Bill C-20 (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

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

My hon. friend is making some comment, but I cannot quite understand it. I guess it was humorous because his colleague from Tobique—Mactaquac enjoyed it. I am glad to see they are enjoying themselves.

We heard how important it was at that time when they brought this bill in as Bill C-5. Those comments were repeated last year with Bill C-20. Now we are dealing with Bill C-15, the latest incarnation of the government's nuclear liability legislation, and the same arguments are being echoed. It is almost as if there are ghosts in here, there are so many echoes. We will see how far it makes it this time.

Canadians will recall that two years ago it was politically convenient to jettison this legislation so Conservatives could break their own fixed date election law and force a vote before they had to admit how badly they had mismanaged the country's finances. As we learned, they had put the country into deficit before the recession even began by their decisions in terms of spending and tax cuts that they could not afford. We had a deficit last year of $54 billion and who knows how much in the current year.

Last December the nuclear industry was quite excited when the bill was introduced, when it passed second reading, when it went to committee where it was approved and then reported back to the House. Industry stakeholders thought that after many years the bill would become law. Of course the Prime Minister panicked over the prospect of having to tell Canadians the truth about Afghan detainees and promptly prorogued Parliament to protect his political assets. Nuclear liability legislation became collateral damage to that decision in the government's ongoing battle to suppress the truth. It is really part of the government's ever-expanding Conservative culture of deceit.

However, now we start again from square one. We heard the parliamentary secretary tell the House how important the legislation was to the government and how significant it was to Canada's nuclear industry. That was quite a performance, deserving of some sort of Prairie Oyster award or something like that.

The bill would provide much needed update to industry standards to ensure stability and protection for Canadians. Hopefully this time the Conservatives can put the needs of the nation ahead of their party interests and actually enact the legislation, not prorogue the House, not break a fixed date election law, or whatever.

Bill C-15 would replace the 1976 Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act and establish a clear regime in the event of a nuclear accident. While we pray that never happens, the recent events in the Gulf of Mexico remind us we need to always be prepared, as my son the Boy Scout would say.

One of the key changes in Bill C-15 would be to increase operator liability from $75 million to $650 million. That is a significant increase but some ask if it is enough. The last time the legislation was before us the government claimed that $650 million was all the Canadian insurance industry could bear. That is why it would not entertain going higher to $1 billion, for example.

However, during a comprehensive study, which we heard about at the Standing Committee on Natural Resources, we learned that this was not quite the case. Hopefully, during this debate, we will hear some more about why the government feels that $650 million is adequate. Hopefully this time we will get a clearer and stronger answer. We have had a bit of an answer today. We need to hear more about that.

When the former bill went to committee, before it was killed along with the government's talk tough on crime agenda and other bills that the government claimed were so important before it prorogued and killed them all, all parties at that time did agree on a number of amendments that strengthened the legislation. I look forward to the committee's further study in the weeks ahead. My party and I will be supporting sending Bill C-15 to committee.

While the bill would provide much needed changes, the basic principles of the nuclear liability and compensation act will remain the same. Operators are absolutely and exclusively liable for damage. That is one principle. Operators must carry insurance. An operator's liability is limited in time and amount. Suppliers and contractors are effectively indemnified. All those are important basic principles.

According to the Department of Natural Resources, the new liability limit reflects a balance of considerations. It is looking at the question of risk and if it address foreseeable rather than catastrophic accidents and if the insurance reflects insurance capacity that can be available at a reasonable cost. It puts Canada on par with the liability limits in many other countries. It responds to recommendations made by the Senate Standing Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources.

Since this is the third time the House has seen this legislation, there is little need to address all of its details. Instead, I would like to note that despite the fact that the Conservatives consistently lack the legislative fortitude to actually see nuclear legislation completely through this process, at least they have not been too afraid to bring it to the House for debate. They brought it back after they prorogued for other reasons.

That is not the case for another key aspect of the nuclear industry, the sale of AECL assets. The government continues to hide its highly suspect plans for the outright sale of our world-class CANDU technology. I find that very disconcerting. Like Bill C-15, this is critical for the industry, but the Conservatives believe they can move without consulting the people most impacted, people directly involved in the industry, the employees of AECL and the industry itself.

