Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have this final opportunity to speak on Bill C-27. I have been involved in the process of the bill, which has been in the works for months and years.
Generally speaking, it is my position, and the position of my party, that the bill does achieve some important things and certainly is worthy of support.
Before I get into the analysis of the bill, I want to express some of my frustration with the process that brought us to this point today.
The speech of the member on the government side of the House is part of that frustration. During the hearing of witnesses who expressed their concerns and on whose concerns we based that amendments, I never saw that member present. I very much suspect the speech he just presented was drafted within the bureaucracy of the department and presented here just as the bill was.
Part of my frustration is the way the process works and the mockery it makes of democracy. There are so many better ways to deal with the development of legislation, which would result in better legislation that would better reflect the concerns of a broader section of the Canadian public.
The bill came to parliament, then went to committee. At committee, we went through the process of calling in countless expert witnesses on the issues. They presented their concerns, their analyses and how the bill could be made better. Then we went into the clause by clause process. Some 70 amendments were proposed based on what a lot of us heard from those witnesses.
When we presented those suggested amendments and concerns in committee, the entire government side of the committee sat like a bunch of posts and refused to debate or engage in any discussion about the bill and the rationale for the amendments. Instead, the bureaucrats from the department, who wrote the bill and understood what was in it, sat at the end of the table and answered those questions. That was a very frustrating process.
This could be done in other ways that would include all parties of the House in a committee setting, with experts from the various departments, such as justice, technical, et cetera. Together we could sit down, draft a bill and enter into some discussion as to why it should be done this way or that way and how the bill could be made as good as it possibly could. That just does not happen.
It seemed as though the members of the government side of the committee table were so arrogant that felt they did not need to enter into any discussion because, in the interests of time and expediency, they would simply use their majority in committee and in the House to pass the bill whether we liked it or not. Perhaps they did not understand the bill and the implications of the sections for which we suggested some amendments and therefore passed off the responsibility to respond to those things to the departmental experts at the end of the table.
Whatever the case, it truly was a frustrating process. I find the same frustration over and over again whenever we get into a bill that falls within my area as critic of natural resources. It seems to be a practice that repeats itself over and over again.
I have been here for over eight years. There certainly has not been any demonstrated desire to give elected members of parliament any degree of authority or any real input in the development of legislation which we will all have to live by for many years to come.
Having vented my frustrations with all of those things, I will proceed to discuss the bill.
There is a lot of merit in the bill. It deals with an area that we in Canada have needed to address for a long time. As the member opposite suggested, this is a process that has been going on for 25 years in Canada without any resolution. Bill C-27 takes us a little way toward some resolution of the problem of nuclear waste disposal.
For the most part the bill is a reflection of the recommendations of the Seaborn panel which did an excellent job in its study and its recommendations on how we should handle this matter. It did not comply in a number of ways that would have had merit and would have made the bill better. The Seaborn panel suggested strongly to have some kind of outside independent oversight over the waste management organization. The government for whatever reason chose not to do it that way.
Bill C-27 reflects some of the recommendations made by the disposal concept environmental assessment panel and presented to the Minister of Natural Resources and the Minister of the Environment in February 1998.
Some might imagine that an issue as important as the management and disposal of nuclear fuel waste would have fast tracked its way through the House of Commons. However, we saw those recommendations back in 1998 and here we are in 2001, almost 2002, and only now are we at third reading stage of this important bill. Despite the time lag, the bill has a lot of merit.
Canada's nuclear industry has stood alone for many years because of the fact that the industry does not have a producer pay approach to the cleanup of waste products. Other industries, particularly other industries within natural resources, have had to concern themselves with the cleanup of potentially dangerous or damaging materials and have similar funds built into a condition of their licensing. It is common within the industry.
Those costs are so well ingrained within most industries that the fact that the nuclear industry has never had that requirement probably has raised concerns in many parts of Canada for many years. The legislation will finally put the nuclear industry on a par with other resource industries in its requirement to be financially and morally responsible for the disposal of hazardous waste.
I believe that by using this piece of legislation the government intends to create an accountable management system for the long term management and disposal of nuclear fuel waste. I would quantify that to restrict it to high level nuclear fuel waste. I can only hope that the road the government chooses to take is not just paved with good intentions. I hope that the bill will quickly lead us to some concrete action.
I am pleased to see that the major players in the industry, namely, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, or AECL as it is known, Ontario Power Generation, Hydro-Québec and New Brunswick Power Corporation are all involved in the process. The bill will ensure that this collective group will be required to establish a waste management organization that will implement the long term management of nuclear fuel waste.
