Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to speak to this motion again.
I'm going to bridge from the point we were making before, just so we're not repetitious. We were saying that there's nothing new. It's true, and it's true of all the points that have been made, that there's really nothing new to be gained from doing this. But I think it's also important that it might be premature, as well.
Mr. Chair, I'd just like to go back to some of the testimony from when AECL was here, when I was talking with Mr. MacDiarmid. This is very much to the point of this motion, talking about the funding. There's nothing new in terms of what we should be trying to achieve with this and when we should be trying to achieve something with this.
I said the following to Mr. MacDiarmid: “You said you're very mindful of the need to acquire the CNSC licence renewal in 2011. Your comment was that we need to invest in the reactor and support systems for life extension.”
My point at that point in time was that we are two and a half years from this. This licence is going to expire in 2011. What are we going to do? I wanted to know if these investments in the reactor are going to be done as part of normal outages. “Will they be done as part of normal outages and as part of a project, or how is that going to be done?” I asked.
Mr. MacDiarmid, of course, put that over to Mr. Pilkington, who I think is one of the right people to be answering these questions, and Mr. Pilkington said this: “The isotope supply reliability program is a fairly broad program. It involves improvement to equipment and systems and to procedures. It involves long-term planning for succession planning for staffing for the NRU reactor”. I think that is an important point. We can all agree that some of the staffing issues and some of the labour force issues we're encountering today are very important, not only to this industry but to others. I think a lot of people can say that they'll have people retire over the next ten years. Fifty percent of their people will retire over the next ten years.