The Conservatives believe it is okay to hide what they are doing from the same Canadian taxpayers who have invested hundreds of millions in this industry in recent years. In fact, they put the terms of this in the budget bill. Why would the decision of whether one sells a Crown corporation be in the budget bill? What place could it possibly have there? It does not make much sense.

It is not like this is the sale of a surplus filing cabinet or a used prime ministerial limo. We are talking about an industry that supports about 70,000 jobs, after all. In fact, a lot of those jobs are in the ridings of Conservative MPs. Like Bill C-15, the sale of AECL will impact a lot of jobs in a lot of Conservative ridings.

In order to encourage investment in our nuclear industry and to protect this sector and the jobs it generates, we are debating Bill C-15 as a way to provide legal and insurance certainty for suppliers and operators. However, while it is good to debate Bill C-15, the government has dropped a cone of silence over its privatization plans for AECL. Conservative MPs have been muzzled once again by the Prime Minister's Office.

Maybe we should not blame them, though. When people are so immersed in the Conservative culture of deceit, they may not recognize what is actually happening. Maybe they feel it is safer to bow to the wishes of the Conservative upper echelons who consider this industry an embarrassment and just want to get rid of it. They want to unload the CANDU technology. They want to unload AECL after many years of Canada being a world leader in the development of nuclear technologies. Things like medical isotopes were developed right in Canada. Canadians can be very proud of that. It is a shame.

There is even a story going around that we are about to sell off AECL to foreign interests because of a tantrum the Prime Minister threw when his ministers repeatedly bungled the medical isotope crisis. It is a scary thought that this is his reasoning behind this decision.

If the government really believes in strengthening the industry with legislation like Bill C-15, why is it not prepared to openly debate the outright sale of AECL's commercial assets? I do not know what Conservative MPs are telling those families in their ridings who rely on jobs in this sector, but I hope they will come to their senses on this one and insist that the government open up debate on this question.

Natural Resources

[Leon Benoit, Conservative, Vegreville—Wainwright, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Natural Resources in relation to Bill C-20, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident.

The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House with amendments.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

The government, of course, still retains the power to assign the tribunal, but the chair, as we've seen through the bill so far, holds a very important place in terms of what's allowed in, what's allowed out, and what's considered appropriate. We've heard that from our witnesses.

There's a slight typo, Chair; it should read, “who shall elect from among themselves a person who shall act as the”.

Amendment NDP-20 is essentially saying that once the government assigns the tribunal, the judges, whether current judges or past judges, then select their chair. It makes it one step further removed. The government still gets to choose the people it wishes to have on the tribunal, but the tribunal members then put forward their chair. It allows those final decisions to be one step removed from the government.

The chair, from what I read on C-20, holds extraordinary powers. It's the critical position on the tribunal. This amendment simply allows the tribunal to pick its chair. The government picks the tribunal, of course.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

So the situation you would have under Bill C-20 as it currently stands is that where a victim of a nuclear accident is given no limit south of the border, a similar person with the exact same case is given a 30-year limit afterwards.

I don't see any reason not to have the unlimited limit, I suppose, at the end of the day, if it can be directly shown as causal, and we have evidence that says particular forms of cancer can show up many years later, especially in young people and especially intergenerationally. It seems that the type of contamination we're talking about is one that can pass through the generations, so we have to be wary of that.

Again, I point to the committee's good judgment, but I think this is a reasonable clause and it's certainly one that our friends in the United States felt was reasonable as well.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

NDP-17 seeks to amend the legislation.

Just in terms of the time allotted in terms of somebody's ability to come back and file for compensation, under C-20 we have a number of limitations. One of them is around the actual liability limit, but it also imposes a ultimate period of 30 years. A number of witnesses who came before us said that the 30-year limit is artificially low and that some cancers that are caused by exposure to nuclear pollution can manifest over a much longer period of time.

