Madam Speaker, I am happy to have an opportunity to say a few words about Bill C-27, an act respecting the long term management of nuclear fuel waste. This is a matter which has interested me for many years. If I recall correctly, one of the first questions I ever asked in the House of Commons had to do with this issue.
Marc Lalonde was the minister of energy and his parliamentary secretary, Roy MacLaren, had a reputation for giving some of the most boring late shows one could ever imagine. He later went on to great heights as the high commissioner in London.
What I was concerned about then, and I raise this in a way to counterpoise my view of what has happened since then with what was said by the hon. member for Halton, was the fact that AECL was initiating a process that we are now near the end of, that is to say a process by which it set out to prove that deep geologic disposal of high level nuclear waste was the way to go.
I have chosen my words carefully because it did not set out to find out whether or not it was the best way to dispose of high level nuclear waste but to prove a conclusion it had already arrived at. The hon. member for Halton reinforced this earlier today when he said that 22 years ago he went to the Whiteshell nuclear research establishment where he was exposed to the technology, whatever that means.
The technology, the method of deep geologic storage or disposal of high level nuclear waste, had not been developed yet. In fact the lab is separate geographically, although in the same area, from the Whiteshell nuclear research establishment. It had yet to be built in 1979. If we listen to the hon. member for Halton we might have the impression that all this was fully developed in 1979. At that point they had yet to dig into the ground and create the underground space that they would use to test their theories about the safety of deep geologic disposal of high level nuclear waste.
That underground lab did not open until the mid-eighties. I first visited it very soon after it was opened in February 1986. For the hon. member to suggest that somehow this was already entrained in 1979 is not so.
What happened was that there was a process. The problem with the process all along was that the impression was never dispelled to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of a great many others. There were certain people who knew what the outcome would be from the day the process began. The process was not open ended and did not allow for the possibility of coming to a different conclusion.
If we do not have the possibility of coming to a different conclusion it is not science. If we already know what the result of an experiment will be, and we are not open to the possibility that it might not work out the way we think it will, it is not science. It is politics.
It was a predetermined outcome based on a political decision that Canada as a maker, producer and seller of Candu reactors was determined to be able to tell its potential clients that it had a way of disposing of high levels of nuclear waste that would be produced by those reactors.
This is ultimately the conflict of interest at the heart of the entire process which has never been rooted out. We see it in the bill. Even now, at the end of the process, it is the industries themselves that will be put in charge of dealing with nuclear fuel waste without any participation by people who do not have a vested interest in the issue.
As long as the country continues to want to sell Candu reactors through a crown corporation, not only the crown corporation but the government itself will be in a conflict of interest. They and others involved in the industry who also have a vested interest are charged with the responsibility of determining whether there is a safe way to dispose of these high levels of nuclear waste. If they cannot say that, they will have a hard time selling the reactors.
This is a prima facie conflict of interest, yet we have not been able to successfully make the argument over the last two decades that the debate has been ongoing. That is my primary objection to the bill. It continues the conflict of interest of the government, AECL, and for that matter even AECB, although from time to time it does tell AECL what to do.
The nuclear club is a very small club. It is almost like a religion subscribing to a particular world view. Anyone who does not share the basic presuppositions about the wonders and benefits of nuclear energy can never become a member of the club.
The member for Halton said that it was best to leave it up to the people who know how to do it. He asked why they would want to leave such a question up to us. That is a fair question.
I do not claim to be a nuclear scientist or physicist, but there are experts in the field who are not tied to the industry. There are people in academia and NGOs that know a lot about the subject. They are trained in the same way the people in the industry are trained. They would be capable of rendering an independent decision while participating in a collective judgment made at a table at which they and members of the industry were present.
That sort of thing was recommended by the Seaborn panel but it is not in Bill C-27. Instead there is the same closed little circle of so-called expertise tainted by vested interest.
Another point made by the member for Halton was the concern he had that there was a provision in the bill for third party funding in the financing of waste management costs. He was worried that the loophole might be an opportunity for a subsidy.
