Mr. Speaker, it is true, $1 billion does sound like a large amount of money.
However, the scale of these disasters, as we have seen with Fukushima and with Chernobyl in the 1980s, ruins entire regions of the earth. The costs entailed in that are incalculable. Although $1 billion does seem like a lot, when we imagine the entire Ottawa region all of a sudden becoming ruined, we can then sort of understand the scale of the costs that are involved. There is the financial cost, but then there is that very real human cost. By putting an unlimited liability regime on this industry, we would be sending a message saying that we do not ever want to take on that human cost of lives being lost and entire regions of the earth being ruined.
It is not just a Canadian thing. It should be a global concern. When Fukushima happened, it was not as if Canadians did not care about what was happening in Japan. We felt as though part of the earth had been ruined, destroyed, and that very human, ecological cost should, in policy, translate into an unlimited regime.