Thank you, Mr. Chair and members, for having me as a witness. This is a very consequential parliamentary hearing, possibly the most consequential one that Canada is facing right now, about Chalk River and its coming under American management.
When I say “Chalk River”, I mean CNL. Those are interchangeable terms. Chalk River is the centrepiece of Canada's nuclear history. It's where we became a tier-one nuclear nation. All of the fundamental research we did that put us on that map was done at Chalk River: cobalt-60, the cancer-fighting radioisotope, and molybdenum-99. Of course, there is the CANDU reactor, which I think it's no exaggeration to say is the most consequential invention in Canada's history. It's powering this room as we speak.
A lot of people don't know that when all of this marvellous research was being done in the early days of Chalk River, the Americans—our one-time friend and ally—told us to hold out our hands, and they were going to put handcuffs on us. We held out our hands, and they slapped the handcuffs on. What am I talking about? They did not want us to enrich uranium in the early days, or any time thereafter. They said if we were going to use enriched uranium, which is a fundamental material in nuclear research, they would provide it for us: no enriched uranium for Canada. We could not do that on our own soil, and we agreed to it.
Why did we agree to it? We went along with it “to get along”, as per Prime Minister Carney's remarks last week in Davos. They did not want us to enrich uranium, they said, because of some proliferation reason. I think that's bogus. That was a smokescreen for a commercial purpose. They did not want us competing against them in the developing power reactor market, so we went along. They were worried that we would be a good competitor, and they were right. As the CANDU proved, we could run circles around them if it were a level playing field, but it wasn't a level playing field. We were not allowed to enrich our own uranium, and we still won this game—until we got cut off when the country that told us not to enrich uranium because they'd provide us with it cut us off from enriched uranium. That was in 2016, under Barack Obama. Canada and Chalk River, at that point, stopped doing major nuclear research. We went along “to get along”, as Mark Carney said, and this ended up biting us, because, as I said, we ended up getting cut off.
Now, who ran Chalk River during this time of wonderful innovation that brought us the radioisotopes and the CANDU reactor? It was a small federal Crown corporation called Atomic Energy Canada Limited. It was spun out of the National Research Council. Its president, Fred Dermarkar, appeared before this very committee at the end of last year. In his remarks to the committee, Fred Dermarkar emphasized—and I agree with him—that Canada is “a tier-one nuclear country.” We are a tier-one nuclear country.
I would ask this question. If we're a tier-one nuclear country, why do we need another country managing our flagship nuclear lab?
We have a major amount of nuclear research to do that we need enriched uranium for, and that's because we have a major geopolitical problem in our Arctic. Essentially, we cannot defend our Arctic. That wasn't a big problem under the previous rules-based international order, but that order is gone. The United States, its inventor, has ruptured that world order.
In order to protect our Arctic, Canada needs nuclear-powered devices. We don't have those devices now. We would need to develop them, and we would develop them at Chalk River. We're handing Americans control of the very facility that we would need to conduct the fundamental research into protecting our Arctic. We're handing the keys of our nuclear kingdom over to representatives of that country. This is not Alice in Wonderland. This is actual, real life. We're handing control over our nuclear kingdom to representatives of that country. Essentially, we're going to pay them with public money to keep their eye on us.
The American executives in charge at NLPC, the company that's going to manage this, are all queue-cleared in the United States. They all have top-level clearance. Essentially, they're members of the U.S. intelligence community. They work for a person with whom Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand don't want to share intelligence because she is a pro-Putin stooge. She works for a president who is a pro-Putin stooge, if you've been following the horrific news out of Ukraine over the last year.
Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, when we conducted our nuclear research with the handcuffs on over those eight decades, what did we get in return? We got “the 51st state”, we got “Governor Trudeau”, we got “Governor Carney”, and we got a trade war by this guy who's mad because Canadians wouldn't stay in his crappy hotel in Vancouver.
We should not be turning over control of our nuclear flagship, of our nuclear kingdom, to representatives of that country.