Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise once again to take part in this debate on Bill C-4.
As I sit and listen to the debate I am amazed at how muddy the water can become on a filibuster and how irrelevant some of the arguments are to what is before us. I am amazed that the self-interest of the Bloc Quebecois does not seem to have any bounds. The development of fossil fuel energy in Canada has been one of the major reasons for our standard of living and our prosperity. Certainly Quebeckers enjoy driving their cars and moving their goods as much as anybody else in Canada. It just blows me away. However, I do not want to get carried away on that kind of debate because I want to stay more focused on what we are dealing with here today.
It is a seven word amendment to the Nuclear Safety and Control Act. It seems to me that the amendment before us is clear and simple. It would remove the responsibility of liability from the lending institution, not all responsibility of liability, but liability over and above the investment that the lending institution makes in the project. It, like in any other project or any other loan that the institution would make, would be liable for the amount of the loan and the loss of that loan should the project fail. However, this particular act as it existed when we passed it back in 1997, and I will address that a little later, held the lending institution responsible for the negligence of an operator in a contamination of a site over and above the amount that institution had invested in the project. That seems ludicrous to me.
When a mine, coal-fired power plant, or a wind farm goes out and looks for financing for a project and puts together a financing package, no one would expect that the lending institution that helps to finance that project would be held liable over and above the amount of the loan for negligence on behalf of the operator of that mine, wind farm or coal-fired generating station.
So why then would anybody, the NDP, the Bloc or a few members of the Liberal Party, believe that the lending institution should be liable in the case of a nuclear facility over and above the amount of the loan that it would be writing for a project? It seems straightforward and simple, yet it has become complicated and the target of such a filibuster in the House. I find it quite amazing.
I want to hold the government responsible in some measure for what is happening with this simple bill. The government has known about this anomaly in the act for some time. It was aware of it when Parliament was recalled around the beginning of October of this year. It did nothing about it until the bill was introduced not that long ago. It expressed this concern that the refurbishing of the Bruce Power facility could not proceed until the bill was passed and so we have some urgency here.
The government could have put this into the mix and we probably could have passed it a long time ago. However it did not. The government is responsible for the fact that we only have a week and a half to go before the Christmas break and the only way it will get the bill through is to use closure once again, which is unacceptable. I feel the government is in some way responsible for this filibuster and what is going on here.
We dealt with the bill in committee where various interest groups made representations to me. Everyone I spoke to, including Bruce Power, the Canadian Nuclear Association and others, said it was a simple oversight. When we considered the bill in 1997 nobody caught that. In committee the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Canadian Nuclear Association reiterated that it was just an oversight that needed to be corrected and we could get on with it.
The director general and the legal counsel for the department were at committee deliberations. It was disturbing that the director general was less than forthcoming with his explanation of why the phrase “or any other person with a right or interest in” was in the bill. The director general did not express the same opinion that I heard before that it was simply there because it was an oversight and was missed.
When the legal counsel was asked the lady said the department was very much aware of the meaning of the phrase and its consequences. She was the legal counsel but was not prepared to offer an opinion. If it was aware of it, why was it in the bill? Why was it not removed when we debated and passed the bill back in 1997? That concerns me. The government could have helped the bill through the process by being a bit more forthcoming on that issue, but it was not.
The NDP and the Bloc brought in all kinds of other issues that muddied the water in a major way. It was educational in a sense because I learned a lot about the genuine issues concerning nuclear power. The House needs to take the time to study the whole issue of nuclear power and how it fits into the mix of energy in this country and how we can best protect Canadians from the dangers of nuclear power.
All that was very interesting but it was terribly irrelevant to the whole thing. We spent a half a day in committee listening to a filibuster about the financial situation of British Power. The weak financial position and the danger of bankruptcy in British Power was enough reason for us to deny this seven word amendment in the bill. Surely, if we were to pass the bill and remove that extraordinary liability from the lending institution, that lending institution would have enough brains to look at Bruce Power, and how its financial situation related to British Power. The bank could then decide whether the liability on its money was too great to lend it. We do not need to do that as parliamentarians. It is a bit outrageous for us to go down that road and have that debate.
