So there's no imminent thousand-employee layoff. This is what people are concerned about, because they are hearing that AECL doesn't have its full year's cheque worth for both the repairs as well as the operating costs and that combined with a mass e-mail that engineers and retired engineers got saying that Bill C-9 is designed to sell AECL out from underneath Canadians by stealth. Just by virtue of having this discussion dispels that notion. So that is why I asked that question. And contrast that to representatives from the Technicians and Technologists Independent Union, who are working together so as the company goes through the restructuring they can be a part of it and work together with it.
And as many of my colleagues here are aware, and Madame Brunelle, I've been working with a group of employees at Chalk River. We call ourselves the CREATE committee, which stands for Chalk River Employees Ad-hoc Taskforce for a national laboratory. Of course their main focus at this point is getting NRU back and running, and I hope eventually the case will be made that a multi-purpose reactor should go there.
But regardless of whatever decisions are made about the future of the commercial side of AECL, we believe the proposal for a national laboratory should be pursued, and we see the current restructuring as much as an opportunity as anything else.
Should the decision not to restructure AECL proceed, what does the CREATE committee need to do to encourage AECL to support their proposal that could result in a different government agency, such as the National Research Council, or some newly created agency, like a public-private partnership, to play an enhanced role at the Chalk River site, particularly when it comes to nuclear research and development?