I actually started to listen with some sympathy to what he was saying at that point in his speech. I felt he had the narrative sort of wrong up until then, but when he talked about subsidy and the need for us to know the full costs of particular energy options he made a lot of sense.
One of the things that is wrong with our economy and that has all kinds of environmental and social consequences is that we externalize the costs of various ways of doing things instead of internalizing them and having them built into the price of things. That sounds to me like a market argument, yet when it comes to something like energy we do not have a market. We have all kinds of hidden subsidies.
One of the greatest acts of subsidy, that is the subsidy to the nuclear industry that has taken place over the years in Canadian society, has not always been that hidden. In some cases it has been right out front.
The member for Halton used the figure of $16.2 billion. He was worried about there being the opportunity for further subsidy, and I think that is a legitimate worry. I commend him for that worry because we need to be aware of and take into account the full costs of the way we do things, particularly the full environmental costs, not only with respect to the nuclear energy option but also with respect to other energy options.
For example, the damage that is done to highways, the atmosphere, the safety of the travelling public and the tremendous overreliance on trucks instead of trains is a cost borne by society and government through road construction and repair. It will be borne by everyone in terms of health care and other environmentally related costs in the future, thanks to the greenhouse gas effect, et cetera. These are not costs that are figured into the cost that we pretend is associated with a particular energy option.
The member from the Alliance talked about the fact that our nuclear establishments were potential targets of terrorism. Unfortunately this is true. However, even more unfortunate, this is something that people who have been against nuclear energy have been saying since the beginning of this industry.
Having nuclear reactors and nuclear waste is much more dangerous in terms of potential terrorism attacks or political and social instability and everything that goes with it than having hydro dams, coal plants, natural gas plants, solar power, wind power or whatever the case may be.
There is something qualitatively different here. There is an infinite qualitative difference between the danger of nuclear waste and nuclear reactors if they were to be damaged and the damage that can be done by other energy sources, other energy factories or whatever, should they be the object of attack.
I say to the hon. member from the Alliance that it is a real concern, but it is a concern that has been raised for decades by opponents of nuclear energy. They have said it is a mistake to assume that the world would be exactly like it is today. We should plan our energy options, particularly when we are taking account of various risks, not on the basis of some sanguine view of the universe but with some account being taken of various worst case scenarios. That has not been done and that is why we are in the position we find ourselves in today.
Someone said that even if we stopped producing nuclear power today and shut down all the reactors we would still have to deal with the problem of nuclear waste. I agree. We still have all kinds of nuclear waste and we have to decide what to do with it.
I am not trying to argue for the status quo. There is an opportunity for Canada, and this is the sense in which I regret the dismantling of the Whiteshell research nuclear establishment at Pinawa.
There is all kinds of work to be done on the question of how to deal with high level and low level nuclear waste. It should be done in a way that does not contain within it all this conflict of interest. There is work to be done in determining how best to decommission nuclear reactors because there will be reactors that will need to be decommissioned.
Whether or not we choose to build new ones, we have a lot of old ones around that will not last forever. In terms of the people who are interested or who have already had their training in nuclear related technologies, it is not as if there is nothing to do.
It is not as if there is not some worthwhile task out there. It is not as if their raison d'être should depend on the making and marketing of more Candu reactors. There is a generation of work to be done by people who know something about this field in figuring out what to do with the waste, how to decommission reactors, and for that matter, improving and enhancing some of the useful ways in which nuclear science can be used for various medically related purposes and other purposes.
This is only second reading, and we hope against hope, we hope for things unseen, we hope for things never seen in this place, we hope that finally this conflict of interest will be seen for what it is and that the government will adopt the recommendations of its own panel and try to set up a more independent, arm's length agency to deal with the question of nuclear waste. Or is it, as I suspected back in 1979, a fait accompli from the beginning, all this process, 22 years of process to arrive at exactly where the Liberal minister of energy at the time thought the thing would end up in the first place.