Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have a couple of questions to the witnesses about the impact of this amendment.
I've been listening to Mr. Cullen dance around this for about 50 minutes now, and the simple measure in clause 17 is that there has to be some kind of competent authority to designate what that damage is, because if you leave that open-ended and stop at saying compensated, who the heck is going to make that determination? It could be someone from God knows where if they have an opinion on something. So if it's a competent authority, a federal or provincial legislation, as you said, under CEPA, it could fall under that, and then it would be compensated under this. I think it would be very risky to put this in, so I'd like your comments about that.
I would also like to ask a second question, since I've listened to Mr. Cullen dance around this for 50 minutes. Does this clause represent a change from the previous act? How do you believe this has strengthened it? I think globally when we look at this act as it is, this is a better act than what we had before. There exist a number of nuclear installations out there now that we do need to cover. Whether or not anybody ever builds another one is not the question here today. We have things that we have to cover.
Further, we also know from the testimony that we heard--and we'll get there a little bit later--about the potential risk to ratepayers and other people from compensation levels being too high.
So do you see this amendment opening up something that we won't be able to close and opening us up to too much risk? Also, how has this clause changed from the previous act?