There's a corresponding piece of legislation in the U.S. called the Price-Anderson Act that no longer has this limitation period of 30 years, or any such limitation. Where they modify the act in the U.S. is they say it's three years after the moment of first recognized harm. So once the cancer is identified, if cancer is the case, you have three years to report it. That seems reasonable.

But the 30-year limit on discovery often.... Unfortunately, we know as individuals, people in our family often have cancer that goes undiscovered for a number of years. Something happens consequentially and then they go in for a test and they find out they have cancer. But it manifested maybe many years before. That's also true with the types of cancer caused by exposure to nuclear radiation.

The Canadian Environmental Law Association brought this evidence forward to committee, and the committee has also received a number of letters from folks across Canada, some of them in the medical profession.

So that's essentially the amendment, Chair. It seeks to modify C-20 exactly that way. I would be curious as to the committee's opinions about the need to remove that one stipulation within the act.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Exactly.

What we're trying to understand is...and have a mechanism for the government every year to declare, “The total liabilities we would estimate, under a nuclear accident, would be the following: these are the liabilities that we deem are out there right now, every year.” Those will shift, depending on how many reactors there are in the country, the nature of those reactors, and their close proximity to....

We need to base that upon some sort of research, some sort of assessment. If you add more onto your house, let's say, your insurance gets adjusted. If the neighbourhood gets more expensive to live in, your insurance gets adjusted. Things change. Insurance regimes change.

Bill C-20 is trying to set up an insurance regime, and will do so for many years. We didn't change the last act for however many years. One has to imagine this thing lasting a while without any major changes. We want to be able to tell the Canadian people that this is the total liability that's out there--every year, as it changes.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Yes. Okay.

In the event that...and Bill C-20 does this. As you said, it requires the minister to prepare, or at least to anticipate the need for Parliament to release more funds--yes?--in the event that it exceeds the $650 million covered by private insurers.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

At what point and where can the Government of Canada say to the Canadian people every year, adding up all the potential damages and the costs that we may be on the hook for, “These are our current standing liabilities, this is what we may, in the unlikely event of a nuclear accident, be on the hook for”? Where can that appear? Why would it not appear in conjunction with an act like Bill C-20?

I understand the point of the limited liability is that this is all that can be made liable under Bill C-20, but there may be more, and there is an estimation. This whole thing has to be based on the idea that there's about this much needing to be paid out in the event of a nuclear accident, right? That's the whole premise of the bill.

We also would want to know, because we've talked about what damages would be covered under Bill C-20, which ones wouldn't. I think it's a worthwhile exercise for the Canadian people to know, of those that wouldn't be covered, this is what sits on the books right now for liabilities for the Canadian government.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

What new clause 26.1 attempts to do--and this is for the interest of the committee--is it attempts to say that under Bill C-20 the government, every year, must come forward to say, above and beyond the insurance coverage that reactors will have, what liabilities will Canada potentially be on the hook for.

Ms. MacKenzie is saying no.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

So what I'm asking about is that Bill C-20 seeks a different regime.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to our guests.

Mr. Hénault, Mr. McCauley, and Ms. MacKenzie, thank you for being here again.

We're here today to continue our clause-by-clause of Bill C-20. When we left off we were about to start dealing with a new clause 26.1, which is amendment NDP-15. It is a new clause.

First of all, Mr. Cullen, do you want to move that motion?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

This took us a while. It wasn't really until the clause-by-clause stage where we could get into this as committee members, but on the assessment of risk, as we saw in the Magellan study, the way the risk is assessed is the whole exercise. If you limit the risk assessment to a certain reactor under a certain defined set of conditions, you come up with a number for liability and a number for compensation. That same study asked the government to expand its view and look at more severe accidents in denser populations.

I'll read for members what NDP-14 seeks to do: “When the Minister causes a copy of a reinsurance agreement to be laid before each House...the Minister shall also cause to be laid before each House a copy of all related risk assessment studies that were completed before the reinsurance agreement was entered into”.

I referred to the Magellan study. If this clause had existed previously, all members of this committee and the Canadian public would have had access to that research. So when the government says that it's building Bill C-20 “based upon this assessment”, all this amendment says is to put the assessment before us so we understand where the number comes from.

