to show any disrespect for the Bloc in not mentioning it as part of mega boondoggle energy projects. I have been on the James Bay coast in Quebec and I have seen the massive flooding and the mercury contamination that has been done by the Bloc's love of mega environment and energy projects.

I am surprised that the member, who is on the committee, says that she does not remember any testimony. I was looking at the testimony of Professor Michel Duguay from Quebec's Laval University in Quebec City. He said that he thought the $650 million was a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money that would be needed in case of an accident.

I was thinking of Mr. Edwards who spoke. He said that he felt “it is important for elected representatives to ensure that the nuclear industry is held publicly accountable and to ensure that the best interests of Canadians are not compromised in order to serve the interest of the nuclear industry”.

We believe that the figure of $650 million has no sound scientific or financial basis and that this arbitrary amount serves to distract the committee from the much more important question. I do not know, but perhaps my hon. colleague was distracted.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, if we look at the past and all the comments made by the members from the Bloc Québécois in committee, it is very clear that they felt that the level of civil liability could not be limited to $650 million. Indeed, speech after speech, the members from the Bloc Québécois were very clear on this. Like the NDP, they felt this limited amount of civil liability was clearly insufficient. I can cite member after member, including several who are here in this House today.

I would like to ask the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay whether he knows where this about-face is coming from in the Bloc Québécois on an issue that affects Quebeckers. They are the ones who will have to pay if there is ever a nuclear accident.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague asks a very in depth question. I was actually thinking about that after I sat down. I thought that perhaps I had finished my comments too early, but I sometimes think it is very important to be brief, direct and to the point in the House. I did feel that things certainly were being left out of the little exchange that I had with my hon. colleague from the Bloc Québécois.

Certainly there were serious concerns raised about the limits on liability, because the Canadian taxpayer will be on the hook. If something goes wrong, the municipalities and provincial governments will be faced with the costs. Talk about the ultimate intervention in the affairs of Quebec: we would be talking about a nuclear accident and the citizens of Quebec being left on the hook. So why the Bloc Québécois would not stand up--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

We will move on.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Beauharnois—Salaberry.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is truly a pleasure for me to speak to this bill at third reading and to answer the NDP's many questions about the Bloc Québécois' position.

We have been talking about this bill since October 2007. This bill would overhaul an outdated act that both Conservative and Liberal governments have cast aside. Under the old act, maximum liability for damages was $75 million. Many of our debates have hinged on the amount of compensation. Those on the other side of the House have not really talked about the mechanism, the tribunal, provided for in this new legislation to support citizens and communities seeking compensation.

Bill C-5 seeks to modernize the old act. The amount of liability has not changed in some 30 years. The NDP's position is irresponsible because if a serious nuclear incident were to happen right now in Ontario or another province, even Quebec, compensation would not exceed $75 million. Delaying the passage of this bill is irresponsible because the status quo is not acceptable.

I understand and agree with many members of this House that $650 million is not nearly enough. The interesting thing about this bill is that it includes mechanisms allowing the minister to change that amount as often as every five years. That does not mean the amount will be changed every five years; that just means that it can be.

The fact that the NDP has done everything in its power to delay passage of this bill means that today or even yesterday, had there been an incident, people and communities would have received just $75 million in compensation instead of $650 million. Even though we disagree on certain points, and even though we often disagree with the critic during Standing Committee on Natural Resources meetings, we have good discussions, and we often end up reaching an agreement.

When Bill C-5 was being debated in committee, we heard from many witnesses. A fairly rigorous examination was conducted. This is a somewhat technical bill dealing with insurance. Within the committee, there were no members with expertise acquired in the insurance industry prior to being elected. Accordingly, we listened very carefully to the witnesses as well as to the House and departmental legislative staff who advised us very well. We asked them many questions and I think we did a good job. Of course, the Bloc Québécois cannot say that it agrees with the bill 100%, but we do believe that, basically, it represents an improvement. The status quo was unacceptable. We think this is an improvement and that this bill is better than the previous legislation.

We do share some concerns of the members opposite who were wondering why the Conservative government suddenly woke up and decided to modernize an old act that had been abandoned by previous Liberal and Conservative governments. Why are they suddenly waking up and exerting pressure to see this bill passed quickly? Of course, the Conservative government endorses nuclear energy and is looking into opportunities in that area. Canada's legislation was completely outdated and no longer met international standards and accepted norms.

In that respect, I completely understand the distress and concerns, since I share them as well. The fact remains that, after all the evidence, all the work done in committee and after debating the amendments proposed by the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, unfortunately, very few amendments were retained. If the Blocs' amendments had also been accepted, the bill would have been even better.

In any case, we believe that the creation of a tribunal to hear cases and ensure compensation for communities and citizens is already a step in the right direction.

We heard some rather touching testimony. All municipalities with a nuclear power station located in their limits are members of an association and the mayor of a “host” city spoke to us about her concerns.

Her message was that she does not oppose the bill because she believes that this old, outdated law—cast aside by the Liberals and the Conservatives—should be revised. However, she was particularly concerned that $650 million would not be enough to compensate both individuals and the communities. For example, she stated that all infrastructure could be affected, requiring much more than $650 million in compensation.

Yet, the mayor also said that $650 million was better than the $75 million currently in place. The testimony to this effect by several witnesses determined the position we took in the committee.

It is rather odd. We studied a large number of amendments in committee, which were presented in the proper way and democratically. Then, all of a sudden, without consultation or democratic debate by our committee, a series of NDP amendments were presented in this House and, unfortunately, the committee was unable to hear witnesses in order to further study them.

I am a new member and this is the first time I have had such an experience. In committee, we carefully studied a bill and the amendments; then at subsequent readings in the House, we were faced with fifteen to twenty amendments. Some had been studied in committee and reintroduced, but others were altogether new. I know it takes a lot of work to introduce amendments, and I found it unfortunate that we were unable to study them in committee with new witnesses.

