Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the Progressive Conservative Party caught me on this once before during a take note debate. I went back to take a look at this because I did not have an answer for him then, but I have one now.
The answer is that in fact Germany does buy from some of the other countries, France in particular. In France, by the way, active consideration is being given to phasing out its nuclear industry. Germany has seen the purchase of that, and the continued use that it is making of its own plants, as temporary. Germany has set a quota for alternative energy sources, which I have asked our Minister of Natural Resources to do, and I am still waiting to hear back from him on, and in fact has a specific quota for wind power.
If Germany achieves that, which it fully expects to do over the next 10 to 15 years, it will be able to phase out its own industry and cease purchasing electricity in the form of nuclear energy from France and other countries.
With regard to the time limit, my friend is wrong. It is grossly unfair to impose that type of time limit on anybody when we know there are other options that may be coming.
I want to talk about the storage bins that I saw at Pickering. They are designed to last for up to 50 years and are monitored on a 24 hour basis. If there are any problems with them, any cracks or deterioration in the material, they are identified immediately and can then be placed in another storage bin. There is no reason whatsoever for us to impose that type of time limit other than to dump this stuff on some community in the Canadian Shield and let the industry off the hook for the cost of it.