Another interesting issue that came forward endlessly was the issue of the Nuclear Liability Act. Issues were raised that I was not familiar with and that we need to deal with. The Nuclear Liability Act limits the level of liability in a nuclear accident to $75 million.That may not have been a big issue when the only people in the entire country who owned and operated nuclear plants were governments. Ultimately no matter what the cap was, when that cap was bypassed, the government of the day would end up being responsible. When the government was responsible from the very beginning, it was not as big an issue.
Now with the introduction of this bill and the opening up of the industry to private sector financing, the question is how liable should a private sector operator be in the case of a nuclear spill? This is a much bigger issue than just the contamination of the reactor site. This is about liabilities for off-site contamination, the health of Canadians, et cetera.
It is a really important issue. Clearly $75 million is nowhere near a high enough cap on the liability. We need to go back at some point to the Nuclear Liability Act, study it and set an appropriate cap either in the act as this is or a cap that is part of the licensing approval process by the Nuclear Safety Commission in the application for the licence to operate a plant. There needs to be a bond or something in place to ensure that the money is there, if there is contamination or an accident, to will protect Canadians, particularly those Canadians living in the vicinity of the nuclear facility.
Those are valid arguments. We need to at some point in this Parliament or in committee or somewhere go back and look at these things. They were not relevant to Bill C-4 and I was very disappointed at that. I can only imagine the frustration experienced by Bruce Power, while it waits for the bill to go through the House, having watched the filibuster which has gone on for weeks on this. It knows that until the amendment is passed, the entire project of refurbishing the reactors at Bruce Power is in jeopardy. Therefore, electrical energy in Ontario and the supply and price of that energy to the province is affected by that.
We hear talk about how we do not need nuclear power and that we should get rid of it. That is another debate for another day. However at some point Ontario Hydro made the decision to go nuclear. Arguments were made about the wisdom of that decision given the death of Ontario Hydro and other issues surrounding it, but they did it anyway.
Now nuclear power in Ontario is an integral part of the baseload power. If anyone doubts that, I would urge the nuclear operators in Ontario to simply shut down all nuclear power at six o'clock in the evening and see how much the wind power operators and the solar power operators can pick up for Ontario residents so they can cook their evening meals. I suggest it would be very dark and very cold.
To advocate those things is irresponsible. We have to do everything we can. We have a responsibility as a government and through government to the bureaucracy and the Nuclear Safety Commission to protect the interests of Canadians in terms of safe operation of the facilities. However we also have heard references to nuclear waste and what we do with that. We have a huge responsibility to look after that waste responsibly and in a safe manner. I think we can do that.
Nuclear power will continue to be part of the energy mix of the country. Undoubtedly, if the government goes ahead with the Kyoto protocol, the contribution of nuclear power will increase, particularly if AECL can come up with a new generation of a Candu reactor which is smaller, more efficient, cheaper and the lead time to construct it is cut way down. If all those things are achieved, nuclear power undoubtedly will become a more important part.
The contribution that fossil fuel energy has made to the country has been tremendous. Probably the key reason why North America has moved so far ahead of much of the rest of world in prosperity is the availability of cheap fossil fuel energy and our ability to use it and export it.
However given the environment we are in today and where Canadians are at, I do not think anybody in the fossil fuel industry would argue that it is time for us to look at cleaner energy sources that provide a baseload, which wind power, solar power and geothermal power can never do. They certainly can increase their share and their contribution, but we still need that baseload power, the one we can depend upon when everybody's lights and stoves are on in the evening.
It is time to look at where that might shift to, simply because fossil fuel energy is a finite resource which will run out one day and which gets more and more expensive. It is pure common sense that we look for alternatives. To think that tomorrow we can erect wind farms and solar panels so we can shut down either the fossil fuel industry or the nuclear industry but still keep the lights on and keep our homes warm is irresponsible and ludicrous.
I would urge all members in the House, in the interests of fairness and reasonableness, to get on with the issue of passing the bill and sending it off to the other place so that Bruce Power can get on with the job of refurbishing the its facility and get it back on line. This would allow Ontario hydro to shut down more of the extremely polluting coal fired plants, which are importing some of the dirtiest coal in the world from the U.S. This would then allow us to have clean non-polluting power, which the Bruce Power facility is capable of providing to us.