The Bloc Québécois is very concerned by the renewed interest in nuclear energy and, above all, by all the energy this Conservative government is putting into promoting it. I often laugh under my breath. In fact, I find it amusing that the Minister of Natural Resources justifies promoting nuclear energy by stating that it is a clean energy because it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, he says that every province is responsible for choosing its own energy and that if the provinces choose nuclear energy, that is their business.

I am saying to him that safety and waste management are federal responsibilities, and thousands of dollars are currently being spent for nothing. There are the MAPLE reactors. Half a billion dollars was invested to design a replacement reactor for the old Chalk River reactor. But this design, unfortunately, will never be built because Atomic Energy of Canada decided to scrap the project due to a major design flaw that could not be fixed. The world's top experts are not able to find a solution to the MAPLE design flaw.

It is true that energy comes under provincial jurisdiction. However, the federal government is responsible for waste management and technology development. Unfortunately, we are facing a government that spends Quebec and Canadian taxpayers' money on projects that result in money pits.

Ultimately, we wonder who will benefit from these projects, which really should be condemned. That is what the Bloc Québécois is doing. We are telling the Conservative government that it is on the wrong track, promoting energy that will produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions in the short term, but will create problems further down the road. We have a problem right now, but we are putting off fixing it until later, which creates serious consequences in terms of waste management.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech by my hon. colleague from Beauharnois—Salaberry and I take exception to several things she said but one in particular. It is not irresponsible to put forward amendments to try to make a bill better.

I will not apologize for putting forward amendments. It may take a bit of time but it is our due diligence, which is something we must do in the House. It is our job as members of Parliament, as people who represent our communities and our country, to make the best of a bill.

Yes, the NDP put forward amendments. She mentioned that we did not put forward any at committee but that is absolutely wrong. The NDP introduced 30 amendments in committee but, unfortunately, they were not supported. These amendments would have made the bill better and stronger.

My colleague from Western Arctic introduced those same amendments in the House at report stage. They were ruled in order by the Speaker and we debated them. We were hoping the broader House might take an interest in them because, unfortunately, in committee the Bloc, the Liberals and the Conservatives did not.

The other thing my colleague said was that if there were an incident or accident at this moment, Canadians would not be on the hook. AECL is owned by the Government of Canada and if there were to be any kind of situation, especially involving the NRU reactor at Chalk River, Canadians would be on the hook for that.

I want to ask my colleague if she understands any of what I said.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, sometimes when we say things in this House—and I am not criticizing the interpreters—we speak quickly and it can be very difficult to interpret our comments properly. If I may, I would like to make a few corrections.

I never said that the NDP never proposed amendments in committee. I said that it did propose amendments in committee and that a series of other amendments had been proposed at report stage. I found it too bad that those that were proposed at report stage had not been presented in committee for debate so that we could call new witnesses to look into the new amendments further. When making accusations, one has to be sure to have understood what the other said. That is the first clarification I want to make.

I would like to make a second clarification. I never said that people would not be entitled to compensation. I said—and I will say it again slowly—that, currently, in the event of a nuclear incident causing harm to people or communities, the amount of compensation would be $75 million, which is considered insufficient. In that sense, the status quo is not acceptable.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I only have 10 minutes on debate, but I could speak for 20 or 30 minutes on this subject.

As I mentioned in some of my questions to my colleagues, this bill was put forward by the government to amend the Nuclear Liability Act. Unfortunately the bill as put forward was not acceptable to the NDP. We felt it needed to be amended quite substantially, so we proposed many amendments at committee. Unfortunately, they were not supported by my colleagues at committee.

We are quite concerned because we feel the bill is being put forward in this fashion in an effort to aid the government to use nuclear energy in this country basically as a carbon offset. This is the biggest offset plan that anybody could have imagined.

Unfortunately, seeing nuclear energy as a clean source of energy is also misguided. The production of nuclear energy causes waste and that waste has to be dealt with. We have never been able to find an acceptable solution for dealing with the waste. It is still there. It will last for millions of years. It is highly toxic and dangerous. At any point in time an incident could result.

With all these things in mind, we felt it was incumbent upon us at committee and in the House to put forward our recommendations and amendments to try to make the bill better so that we could support it.

We also agree that as it stands now, nuclear liability in this country is far too low at $75 million. That is not nearly enough to cover any kind of disaster in any community. It needs to be increased, but to increase it to the minimum international standard is also not the right way to go. That is why we put forward amendments to increase it to an unlimited liability on the part of the nuclear operator. We feel very strongly that Canadians, including Quebeckers, should not be put on the hook by having their tax dollars used to pay the potential billions of dollars that would be needed to cover the cost of a nuclear incident in this country.

We do have some facilities near our borders. If a nuclear incident were to occur near our borders, what would be the impact from other countries? What would we be on the hook for there?

This is a serious issue and we take it very seriously. We are not here to try to hold up the bill just to play games. We are very concerned about this issue. We want to make the bill better and something we could support.

Right now there is an issue with AECL, the company that operates under the government. The taxpayers basically own this company. If there were to be an accident or an incident, the taxpayers would be on the hook for that company. We would never want to see that.

Earlier today my colleague from Winnipeg referenced a book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, by Helen Caldicott. I found some interesting passages in this book, which I want to share with the House and with Canadians. It talks about accidental, and unfortunately, terrorist induced nuclear meltdowns, and says:

Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to many events that could lead to meltdowns, including human and mechanical errors; impacts from climate change, global warming, and earthquakes; and, we now know, terrorist attacks.

I would like to read a couple of excerpts to give people a sense of what could happen and why it is important that we have unlimited liability on our facilities so that Canadian taxpayers are not on the hook.