One of the other concerns, which we heard a lot of talk of in committee and from the previous speaker, is the need for transparency. There is at least the transparency of the requirement to table the studies and the annual reports of the waste management organization, and I was glad to see that. However any time it is suggested in the bill that there is a responsibility either to report to, or for the governor in council to make a decision on, it makes me a little nervous. I think it makes a lot of Canadians nervous.
It seems that only by allowing members of cabinet to make final decisions with no role for parliament in those decisions, especially on something as important as nuclear fuel waste, it opens a decision to Liberal insider trading. Certainly we saw a lot of that yesterday in the auditor general's report. It is a reasonably common phenomenon. Who knows what friends the governor in council might have in the business of nuclear fuel waste disposal. It could of course present some very lucrative contracts to individuals who are running the right business at the right time and of course have made the right levels of contributions to the Liberal Party of Canada. That is a legitimate concern, a concern backed up as I said by some of the comments of the auditor general yesterday.
Furthermore, the major owners and producers of nuclear fuel waste have to establish a trust fund and make set annual payments into that trust fund to finance the long term management of the waste.
Finally, the new waste management organization has the responsibility to determine fiscally responsible, realistic options for the long term management of nuclear fuel waste.
Once these options are determined, they will then be presented to the governor in council through the minister, who will then make a choice as to the best approach. That decision having been made, the waste management organization may, and I emphasize the word may, then move forward to waste disposal.
One of the most outstanding weaknesses of the bill is that once the report is done, the trust fund is set up, the study is done and the recommendations are made to the minister, there is really no assurance that will require the waste management organization to proceed with implementation of any of the chosen options. We could sit on this issue for another 10 years before anything concrete was done.
While the waste management organization may identify a technically feasible process for disposing of nuclear fuel waste, it may find, as the Seaborn panel did and as the department has for a number of years, that while technically the idea is acceptable, it simply cannot find a location, a community or a province that will allow such a facility in its backyard. It is a well known fact that it is hard enough in this day and age to find something as simple as a nuisance ground, a non-toxic waste disposal site if you will, for the huge amounts of urban garbage that we produce. It is very difficult to find a site that is acceptable for those kinds of facilities. It is no small feat to find a community anywhere that will jump at the opportunity to accept the kind of facility that we are proposing for the disposal of nuclear fuel waste.
One of the key recommendations of the Seaborn report that appeared in the legislation is the need for an independent advisory board. I referred to that suggestion earlier. In the Seaborn report the advisory council would be given the responsibility of ensuring openness and transparency of nuclear fuel waste management, particularly in areas related to public and aboriginal participation, environmental assessment, monitoring, mediation and dispute settlements. Furthermore, the Seaborn panel recommended that the agency should be heavily involved in all stages of the agency's work and options for long term management.
I am pleased to see that the government has incorporated the general idea of an advisory council in the legislation. However it concerns me and others on the committee and others in the public that the original spirit of the council seems to have been lost in the translation into this legislation.
As far as I can see there is little in the bill that structures the advisory council to be the watchdog of the agency. In fact it seems to me that the council is to be given a much smaller role than what the Seaborn panel recommended.
The government's record on openness and transparency when it comes to governor in council appointments is not good. There simply is not another word for it. The Seaborn panel made solid recommendations to enable the agency to be an open, honest, transparent and accountable organization, yet the government seems unwilling to open up its process to that kind of scrutiny or that kind of input. I must confess that it makes me wonder exactly how the government intends to set this whole process up if it is unwilling to ensure transparency and accountability from the very beginning.
Obviously a key area of the bill is the process by which a method of disposal of nuclear fuel waste will be chosen. As described by the bill, within three years of the coming into force of the act, the waste management organization shall submit to the minister a study setting out its proposed approaches for the management of nuclear fuel waste along with the comments of the advisory council on those approaches, as well as the organization's recommendations as to which of its proposed approaches should be adopted.
Realistically, and this is reflected in the legislation, there are only three real choices for the disposal of nuclear fuel waste. The idea that the waste management organization has a broad range of options to study, examine and recommend really is not realistic. There are three choices, those being deep geological disposal in the Canadian Shield, storage in a nuclear reactor site, or centralized storage either above or below ground. The only feasible one is the first one, the deep geological disposal in the Canadian Shield, with some variations as to how that is done and whether it is absolutely permanent or is a type of storage system that will allow reclaiming of that buried fuel waste if technology should come along in the future that would allow for a better method of disposal.
