[Technical difficulty—Editor] for years. Canada is a party to the International Atomic Energy Agency's Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. That's a 1968 treaty that was enforced in 1970. Now there is work happening worldwide to include a convention or treaty that would ban reprocessing nuclear waste. Canada has not been supportive of that approach to date, at least not explicitly. Canada had a de facto ban, or at least an operational practice not to support utilizing the reprocessing of nuclear waste, specifically because of the weapon risks, along with highly enriched uranium, which we don't do here either.
There was a real opportunity for Canada to include a ban in its just-released, updated nuclear waste policy, which the International Atomic Energy Agency had asked it to do. Instead, unfortunately, Canada said in that policy, released a couple of weeks ago, that because there was no current reprocessing of nuclear waste, it was outside the scope of the nuclear waste policy.
That was, I think, a real missed opportunity. Because the advocates, as I mentioned, are arguing for the use of nuclear power as part of the answer to climate change—and that's a different discussion for a different day—the types of nuclear technology are being examined. Some of them are proposing to use, as fuel, reprocessed nuclear fuel—i.e., plutonium extracted from the used fuel from reactors.
Yes, Canada does need to work with its partners, but Canada needs to also pull up its own socks. It has been providing research money to some of the industry companies that want to explore this type of technology. Furthermore, in the recent budget, Canada, without discrimination, added nuclear to a range of tax credits and clean technology credits and benefits, without excluding reprocessing nuclear fuel from that list.