We know also that in this country the reactors are aging. The NRU reactor at Chalk River is around 50 years old. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is looking at having to allow that unit to operate longer. It is only supposed to operate until 2011 but we are looking now to 2016. It is going to continue to operate because there is no replacement for that.

The aging nuclear facilities in this country will have more and more problems as time goes by. Metal fatigue, rust and all kinds of things can happen as things age. We have to ensure that we have the safety and protection of Canadian people in mind when we are talking about nuclear liability.

In her book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, which is an American publication, Dr. Caldicott says that even though today's reactors were designed for a 40 year life span, the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, acceding to industry pressure, is currently approving 20 year extensions to the original 40 year licences for nuclear power plants.

That is a concern. Although that refers to the U.S., the same kinds of things are happening in Canada. I am concerned about these aging facilities, that we do not have replacement power. They do not have to be nuclear facilities. They could be cleaner energy alternatives such as solar and wind. We could look at doing an east-west grid across this country.

We could have alternatives to nuclear power. We would not have to worry about pressure being put on our Nuclear Safety Commission to prolong the licences for these facilities if we had alternatives to that energy source. It is quite a concern. If the aging facilities called on the Nuclear Safety Commission to extend their licences for longer periods, we would have to start worrying about the near misses that might happen in continuing the use of those aging facilities.

Another thing that Dr. Caldicott talks about is global warming. Who would have thought that global warming would have impacted nuclear facilities. She says in her book that there are many facilities that are built on coastlines which could possibly be impacted by tsunamis or earthquakes in places around the world such as India. They could be impacted by global warming.

She talks about terrorist attacks, which we are quite concerned about as well. According to this book, the necessary steps have not been taken to increase security around nuclear facilities in case of a terrorist attack. We have seen increased security measures at airports and other border security measures, but we have not had an increase in security around nuclear facilities.

We need to make sure that the steps are in place to protect Canadians in the event of a nuclear accident. We must make sure that the liability on the part of the operator is a lot higher than $650 million, because we know that if there were an accident, the liability costs would be in the billions of dollars.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to my colleague across the way. We share many of the same concerns about the safety of citizens and communities in terms of nuclear energy.

We have grown increasingly worried since the Conservative government interfered politically with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission by firing its president, Ms. Keen, last year. That action shattered the trust of Quebeckers and Canadians. And since our nuclear reactors are getting older, trust in the commission is waning.

My colleague works with me on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources. I would like to ask her if, in light of the testimony we have heard during our current study of the MAPLE and Chalk River reactors, she is reassured when it comes to nuclear safety.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question. I know that the member is very concerned about nuclear safety as because that came up in the discussions at committee and she put forward questions in a very forthright manner. I have to congratulate her on her interventions there.

Yes, it is an issue of trust for many Canadians and something that was shaken very severely back in November when we had the incident at the NRU reactor in Chalk River. Canadians are very concerned.

I have received many calls and many letters from my constituents and we do not even have nuclear facilities in our area, but they are worried about what might happen across this country.

This is an issue of national trust and we must do everything we can to ensure that Canadians are protected in every way.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was very interested in the points my hon. colleague raised about these aging facilities and the real serious questions about safety.

I want to be very careful. As someone who is closer to 50 than 30 now, I am a little more sensitive to the issue of age. However, I would not drive a Studebaker. I would not use a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I would not use an IBM adding machine. I would not wear a ducktail or have my wife go around in a poodle skirt.

Now I know that members in the Conservative Party probably figure Canada peaked mid-1950s and it has been downhill ever since, but I certainly also would not want the safety of our country to be dependent on facilities that were not meant to last past 50 years, facilities with incredible risks of liability.

Given the fact that the Conservative government, which again probably still is in the black and white world, fired the head of the regulatory safety commission that is looking over these aging energy behemoths, I would like to ask my hon. colleague if she has any concerns about the state of our present facilities.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, this is another good question from my colleague. I go back to what my colleague from the Bloc also asked. The nuclear safety commissioner was basically fired in the dead of night for doing her job of protecting Canadians. This has again shaken the trust of Canadians.

We know that the NRU unit is 50 years old. It is starting to deteriorate. Increased safety measures are having to be put in place and yet, there is nothing coming forward for the replacement of this facility which makes, primarily, medical isotopes. Unfortunately, this is something that we have to get our heads around.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Kitchener Centre, Elections Canada; the hon. member for Davenport, Cluster Bombs.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak to Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident.

I am especially pleased to be speaking right after our critic, the member for Beauharnois—Salaberry, who does an excellent job and very capably represents the Bloc on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources. A specialist in community services, she always defended peoples' interests when she was in business or working in the community. She always paid special attention to the men and women around her. That is why she is capable of defending her constituents every day, and that is why our colleague from Beauharnois—Salaberry sits on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources.

I am not an expert. I have some things to say. I listened to her speech and learned from it. However, I do understand the political game the NDP is playing. It will always astound me, because the NDP has never been in power in this country—

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

In five provinces and one territory—

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

We will not talk about the disasters in the provinces or the NDP disasters in Ontario. This member makes me laugh when he says that the NDP has been in power in five Canadian provinces. In any event, it has never been in power federally. We have an advantage over the NDP in that we know we will never be in power, whereas the NDP is doing everything it can to come to power.

The NDP will never come to power for the simple reason that the New Democrats do not get it. That is the tragedy of the New Democratic Party: it does not understand. It does not understand that the Conservative Party introduced this bill on compensation because it wants to develop nuclear energy.

We know that, in Quebec, nuclear energy will not solve all our problems. Those days are gone. We have plants in Gentilly, but those days are gone. We have moved on to hydroelectricity. We in Quebec do know, though, that we are going to have to pay 22% of the bill when there is damage. That is a fact.

