I know that not everyone sat on this committee in the previous Parliament, but one of the things that frustrated me on the committee in the previous Parliament was that every so often we would have no basic scientific understanding of questions. There was basic scientific illiteracy.
I can understand that not everyone will get this, but we had discussions about the half-life of isotopes and there were questions to the officials about why you couldn't store an isotope with a certain amount of half-life, radioactive decay, and things of that nature. There seemed to be some idea that you could manufacture it and put it away. Then we had—this was amazingly ridiculous—people who didn't understand the difference between a one in a thousand year probability and a one in a thousand probability, something that could be differentiated in a high school statistics class. These sorts of things tend to frustrate me. I understand in the general press....
My concern, when we start to go back and look at these issues again and again, is that we need to have some sort of basic scientific background for what's serious and what's not. I think it was very appropriate that you had one hearing on this to see if this was something that was serious or not, because reports in the popular press often cannot differentiate between normal radioactivity and a Chernobyl type of situation. They don't understand that.
For people who don't know: you can get radioactivity from wooden buildings, from brick buildings, and from your TV. Every day, from everything around us, we get doses of radiation. It's not just from things such as X-rays at a dentist's office or so forth. Just being in a wooden or brick building gives you different levels of radiation.
This brings me to my concern here. We talk here about the heavy water, about the spills, and about things like that. Throughout the whole world, any industrial facility of any size will have spills. I come from a farm family. We spilled oil on the ground every so often when we changed the oil in our tractors, our trucks, and things like that. Was getting a little bit of oil in there good for the environment? Of course not, but these things actually do happen.
What we have to do when we look at events is put them in the proper context and understand the scientific scale that we're dealing with. The reason I'm opposed to this is that we are taking this from what's incredibly minor, almost trivial. It was proper to find out whether or not it was trivial, whether or not it was a major incident, and whether or not it was something of sufficient interest, but we've done that. All we can do now is try to exaggerate its importance or create it to be something that it's not.
My colleague will eventually figure out how to turn off his phone here.