Instead, we've had to go through all these witness hearings, and it was in a seemingly casual way--I don't want to say that it was in a casual way, because I'm not knocking the witnesses at all--that we got to see the report. Also, the report was made available to committee members, but it wasn't translated. I think we need to formalize this part of the process because the rules you set out at the very beginning for the study will eventually determine the liability limit.

So we're simply asking the government, when it's setting any new liability limit, to tell Parliament and the Canadian people, “This is the study we used to set the liability limit”. It seems logical. The amendment is not asking for any state secrets or anything that would be a corruptive influence. It just says to tell us how you got to the number, show us the data, and allow us to have some conversation about it. That's what NDP-14 seeks to do.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Okay. I might have that wrong.

The report I'm referencing is the one that the government commissioned. It looked at two reactors around which we had much discussion here. There were three factors. One is, the report is eight years old. That's when this bill was constructed. It was constructed around an eight-year-old report.

Second, the two recommendations that came out of the report—there were only two—said that the government should look at Pickering, a place with a higher density of population, and it should also look at different types of accidents, more severe accidents than the one the examiners studied. They were given a direction to study two more isolated reactors under a limited set of conditions for a design accident, one that was imagined, as opposed to a more severe accident. The nuclear insurance group came before us, and under a question from my colleague, Mr. Rafferty—I'll repeat this, because I think this is important—the question was, “As a lawyer, would you think it would be fair to limit liability to an entity if an accident were to happen because of negligence and incompetence?” That is what we're dealing with here.

The answer from Mr. Walker—this is from the nuclear insurance companies themselves—is that “the classical answer would be no”. I guess there are no countervailing arguments in a nuclear environment. From the insurer's point of view, to Mr. Allen's point, when the concept that's brought up here about proven negligence and given the moment where you can have this limited liability, the insurance said no. They said that when you look at it this way, you shouldn't do this.

Our report is eight years old, and the government ignored the only two recommendations that came out of the report to study what may in fact happen. We're going to a question of proven negligence, in which the insurers themselves said that if you have proven negligence, the special circumstance that Bill C-20 creates should be modified. Our amendment is modifying that circumstance in saying that we're giving you special treatment as an industry because it's so hard to insure you guys flat out--that it can't be done. That was said by the nuclear industry themselves: without this type of legislation, you don't have a nuclear industry, period.

We're saying that's fine to an extent. We've argued already for a higher liability limit. There's disagreement on that. We're now saying that just in a point of proven negligence, should they still be afforded that special privilege of limited liability? We're saying sure, that it still is afforded to them, but charge them more for it, because they were negligent, and it was proven, and the insurance companies themselves who are involved said that would make sense.

Those are the arguments we're making around NDP-5. I think for all the points I raised, it makes sense. We submit ourselves to the vote of the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Yes, Mr. Cullen, what you're arguing is that there wouldn't be additional money if amendment 16 were to pass. I've ruled that amendment 16 isn't in order because the introduction of additional security in the form of contributions is a new concept that's outside and beyond the scope of Bill C-20 and therefore is inadmissible.

So you're basing your argument for saying there wouldn't be any additional spending required on the condition that amendment 16 would pass, which isn't going to happen because it isn't in order.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

A lot rests on the judge, obviously, because that's the way the tribunal is established. But there was nothing earlier on the judge's own experience, potential bias, or interest. The current or ex-judges are simply appointed by cabinet. The act itself, Bill C-20, allows the judge quite a bit of discretion to determine what's vexatious and what's not.

Imagine the public having a concern if a judge had previously been a lawyer, had worked for one element of the nuclear industry, became a judge, and was appointed to this because of their experience. But the act leaves so much available to the judge to decide. This could involve many millions of dollars and be quite important. There's no direction given on discretion, if you follow my meaning.

Is that because it's impossible to guide the government that way? You have a judge who worked 20 years as a lawyer for part of the nuclear industry and ends up becoming a judge. Then 10 or 15 years later he's appointed to a tribunal as a retired or sitting member of the bench. Now the public has to come before a judge who used to litigate on behalf of the nuclear industry.