Every day in committee, the member for Beauharnois—Salaberry defends the interests of Quebeckers, as I do every day, and as all our Bloc colleagues do. Our objective is to defend our fellow citizens. We are Quebeckers.

This bill has one benefit: everyone agrees that the $75 million for compensation is out of date. It is true that we would have liked to improve on the $650 million.

We would have liked to have supported the NDP, except its problem is that it did not understand that the Conservatives and the Liberals were together and had decided that $650 million was enough. What the NDP is doing is just delaying the implementation of this bill. In the meantime, if there were an accident, there would be no bill to guarantee the $650 million in compensation.

As the member for Beauharnois—Salaberry said, at least the bill states that it will be reviewed every five years. If the minister ever finds that the compensation is insufficient, he will be able to increase the amount. Once again, it is a matter of understanding the dynamics of politics.

Earlier, the NDP critics said that they are not playing politics. When the Liberals say white, all they do is say black. It is always the same. Since I came here in 2000, it has always been the same. In their approach to politics they are cut from the same cloth as the Liberals. They look at what the Liberals are going to do and then decide to do the opposite.

That amazes me, especially when we are talking about issues as important as compensation for damage in case of a nuclear accident. It does not need to be spelled out. We know that reactors, not just in Canada, but throughout the world, are not in good shape. We know that these nuclear reactors are dangerous.

So it is important to be able to counter that. Obviously the Conservatives want to develop this energy system. It is really something to hear the Minister of Natural Resources claim that it is a clean energy, yet no one knows what to do with the nuclear waste.

Furthermore, the tragedy for Quebeckers is that the government wants to bury the nuclear waste in the Canadian Shield in Quebec. We are not the ones producing the waste, and we are the ones getting stuck with it.

Every day in this House, the Bloc Québécois will fight tooth and nail to keep nuclear waste that has been produced in other provinces from being buried in Quebec. Imagine. Other members in this House need to realize this.

In Quebec, we decided to develop hydroelectricity without a penny from the federal government. I hope that no one faints: we did not get one penny from the federal government.

Quebeckers alone paid for the development of hydroelectricity, through their taxes and their hydro bills, which they pay to Hydro-Québec, a crown corporation. The federal government has never contributed a cent, yet Quebec has always paid 22% to 25% of the costs of nuclear energy based on its contribution and its population compared to that of Canada. Quebec has always footed approximately a quarter of the total bill for development of nuclear energy, non-renewable energies and fossil fuels, the oil sector and all of the investments made. That is a fact.

So there is no reason to be surprised if the Bloc Québécois members rise in this House to defend the only solution we see—quite simply, Quebec's separation—so that we can manage our own energy development. Quebec is the province most likely to respect the Kyoto protocol because we developed our hydroelectric system with our own money.

We are doing the same thing with wind energy. Admittedly, the federal government is somewhat involved, but not anywhere in the range of the $900 billion invested in fossil fuel development.

I would point out that tax credits for petroleum development still exist, but there is no such development in Quebec. Furthermore, not a single litre of oil produced in western Canada goes to Quebec, because of the Borden line. People listening to us all think that Canada is an oil producing country and that we pay our share, but not a single litre of that oil makes it to Quebec, thanks to the famous Borden line, which comes from the west and stops at Borden. The rest goes to the United States. We, on the other hand, have to get our supply from other countries. It arrives by tanker along the St. Lawrence. We buy it from overseas. That is the reality.

If Quebec were its own country, it could have energy self-sufficiency. It would be very easy, simply because we produce our own hydroelectricity and receive our oil from other countries. We buy it internationally, so we do not need Canada. People must accept that reality.

We worked very hard in committee, especially the hon. member for Beauharnois—Salaberry, to try to improve this bill as much as possible, in order to force companies in nuclear development to be responsible in the future, and have them pay compensation and pay out large sums in the event of a nuclear disaster. We are talking about $650 million. We chose the maximum amount possible, while remaining very realistic.

The Conservatives and the Liberals were in bed together and therefore had the majority. Considering the Conservatives' hunger to develop this sector, we simply want to pass a bill very quickly to increase fines and compensation in the event of a nuclear incident or disaster. That must be clear. Otherwise, the Conservatives will sell the development of this sector to the Americans, as they have done with so many Canadian businesses. They like to let things take their course. Clearly, that allows foreigners to come and make their profits at our expense and, especially, in the event of an incident, at the expense of certain people who could not be reimbursed for all damages.

Once again, we are supporting certain bills but we are not happy about it. We had hoped the NDP amendments would be adopted and we supported them. However, reality caught up with us. The Conservatives and the Liberals are in league on this one. They have chosen to go full steam ahead in that direction. Unduly delaying Bill C-5, as the NDP is doing, will prevent passage of a bill that could be of great benefit in the event of a nuclear disaster.

We saw what happened after the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the United States. No one wants disasters to happen but they do. The only way to avoid them is to stop building nuclear power plants or to devote them to producing other types of energy. However, there are none. The Conservatives have no imagination when it comes to energy. The Conservatives' priorities are oil, nuclear power and the military. They do nothing for seniors, the forestry and manufacturing sectors or the general public and everything for all-out development.

Once again we will vote in favour of the bill even though we know it could have been better. It is nonetheless better than what we have.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, if there were a nuclear facility in Montreal and there were an accident at that facility, how much does my colleague think Montreal would be worth? Would it be worth $650 million or would it be more? I just want to get an idea as to whether he thinks $650 million would be enough liability or if he thinks it should be more in the case of a nuclear incident.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague can rest easy: no nuclear plants will be built near Montreal. She can be sure of that because we have hydroelectric power. However, should $650 million ever have to be paid out, it would probably not be enough; it will never be enough. Of course I agree with them on that.