Certainly we already have above ground storage at the nuclear reactor sites. We have had in the past to some degree some centralized storage at some of those sites as well. The very fact is that the industry and Canadians and a number of the panels that made recommendations do not deem what is presently taking place as being acceptable in the long term. At least in my opinion that narrows the choices down to the one that was looked at and the one which the Seaborn panel suggested was technically feasible. The problem was there was no public support to allow that proposal to go ahead.
According to the Seaborn panel, whichever method the waste management agency chose, the choice had to meet several key safety and acceptability criteria. To be considered, the concept must have broad public support and, as I suggested, that is not the case.
It has to be safe from both a technical and a social perspective. That criteria seems to be at least within reach. It has to have been developed within a sound ethical and social assessment framework. There has been a lot of good work done but I am not sure that particular criteria has been met at this point.
It has to have the support of aboriginal people. We heard at committee that this support is certainly not there at this time. Some very stringent conditions were placed on that support being forthcoming.
It has to be selected after comparison with the risks, costs and benefits of the other options. As I said, the other options are very limited.
It has to be advanced by a stable and trustworthy proponent and overseen by a trustworthy regulator. I suggest it has yet to be determined if the waste management organization could be deemed to be a trustworthy proponent. I certainly hope it would.
There are those on this side of the House, at least, and I think a fair number of people across the country who would question whether the government is in fact a trustworthy regulator of this system.
It seems to me that in some ways it is the first of those conditions that will be the most difficult to meet. Having broad public support on an issue such as this where there is such a strong sense of “not in my backyard” will be a truly tough obstacle for this agency to overcome. Of course there are also a number of other conditions which, as I said, will be some challenge to meet.
The choice, according to the Seaborn panel, must: demonstrate robustness in meeting appropriate regulatory requirements; be based on thorough and participatory scenario analyses; use realistic data, modelling and natural analogues; incorporate sound science and good practices; and demonstrate flexibility.
Of course we will not know until the report comes to the minister and then becomes public whether in fact the chosen one will meet those criteria.
I certainly hope that any organization working with nuclear fuel would already have the stringent safety regulations and good practices, but even that is in some question considering the conditions under which Ontario Hydro had to shut down a number of its nuclear reactors. That process was forced upon it not by Canada's own industry regulators but by a U.S. industry inspector.
There certainly are a number of concerns about the stringent safety regulations and the compliance with those regulations and good practices and they will remain.
One of the key issues this agency will have to contend with is the question of how safe is safe enough, taking into consideration different technical and social perspectives. Nuclear scientists are likely to have views on the issue that are very different from those on the environmentalist side of the equation, yet somehow, if the plan is to go forward, both groups must be made to feel comfortable with and accepting of this plan.
As far as I can tell the only really viable course of action for the long term disposal and management of nuclear fuel waste is that which has been proposed by AECL, that is, the deep geological disposal in the Canadian Shield. However, as I mentioned, in its study the Seaborn panel concluded that it seems to meet the requirement from a technical perspective and states that:
—safety of the AECL concept has been on balance adequately demonstrated from a conceptual stage of development, but from a social perspective, it has not.
Furthermore, the study concluded that:
—the AECL concept for deep geological disposal has not been demonstrated to have broad public support. The concept in its current form does not have the required level of acceptability to be adopted as Canada's approach for managing nuclear fuel waste.
I know only too well how the government likes to operate when there are contentious matters that do not have public support. A perfect example is the MOX fuel that was flown into Chalk River without any sort of public support after numerous towns, cities, native communities and the Ontario provincial government raised their opposition to the MOX plutonium test plan. Without any public notice, and showing complete disregard for public concerns, the government went ahead and flew in the MOX for the test.
I would like to urge the government to take a more responsible, measured and, frankly, more reasonable approach to nuclear fuel waste management. There is simply too much at stake to just put a stranglehold on opponents of the proposal.
As I said at the beginning of my comments, I am pleased that the legislation has finally come to the House and that the government seems to have taken to heart most of the recommendations of the Seaborn report.
The committee discussions on the bill were certainly interesting and could have been even more interesting if we had had a little more participation from the government side. Not surprisingly, the government did not allow any opposition amendments to the bill, which could have been to the benefit of the waste management agency as well as all Canadians.
While I do have hopes that the good intentions of the bill will actually turn into solid, responsible legislation I am not convinced that the government intends to follow through with total accountability and openness. The bill certainly has merit, and while I am pleased to see that the government has finally taken action on this issue, I believe more should have been done with the bill. Consequently, with some reservations, we will be supporting the passage of Bill C-27.