This took us a while. It wasn't really until the clause-by-clause stage where we could get into this as committee members, but on the assessment of risk, as we saw in the Magellan study, the way the risk is assessed is the whole exercise. If you limit the risk assessment to a certain reactor under a certain defined set of conditions, you come up with a number for liability and a number for compensation. That same study asked the government to expand its view and look at more severe accidents in denser populations.
I'll read for members what NDP-14 seeks to do: “When the Minister causes a copy of a reinsurance agreement to be laid before each House...the Minister shall also cause to be laid before each House a copy of all related risk assessment studies that were completed before the reinsurance agreement was entered into”.
I referred to the Magellan study. If this clause had existed previously, all members of this committee and the Canadian public would have had access to that research. So when the government says that it's building Bill C-20 “based upon this assessment”, all this amendment says is to put the assessment before us so we understand where the number comes from.
Instead, we've had to go through all these witness hearings, and it was in a seemingly casual way--I don't want to say that it was in a casual way, because I'm not knocking the witnesses at all--that we got to see the report. Also, the report was made available to committee members, but it wasn't translated. I think we need to formalize this part of the process because the rules you set out at the very beginning for the study will eventually determine the liability limit.
So we're simply asking the government, when it's setting any new liability limit, to tell Parliament and the Canadian people, “This is the study we used to set the liability limit”. It seems logical. The amendment is not asking for any state secrets or anything that would be a corruptive influence. It just says to tell us how you got to the number, show us the data, and allow us to have some conversation about it. That's what NDP-14 seeks to do.