Nevertheless, we have to face political reality and understand that the Conservatives and the Liberals have decided that $650 million is enough. We can try to block it or stop it, but in the meantime, the $75 million figure applies. That is the NDP's position: if an incident were to occur tomorrow, the $75 million maximum would apply. That is what it is focusing on.

If we were to listen to the New Democrats and do as they suggest, the maximum liability would remain at that level for a long time because they are delaying the passage of the bill, thus limiting compensation to $75 million. That is probably what they are hoping. I have never understood their political strategy, and I still do not understand it today.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague on his excellent speech. Because he is an infrastructure specialist, because of his responsibilities within the Bloc Québécois, and because he has been a mayor and president of the Union des municipalités du Québec, my question will be very precise.

Earlier, our New Democratic colleagues recommended solar and geothermal energy as alternatives to nuclear energy, and we agree with that. They recommended an east-west power grid. The Bloc Québécois does not agree with that solution. We agree with the idea of a grid, but as to who will pay for it, that is another matter.

I would like my colleague to comment on that issue and the debate over an east-west power grid.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Beauharnois—Salaberry for working every day in the interest of Quebeckers.

Again, given that Quebec paid for its own hydroelectric network without any federal contribution, given that we buy our gas and oil ourselves internationally, which is delivered by ships on the St. Lawrence River, I hope that my colleagues in this House will understand that Quebec is going to sell its electricity to the highest bidder.

It is obviously not our role to support the development of this grid and it is certainly not our role to pay a cent for one-quarter of developing it, because Canada has never paid for the development of Quebec's hydroelectric grid.

I hope hon. members will be understanding and respectful enough of Quebeckers not to make them pay 25% of the bill to develop grids for the others and that they will understand that we are going to sell our electricity for the best market price to those who will give us the most money. If it is the Americans, then it will be the Americans. If it is Ontario, then it will be Ontario. If it is the other provinces, then it will be the other provinces. We are here to do business, the way they have always done business with Quebec. They have always exploited us to the maximum. That is the reality.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to make a comment in response to the statements by the member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel. It is interesting to note that he spent his entire 10 minutes talking about the NDP. That is likely because of the big nominations we have seen recently, such as the one in Outremont or the one yesterday in Gatineau. Three hundred people came out for the NDP nomination in this riding represented by the Bloc Québécois. Obviously the Bloc feels it is important to try to attack the NDP, because it can see that more and more Quebeckers are turning towards the NDP.

Why? It is very clear. The Bloc's position on Bill C-5 is incomprehensible. We know what the Conservatives are doing, and I will come back to that in a moment. We know that the Liberals go along with anything the Conservative Party says. As for the Bloc Québécois, after supporting the Conservative Party on all those budgets and confidence votes, this is the third time it has given up when faced with something that is not in the best interests of Quebeckers.

In the case of Bill C-5, it is clear that civil liability will fall on Quebeckers for any amount over $650 million if there is an incident. That is what happened with Gentilly-2, just east of Montreal. Once this is privatized, Quebec taxpayers will have to pay. Based on the costs of other nuclear incidents, that could mean paying $499 for every dollar paid within the liability limit. That is ridiculous.

I wanted to make these comments before moving on. I do not understand the Bloc's position, but it is very clear that this is not in the best interests of Quebeckers.

I would like to come back to this issue of Bill C-5 which should be known as the worst nuclear practices act put forward by the government in an attempt, in the long term, to essentially privatize Canadian nuclear facilities.

We know that the current status of nuclear facilities makes it impossible for American private companies to take over Canadian nuclear facilities because there is liability legislation in American law that when foreign liability insurance is too low those nuclear companies are responsible for picking up the liability in the event of a nuclear accident.

What have the Conservatives done? Their privatization agenda seems to be as broad and vast as possible. They have privatized airline transportation safety and given it over to the companies, which certainly did not work with railway safety or business aircraft and it will not work with public transport in the skies, and now nuclear liability itself. The government seems hell bent on privatizing every facet of Canadian life. We have to wonder if this is in the interest of the Canadian population.

I will come back to this term of worst nuclear practices because we need to look at what is happening around the world and how other countries are handling this same question. Hopefully, in all four corners of the House, there would be some degree of consensus that we have to move to best practices, not worst practices.

What is the issue of liability? What it means is that whatever the liability limit is in Canadian legislation, Canadian taxpayers will be picking up the tab for everything beyond that amount.

What does that mean? It means that if we privatize nuclear safety, and the government has shown its willingness and determination to privatize safety in every other aspect, we could have a private nuclear company botching its nuclear safety and causing a massive accident. It would not be the first time it has happened. We have tabled in the House dozens and dozens of nuclear accidents taking place since 1945. It is a regular occurrence.

Therefore, to say that there is a possibility of an accident, one needs only look at the facts and the reality. We cannot pretend that there will not be an accident when we have this past track record. Therefore, we need to look at the whole issue of how we handle these accidents and how we handle liability.

Other countries have said that companies need to have strong liability levels. Germany and Japan both have unlimited liability. In the United States we are talking of liability limits that are in the order of $10 billion. What do the Conservatives propose, with the support of the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois, three-quarters of this House basically just dropping their arms in surrender and saying that whatever the Prime Minister wants he gets? They are proposing $650 million. It is ridiculous.

We need only look at one nuclear accident and the estimated damages, the nuclear accident that took place in the Ukraine. The estimated amount in terms of overall damages by the Russian government is in the order of $235 billion. I will repeat that because I think it is important for our hon. friends in the other three-quarters of the House to understand the difference between $650 million and $235 billion. What does that mean? It means that the potential consequences of shoddy management practices in nuclear facilities would cost in the order of $235 billion and yet the government proposes to set the liability limit far below that.

In fact, in that particular case, if that had been a Canadian nuclear reactor and if that had been on Canadian soil, under the guidelines of Bill C-5 that would mean the company's liability would be $1 and the Canadian taxpayers' liability would be $500. For every $1 of the company's responsibility, the taxpayers would be libel for $500.

