I don't know of any such study.
I would like to apologize to the committee if there's any edginess to my remarks. I think the edginess is basically a reflection of frustration that the committee does not have available to it the tools that would be necessary to do a really good job. That's my concern.
Especially if we are going to have a nuclear renaissance and build more reactors, then I think it's very necessary for legislators to have much more knowledge and resources available to them to weigh these problems. I sympathize with members of the committee, who are given very little to go on other than a piece of legislation that has been written without much deliberation of the deeper issues surrounding that. So that's really the basis of my frustration.
The accountability problem is, I think, a serious one, and one that Parliament must take seriously for the future, because right now the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission answers to the same minister that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited answers to, which is the Minister of Natural Resources. This means there's only one voice at the cabinet table speaking on nuclear issues. Even the CNSC itself, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, although it is responsible for the health and environment, it has no health department. It does not have a staff of independent health scientists. Most of its staff are drawn, in fact, from the very industry that it is regulating, and the minister it is reporting to is the minister who is promoting that very industry.
Now, this poses serious governance problems for the future. I would like to see, at some point, some aspect of the House of Commons, or some aspect of our parliamentary system, that stands up and doesn't take the first offer that's put on the table.
Where's the negotiation? If we're representing the public interest, should we just take the industry's offer of $650 million and say, “Thank you, thank you, we'll take it, we'll pay all the rest”? Or should we say, “Wait a minute now. You're asking the Government of Canada, asking the taxpayers, to assume an enormous financial liability, and you're limiting yourself to $650 million? Let's negotiate. Let's talk about this.”
I don't see any negotiation taking place. The question remains, where is the accountability?