Mr. Speaker, first I thank the hon. member for Jonquière for her questions.
Her first question was about co-operation between the federal and provincial governments. I can assure the hon. member that I have already had meetings with provincial ministers. We have had very productive discussions on endangered species. We all shared the same views, as I mentioned in my speech. We set the objectives three years ago. The purpose of the meetings held a few weeks ago was to discuss ways to achieve the goals that we set together.
There is truly a great deal of co-operation between the various levels of government, because we know that Canadians want us to take action. They do not want us to carry on constitutional debates. They want concrete action on the environment, not constitutional debates.
The second thing that she mentioned was the issue of the very small amount of weapons grade plutonium, the MOx which is to be burned in the Chalk River reactor.
The reason this is important is that the world has literally tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that are rusting in former soviet union territories and need to be disposed of, to be eliminated. We have to take risks. It is true that she is correct. There can be very minor risks related to transportation, but if we are not willing to take the small risk to achieve a much greater gain for society our children and grandchildren will know that we have failed because we simply are delaying a problem to them.
This is a very important issue. It is truly an example of the biblical injunction to beat the swords into ploughshares, to destroy weapons for good. Can we think of anything more symbolic of turning evil into good than turning these weapons of mass destruction into light and power for human use? Is there anything more symbolic of the type of thing we should be doing?
Yes, I admit to the member that there are risks, but I challenge her to think also of the risks of doing nothing. The worst thing we can commit as legislators is to simply say there is a problem and do nothing, leave it alone, ignore it, let our children have the problem and inherit something much worse than if we dealt with it now.