I say that is absurd and so do members of the NDP caucus who have been speaking in the House against this bill. It is absolutely absurd that we would limit the company's responsibility to that small an amount, the minimum possible international standards. That is why we in the NDP say that Bill C-5 should be known as the worst nuclear practices act.

In the recent statistics coming out of the latest parliamentary session, and I do not think I am betraying anything unless there is a massive shift in the next 24 hours, it turns out that the average NDP MP does 19 times the work of MPs from other caucuses, particularly backbench Conservatives and Liberal MPs.

When Bill C-5 came forward, we immediately got to work offering dozens of amendments to clean up the bill so Canadian taxpayers would not be on the hook. We raised it in committee and thought we had the support of the Liberals and the Bloc. However, any time there is a bill the Prime Minister wants passed, the Liberals back off immediately and simply agree to pass it. In something reminiscent of the softwood lumber sellout, which both the Liberals and the Bloc supported the Conservatives on and on which B.C. is still suffering the enormous consequences of that sellout, the Bloc told the Prime Minister to take whatever he wanted and Bill C-5 was not amended.

We then brought forward amendment after amendment in the House and still there have been no changes, which is why we have been speaking against this bill. It is ridiculous. It is simply the worst possible nuclear practice. It is not in keeping with Canadian interests and it is irresponsible.

The reason we have been speaking out against this so-called responsible bill, the worst nuclear practices act, in the House of Commons, and raising this issue in every tribunal that we can and, by the way, getting significant public support, is because it does not make sense to push for the privatization of the nuclear industry, to lessen safeguards over the nuclear industry or to have a liability amount that is so ridiculously low that Canadian taxpayers, in the horrendous and horrific possibility of a real nuclear accident, would be on the hook for centuries.

We know that nuclear material is radioactive for centuries. This bill, the worst nuclear practices act, is a radioactive bill because it would have consequences that would last for centuries, which is why we are opposing it.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster understands what this bill means and why we tried to amend it but, sadly, could not get it amended in committee and could not get it amended in the House at report stage. We want our voices to be heard loud and clear, which is what he has done, about the problems in the bill and why it should not go forward.

One of the biggest issues is the amount of the liability. I want to ask a similar question to the one I asked my Bloc colleague. Does he think the government is devaluing Canadian communities that have nuclear facilities where there could be an incident? When we say that a community is only worth $650 million and we know it is worth a lot more, does he think the government is devaluing Canadian communities by having such a low liability?

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Vancouver Island North represents an area that has been devalued by the Conservative government, North Vancouver Island. Through the devastating softwood lumber sellout, she has seen first-hand what she has had to do to fight on behalf of her communities.

The Conservative government basically sold out pretty well every community in British Columbia, certainly, northern communities across the prairies, northern Ontario and northern Quebec, with the softwood lumber sellout. Ten thousand jobs were lost. There was a hemorrhaging of jobs to the United States and a billion dollars were given up, which is absolutely ridiculous.

We see yet another initiative of the Conservatives as part of their great agenda to sell out Canadian communities. There is absolutely no doubt that when we limit liability to $650 million and we know the potential in a nuclear catastrophe is in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars, when we see that other countries like Germany and Japan have unlimited liability, which forces the companies to assure proper practices in the nuclear sphere, and when we see it in its entirety, it is very clear that the Conservative government does not value Canadian communities, whether they be in Newfoundland and Labrador, or on Vancouver Island or in the north.

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, based on the analysis he just gave, does my hon. colleague not agree that it would actually be better for Canada to find ways to produce electricity that are permanent, sustainable and viable, unlike atomic energy? Does he not also think that, since such a low limit is being established, there is good reason to believe that that limit could be surpassed?

Indeed, as the member just mentioned, would it not be better to follow the example of countries that are setting much higher limits as a guarantee that companies will do everything they can, knowing the consequences they face in the event of a tragedy?

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Outremont for his question.

He is quite right. It is important to establish a strategy that includes other kinds of energy.

Fortunately, we in the NDP have done so recently, with the energy plan we are currently establishing in order to really create a new kind of sustainable development in Canada. We believe that a vast majority of Canadians support this new kind of development.

I know the hon. member represents a very important community in Quebec and I also know that he is worried about the position of the Bloc Québécois, who wanted to follow the NDP's lead regarding Bill C-5, but who threw in the towel and said they would stop fighting the Conservative government, as one Bloc member just mentioned.

The Bloc says the Conservatives and the Liberals are too strong and that it cannot do anything. We saw this with the softwood lumber agreement and we are seeing it again with air safety. Time and time again, the Bloc Québécois refuses to represent Quebeckers—

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

It is with regret that I must interrupt the hon. member for Burnaby—New Westminster. We are now resuming debate.

The hon. member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel would like to take the floor, but it is the member for Outremont's turn to speak.

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, such excitement. For a moment I thought the member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel would speak, but no. Maybe one day we will hear his voice in this House.

We are talking about an extremely important bill that aims to relieve the nuclear industry of its responsibility. Nuclear energy represents very real dangers. Because using nuclear energy to produce electricity is so dangerous, the Conservative government, which has no vision for sustainable development, wants to make things easier for companies should an accident occur.

What I am about to say may seem incredible, but to the south of us, in the United States, the limit on compensation that could be paid out for a nuclear accident is $10 billion. The Conservatives would like to set the limit at $650 million. However, we know that the total cost of damages from an accident like Chernobyl would be hundreds of billions of dollars. For a single accident. The proposed amount is obviously insufficient. It does not even represent 1% of the potential damages in the event of an accident, which is not something anyone wants to see happen, of course.

