Madam Speaker, I rise again today to bring an issue to public attention and to try to seek clarity and at least some direction from the Liberal government with regard to the environment and the storage of nuclear waste, and respect for municipalities, including aboriginal communities, and another nation, the United States. I am talking about an idea that was conceived more than a decade ago to store low-level and intermediate nuclear waste within limestone one kilometre from the Great Lakes, something that has never been done before and is certainly very controversial.
The fact that we need to understand is that the Great Lakes and the fresh water it supplies to the trillion dollars in industry in the region, including shipping, and the surrounding environment and the basin of civilization that developed out of the Great Lakes are at risk from this proposal. It is no surprise that 23 million people have participated in motions and hundreds of municipalities in official objections to this proposal.
Most recently, we were able to delay this process enough to have Ontario Power Generation complete an alternative site selection process for its original submissions. The type of work it came back with is indicative of the entire process. I say this because it had GPS locations for alternative sites that included a bridge in Burlington, Ontario, and second, a store that was actually in the United States off the Minnesota border in Grand Portage. The mere fact that those two locations were identified by GPS by the OPG should say something about its entire philosophy of storing nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years underground in what is basically a new type of venture next to the Great Lakes. This is certainly not with the competency one would expect for the legacy that we will, as a result, stuff into the backpacks of future generations, including the costs for our children.
I would also say that given the record of environmental stewardship that Canada likes to claim on the international front, we should make sure that we actually live up to some of those commitments. I know that the United States Congress, Senate, and other bodies have objected to this, as well as municipalities. Lo and behold, it was Joe Clark as Canadian foreign affairs minister at the time who asked the United States to back away from it and not to put nuclear waste and disposal facilities off the Great Lakes, which the United States agreed not to do.
Again, I rise with the objective of finally getting the government to live up to its stated philosophy of protecting the environment first. The mere fact that this idea continues to have some type of breath to it is unacceptable. I am hoping not to hear a canned response by the parliamentary secretary, but a good debate as to why the Liberals would even want to consider going down this path and not just end it once and for all now.