Thank you, sir.
I'd like to make four points. I'll start not with my first, in logical order, but with what I think is the shortest; that is, as somebody who has spent more time in court while the Nuclear Liability Act's legality and constitutionality were debated than anybody in your room, I would suggest that neither the Nuclear Liability Act nor its draft successor, Bill C-20, is likely to survive a charter challenge after an accident. That is, if, God forbid, the act is triggered, I believe it will be struck down and the protection it gives to the risk-maker will not actually be there when called upon. I will leave that there for discussion later and go on to my other points.
My first point, logically, can be summarized with the question: why in God's name? If you have an industry that is capable of creating a catastrophic accident, and job number one for a government is presumably to ensure that such a catastrophic accident never happens, and job number two of a government should be to ensure that the consequences of such an accident are mitigated and minimized to the extent possible, and job number three is to ensure that every potential victim of such an accident is taken care of to the extent that they deserve, why in God's name would you limit the liability of the entities that might cause such an accident?
I'd like to point out that one of the useful strains of research in this area is to look at past catastrophes. We can examine, for example, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the nuclear area; we can examine the Challenger crash; we can examine when two jumbo jets collided on a runway. And what we find when we look at these catastrophes is that virtually every one of them, when viewed in hindsight, seems to have been caused by a combination of negligence and incompetence. Then the question is how, in a proactive way, looking forward, would you extend the incentives to try to minimize incompetence and negligence going forward? I would suggest that the last thing you should ever consider on a list of what you might do is to tell a number of potentially responsible parties in advance that they will be held blameless and to tell the remaining party that they will be held responsible, but only up to a certain point, regardless of the total bill to clean up the accident and to mitigate the consequences and to give reparations to the victims. Yet that is exactly what the Nuclear Liability Act does at present and exactly what would be preserved in Bill C-20 if it is passed into law.
I'd like to just spend another minute or two on this. Obviously prevention is key, and telling somebody that they aren't responsible is counter to the incentives to prevention; I think this is simply logic. It will be extremely obvious after an accident, although it's now theoretical, thank heavens. In addition, we've done some studies. In fact, for our failed constitutional challenge of the existing Nuclear Liability Act, we commissioned a study on the consequences of a potential nuclear accident, a catastrophe, at a CANDU station. What that found is, obviously, first of all, the size of the release is a key variable in the consequences, but the impact of a given release can vary incredibly hugely, from effectively zero to enormous tens of billions of dollars of damage. The variables that drive that difference are two. One is the weather, over which we have no control, and the second is contingency planning, over which we have a great deal of control. We should have every incentive applied to the risk-makers to ensure that they ensure that contingency plans are as good as possible and as good as they would require if they felt they were going to have to pay the damages in full.
Let me be clear. Contingency plans, getting potential victims out of the way of the radioactive release, turns out to be right up there with the weather in determining whether you have thousands of victims, thousands of casualties, or whether you have perhaps none.
I'd now like to compare Canada with two other states—Germany and Japan, both of which, as I understand it, have imposed unlimited liability on their nuclear operators. I have several questions about this situation. Why do we have to be different? Are their reactors safer than ours, either by design or by operation? Is their emergency planning so much better than ours that their industry doesn't mind operating under unlimited liability? Are their operators simply gutsier? Do they have more nerve than ours? Or is their federal government more independent from the industry that creates the catastrophic risk? In other words, have they simply taken the needs of potential victims as paramount, rather than caving in to the requests of the risk creator?
I think you can tell from the way I framed the question that I have a guess about where the main difference is between Canada and these other countries. I think their governments played hardball and our government did not. Our government behaved, first and foremost, as the shareholder of AECL, as the creator of one of the world's prominent reactor designs, as an international salesman of nuclear reactors around the world. Their governments, in contrast, acted as elected officials, the representatives of the potential victims and the guardians of the environment that would be contaminated in this kind of accident.
I'd like to close with a brief reference to one growing development. We are gradually shifting from a regime in which nuclear reactors are built and operated by governments, or by creatures of governments, like crown corporations, to a regime in which reactors may be built by private entities. It is worth considering how the federal government would act on behalf of potential victims where you couldn't count on a provincial government, for example, to backstop the owner and operator of a reactor.
I believe the main area where the federal government must act is not in limiting liability—liability should be unlimited, limited only by the consequences of a catastrophe. Rather, the federal government can and must mandate a minimum depth of pocket.
There must be assurances that even after the entity that owns and operates a reactor loses the reactor and incurs a massive internal bill and a loss of equity from that, it still has, through a combination of insurance and other instruments, approximately enough money to meet the needs of a credible but worst-case, beyond-design-base accident. I think there's a shadow of that in Bill C-20 and in the Nuclear Liability Act, but I believe it's only a shadow. That is, I believe, an essential role of government.
We are entering a period of a couple of months now when Bruce Power is going to be actively negotiating with the Government of Saskatchewan toward building a new reactor, probably a CANDU. They've set themselves a deadline of December. I always predict failure for these efforts, but it's just conceivable that there actually will be something happening, and some of this will matter. Let's hope that victims will have more than $650 million of compensation available to them, and that the decisions about siting, about emergency planning, and about design will be informed by full liability extending to the private owners of that facility.
Thank you.