How did we get to this point? The answer is simple. For at least the past 13 years, the Liberals claimed they were doing something about sustainable development, but in reality they were not. They were all talk and no action, as is their habit. Although we do not agree with the Conservatives, at least they do not pretend to care about future generations. All they want to do is get as much as they can now, look after today and let tomorrow look after itself. That is their attitude, and it is reflected in all their decisions.

We are faced with a situation that came about through Liberal inaction: no vision, no plan for clean, renewable energy, no hydrogen, no wind power, no solar power or hydro. What we have instead is an attempt to promote nuclear power in Ontario and Saskatchewan.

I want to be very clear. The NDP is opposed to any new nuclear infrastructure in Canada. We find it regrettable that, instead of looking at potential energy sources—and what Quebec is doing is a perfect example—instead of developing clean, renewable energy sources, the government is relying on a technology that is more than 60 years old.

As I just demonstrated with the case of Chernobyl, in Ukraine, nuclear accidents can have devastating consequences. I am talking about damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars, as well as tens of thousands of deaths. Many people died immediately, as a direct result of the accident, but a huge number of people also developed cancer. By looking at the concentric circles emanating out to Europe from Chernobyl, we can even see changes in types of cancer 5, 10 and 15 years after the accident, which occurred about 20 years ago.

I am reading a book about Chernobyl and was interested to see that the accident prompted Gorbachev and Reagan to focus on the urgent need to work for peace. However, it seems as though these lessons—pursuing peace and working to eliminate the real danger of any form of nuclear energy, whether it be a nuclear weapon or, in the case of Chernobyl again, a series of reactors to produce electricity that could get out of control—are often lost.

Let us look at how extraordinary Canada is. It is the second largest country in the world, in terms of geographic area, with a small population of barely 35 million. In this country, solutions have varied over the years and generating electricity is a provincial and local responsibility. We could work, for example, with wind energy. Did you know that Quebec is heading toward a production of 4,000 megawatts? That means 4,000 times a million watts in wind energy. We have potential wind energy sites all across Canada, in other words, sites that are particularly favourable for generating wind energy, particularly in regions where first nations live.

Last week, quite rightfully, the government apologized for some of the harm caused to the first nations. What an incredible opportunity for us to have a vision of the future, to work with the provinces, which are primarily responsible, to provide incentives, including tax programs, to develop clean and renewable energy that comes from the wind.

If we combine wind energy with hydroelectricity, which is often a potential source of energy across Canada, we can, when weather and market conditions are suitable—why not export clean, renewable energy if we have it in abundance?—we can create something that is sustainable and also very useful for future generations.

Quebec's current finance minister, Monique Jérôme-Forget, recently went to different capital cities to explain the intrinsic value of Hydro-Québec, and I must admit that I more or less agree with her. She was talking about the wealth that can be created, but the Conservatives do not see it that way. To them, the only thing worth doing in Canada is to develop the oil sands in Alberta as quickly as possible and soon those in Saskatchewan, too.

In an extraordinary new book by Montreal journalist William Marsden, aptly entitled Stupid to the Last Drop, he considers the oil sands and recalls a historical fact. In the early 1950s, the suggestion was made that to get oil out of the oil sands in Alberta, it would be a good idea to set off atomic bombs here and there throughout that province. Plans were created and analyses carried out. It would not surprise me to learn that they actually tried that.

Something almost as stupid is now being proposed: the construction of a number of nuclear plants to generate the steam used to extract the oil from the tar sands. This is already an unsustainable situation. Natural gas is presently used to extract oil from tar sands. And the oil is being exported directly to the United States without any value added.

This is somewhat similar to the mistake made, generation after generation, with respect to our forests. My colleague just explained to us how ridiculous it was to sell out to the Americans. Even if there were real concerns about the sustainability of certain forestry practices, that did not at all justify, in light of NAFTA, giving away $1 billion just to settle the dispute. But that is what was done. We were directly exporting our forest products, while the value added, the processing, was done elsewhere, primarily in the United States. Most of the time, this is also true of ores and our other resources from the primary sector.

The same thing is happening with oil. The new Keystone project, just approved by the National Energy Board, proposes to export 200 million litres per day to the United States. Despite the problems of extracting the oil and the pollution that already exists in Canada, the errors will be stupidly compounded by exporting the oil in bulk to the United States, along with all the jobs in processing.

For the Keystone project alone, that amounts to 18,000 jobs that will be exported to the United States. The environmental problems will be placed on our shoulders and on those of future generations and the first nations. All the benefits will be exported. With regard to the obvious problem of NAFTA, we are creating a situation where the Americans can, under the NAFTA rules of proportionality, demand that we continue sending the same amount.

This bill exemplifies the Conservatives' lack of vision in terms of energy production. They have gone so far as to draft a bill to help the nuclear industry avoid its civil responsibility. It is outright shameful and I am very proud to be a member of the only political party that has the courage to rise in the House of Commons and to express its disapproval. I am very disappointed that the Bloc and the Liberals support the Conservatives in this matter.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I believe the member has a good understanding of the problem with this bill. He was once Quebec's environment minister. Therefore, he has a lot of experience with the need to develop a long-term plan, with environmental requirements, and with the effects of power-generating projects. The NDP is opposed to this bill and to the development of the nuclear industry.

The reason for our opposition is there are so many issues of liability as well as unanswered questions.

Clearly no one has never come up with a plan for the waste, for the MOX fuel, for the spent rods and for the contamination that is created in the nuclear industry. It is shipped in barrels and moved on trucks. Continually the great lands of the north are looked at as an ideal dumping ground. I am proud to say the citizens of Timmins—James Bay will stand steadfast in ensuring that such waste is never dumped on us. However, there is lack of a plan for contaminated substance that has thousands of years of liability and impact on the environment.

From his many years of experience with the Government of Quebec, could he explain to us, if this process is so safe, why we still have not found anybody, any jurisdiction or any way of addressing or accepting the waste left from these projects?

