Meegwetch for giving me the opportunity. I'm Chief Duncan Michano from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg. We live in northern Ontario.
The issue is that the Government of Canada is delegating the governance and policy-making for nuclear waste to the nuclear industry. I liken it to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
The nuclear industry in Canada has been creating high-level nuclear waste now for approximately 60 years. During that time, the nuclear industry has created somewhere in the order of three million used fuel bundles, probably more. These highly radioactive bundles need to be cooled for a period of time in pools of water, which themselves become contaminated.
The NWMO, which is an industry-owned organization, has been delegated by the nuclear industry to determine methods to safely store this waste, waste that is created in the nuclear reactors. Some of these elements exist nowhere else in the universe but are created solely in these nuclear reactors. This waste is deadly to all forms of life on our planet, and toxic for thousands of years—hundreds of thousands of years in a lot of cases.
The method the NWMO has chosen to dispose of this deadly waste is to bury the nuclear waste in deep geological repositories. The intent is to bury that waste at some point and then walk away, leaving future generations to deal with the issues and the contamination of their homelands by an industry that cares only about the bottom line.
I would like to point out that as a prospector—I wander around the bush all the time, and I study geology—I understand geological processes, and the earth is not static; it's plastic. Over geological time, all rock formations move. These movements will eventually allow the toxic nuclear waste to then leach into the environment. It's not a matter of if it will eventually leach out but when.
What is the legacy that we wish to leave our descendants? A legacy like Chernobyl? Think about that, please.
The Governments of Canada and Ontario must ensure that they, not the nuclear industry, are in charge of nuclear waste policy and must phase out the production of electricity by nuclear means so that no more of this deadly waste is produced.
Attached are numerous resolutions—and you may have that in your files because I sent them in—passed by the Anishinabek Nation and other first nation organizations, including our chiefs in Ontario and the AFN. Some of these resolutions were moved by me. They include opposing the storing of nuclear waste on their lands and our lands and opposing the creation of SMNRs, and demanding that nuclear power be phased out.
There are other—