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague and friend, the member for Timmins—James Bay, has hit the nail right on the head with his question. That is where the real problems of sustainable development, longevity and viability arise.

Like him, people on Quebec's North Shore are concerned about certain companies. This concern is not merely theoretical. There are some companies—and I can comment on them because I knew them when I was Quebec's environment minister—that have definite designs on the region because they think there is nothing there, nothing but a few people, anyway. They think the place is huge and that they can always dig deep enough.

That is exactly the mentality underlying this bill. The fact that they are exploring the vast reaches of northern Ontario and Quebec looking for places to dig and bury waste, hoping that it will not escape somehow, which makes no sense at all, is proof positive of the problems inherent in nuclear development, just like the problems with this bill to limit liability.

The very idea of limiting liability reveals the danger this kind of activity poses. The government recognizes these threats, but it does not want to reduce them; it wants to limit companies' liability. That is why this bill is so shameful, and that is why it is so unfortunate that the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals are supporting the Conservatives on this one.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I referred to the bill as a sad case of trying to introduce carbon offsets for our greenhouse gases in the oil sands. The Conservative government seems to think nuclear is clean energy and it is sadly mistaken.

Because my time is so short, does my hon. colleague think the $650 million, this small amount of money attributed to operators of nuclear facilities, is basically a devaluing of Canadian communities? So many communities that have nuclear facilities are populated areas with businesses, families and homes and these assets are worth a lot more, collectively, than $650 million. Is it a sellout to our Canadian communities to not go with an unlimited liability?

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is exactly right. It is a further illustration of the fact that the Conservatives simply do not believe in sustainable development. What is saddening today is the Liberals and the Bloc are endorsing their positions against sustainable development.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate, at least for a little while, in this important debate on Bill C-5, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident, also known as the nuclear liability compensation act, or as some of my colleagues in this corner of the House have referred to it as the worst nuclear practices act.

That should give an indication of where New Democrats stand on this issue. We have been very opposed to the legislation. We thought it needed significant improvement before we would be able to support it. Unfortunately, despite doing our best in committee and later here in the House, those improvements did not happen and the bill is headed to be endorsed by the Liberals, the Bloc and the Conservatives. We think that is very disappointing for Canadians.

We know many Canadians have very serious concerns about nuclear energy. We know many Canadians understand that nuclear energy is not green energy, that the potential for accidents, the safety concerns surrounding nuclear energy, are very significant. Also the serious concerns about the disposal of waste from the nuclear power process have also baffled and troubled Canada for many years.

The member for Timmins—James Bay made it very clear that attempts to deposit waste from nuclear plants in northern Ontario will be resisted by the people of northern Ontario again and again because of the problems with that kind of process and waste.

There are many problems with the legislation. The legislation was developed to limit the amount of damages a nuclear power plant operator or fuel processor would pay out should there be an accident causing radiological contamination to property outside the plant area itself. The legislation really only applies to power plants and to fuel processors. Those unfortunately are not the only places where nuclear material is used, where there is the potential of an accident that might cause a claim for liability and compensation.

The current legislation dates from the 1970s and it is incredibly inadequate. We know changes are needed to that legislation. Right now under the existing legislation the liability limit is only $75 million, which is a pittance when we consider the kinds of accidents and liability claims that might come about as the result of a nuclear accident.

The proposal before us, however, only considers raising that to $650 million, which is the rock bottom of the international average of this kind of legislation around the world. We know, for instance, the liability in Japan is unlimited, with each operator having to carry private insurance of $30 million. The liability in Germany is also unlimited, except for nuclear accidents caused by war, and each operator has to have almost $500 million in private insurance. That is a far different approach than we take in Canada. Even in the United States, there is a limit of $9.7 billion U.S., with each operator needing up to $200 million in insurance.

The Conservatives' attempt pales by comparison with the assessment of other countries of what the level of liability, what the dollar amount attached to liability, should be. It is easy to understand why it should be so high when we consider the kinds of problems that would result from a serious nuclear accident.

The problem also with the legislation is that once the $650 million liability threshold is reached, the Canadian taxpayers are on the hook for the rest. A nuclear operator would only have to pay out a maximum of $650 million, while the public would be on the hook for millions, possibly billions of dollars in the case of an accident. There would be a special tribunal set up by the Minister of Natural Resources to look at the liability beyond $650 million and that liability would be paid out of the public purse. That is not an appropriate approach that Canadian taxpayers could support.

There are a lot of concerns. Many believe the legislation is an attempt to make the situation for the privatization of Canada's nuclear industry more attractive to foreign corporations to step in and get involved in the ownership of the Canadian nuclear industry, that the Conservatives have a plan to move that way. Given some of their other movements and their other steps, it is hard not to believe that it is what they have in mind.

British Columbia fortunately does not have nuclear power generation, but we are concerned about nuclear power and fuel processing at the Hanford station in Washington state in the U.S. It has been a long time source of concern for many people in British Columbia. We know that over many years the nine nuclear reactors and five massive plutonium processing complexes put nuclear radioactive contamination into the air and into the water of the Columbia River.

Thankfully the Hanford site has been decommissioned and is now in the process of a huge clean up, which will cost a minimum of $2 billion a year, and this clean up will go on for many decades. There are other specialized facilities to aid in the clean up, like the vitrification plant, which is one method designed to combine dangerous waste with glass to render it stable. That facility will cost $12 billion. Sadly the clean up has been put off. The timelines originally scheduled will not be met.

Billions of dollars are being spent just to remediate a former nuclear processing plant area and a nuclear generating site. This shows the extreme cost of an accident, which would be far more expensive.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

It being 5:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of private members' business as listed on today's order paper.

When we return to the study of Bill C-5, there will still be three minutes for the hon. member for Burnaby—Douglas.