Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to continue my remarks on Bill C-20, An Act respecting civil liability and compensation for damage in case of a nuclear incident.
As I spoke before the question period portion of today's proceedings, I raised the concerns that by raising the amount of limitation of liability, we are still leaving to the public of Canada or individuals the rest of the liability for what could be extremely expensive nuclear accidents.
What we are also learning today and what we believed all along is that this is all part of the effort to privatize or sell-off and make available Canada's nuclear industry.
What is ironic though is that if the bill were not brought before the House at all and American corporations who we understand have some interest in purchasing nuclear facilities or starting nuclear facilities in Canada, they would be bound by American law and lo and behold they would be subject to a compensation limit of $10 billion.
What we are effectively doing is raising our limitation of liability to what is known as an international minimum standard. If that is available in the case of $650 million, then the American law which requires $10 billion would not apply.
What we are effectively doing is making it easier for American corporations to operate nuclear plants or purchase nuclear plants in Canada in the private sector in a cheaper way without the same kind of responsibility that they would have under their own law in their own country or even in this country under existing law.
What is being presented as a significant increase in the requirements, by increasing compensation limits from $75 million to $650 million, in fact is a disguise for lowering the limits for foreign buyers such as the Americans. That may sound complex, but that is a function of how American law operates to protect its own citizens.
My question is this. If we are going to change the law and allow this to happen, why would we not adopt the same standard of $10 billion? Why would we not do that?
The government has deemed fit to continue to have public liability for damages from any nuclear plants, whether it be the liability for an accident, for decommissioning or for public liability of any sort. It will either be falling on the public as the taxpayer, that is the government, or the damages will lie where they fall, just as, for example, the victims of the bankruptcy or insolvency of Abitibi-Consolidated and the pensioners of AbitibiBowater who are losing their promised pensions, severance pay and other things. They are not covered by the insolvency law and therefore the severance payments that they were supposed to get contractually are not available to them. The additional pension payments that had been agreed to are not available to them. The Federal Court of Canada has decided that that is the case under our law. In other words, the loss in a bankruptcy falls on the victims. The public is not stepping up to the plate in that situation.
However, if we had a nuclear accident or a nuclear decommissioning in a bankrupt company for whatever reason, I foresee very easily that the company's ability to look after the cost of the damages would very soon be exhausted and the $650 million is not going to do the job. Therefore, I am assuming that there would be a public outcry and an expectation that the Government of Canada, under whose jurisdiction this falls and who allowed this industry to develop in the way that it was planning, would have to assume responsibility for the damages that were done to individuals financially, physically, health-wise or whatever long into the future.
That is what this bill is about. It is bringing about a situation which takes the direct control of the nuclear industry out of the hands of government and is designed to put it into the hands of the private sector with a special arrangement that says that the nuclear industry will only be expected to have a compensation limit of $650 million. That is wrong and we in the NDP oppose it.
The development of the nuclear industry has been very controversial in Canada and elsewhere. We have seen, as previous speakers from my party have noted, a series of nuclear accidents over the years, which have been very expensive not only in terms of the health costs, the lives lost and the environmental and health damages for many years to come but also obviously in terms of dollars.
Let us look at the enormity of some of the costs of damages. For example, the cost of cleaning up the Three Mile Island nuclear incident a number of years ago in the United States would equal the cost of developing over 1.1 million 100-watt solar panels. We know that solar panels are rather expensive ways to produce electricity. The cost of cleanup alone, not the cost of operating or building, could have produced 1.1 million 100-watt solar panels.
We have the absolute cost of building nuclear plants too, which are very expensive. We have not had examples in Canada of this yet but we have long-term costs and expenses associated with finding a way to look after nuclear waste for many years to come.
We have seen an example of the mining industry running into financial difficulty. It was unable to clean up its environmental waste because it went bankrupt and the public had to step in. There is the example in my own province of the Hope Brook Gold Mine on the southwest coast, which was operated for a number of years. It did not operate for many years, just a handful, during which it made some money. It left a toxic waste situation that required millions and millions of public funds to clean up because the company itself was bankrupt.
That is the kind of situation we would be facing when the liability issue would be brought into question. It would be brought into question when something drastic and dramatic happened. It is not something that is so far beyond the realm of possibility that it ought not to be accounted for. If that were the case, the American government would not be insisting that nuclear plants and developments inside its borders have a minimum of $10 billion liability.
Other legislators and governments have decided that this is an extremely serious matter. The amount of liability that we are exposed to when it comes to the nuclear industry are enormous and must be accounted for.
We see the very mundane example of people who drive motor vehicles, which is provincially regulated, being required to have certain levels of insurance. In some provinces it is $100,000 public liability, in some cases it is $200,000. Some people get $1 million or $2 million public liability, and they do it because they want to protect themselves if there is an accident where the costs are greater than the statutory minimum of, say, $100,000.
There are many examples of car accidents which have incurred costs for recovery, rehabilitation and long-term care in excess of $100,000. Some are in excess of $1 million. Drivers of motor vehicles must protect themselves by law to the minimum but by common sense higher.
The same thing is at work here. If individuals with $100,000 liability insurance have a car accident that they are responsible for which ends up costing $300,000 in damages to an injured party, the $100,000 comes from the policy, but the $200,000 comes from the individuals, from their assets, their homes and their properties. So people protect themselves.
By the same token, in the nuclear industry, where we are talking about the kinds of damages that would be incurred, we are talking about an enormous amount of money, hundreds of millions of dollars and into the billions of dollars. Our American friends have decided in their wisdom that a minimum of $10 billion of liability is required to provide for the safety of the public in the United States of America.
That does two things. If the liability were $10 billion, that requires a very strict level of activity by anyone engaged in the nuclear industry, first of all, to get the insurance and, second, to abide by whatever rules, regulations and activities are insisted upon by these insurers with respect to safety. If I were an insurance company and on the hook for $10 billion of liability, I would be acting extremely vigilantly in ensuring that any activity going on under my policy was going to be strictly looked after.
We see that in the offshore oil industry and in other industries where a lot of damages can be incurred. As a result, of course, there are very strict guidelines and international standards organizations actually monitoring, in the case of the offshore, the construction of offshore oil platforms, drilling rigs and all of these things. They get involved because they have the ultimate liability in ensuring that the rules are followed. The same thing would happen in the nuclear industry if it were to be privatized, as the government seems to be hell-bent on doing.
It is a very expensive industry and the biggest problem is that the costs are almost unknown. The additional costs can balloon by millions and billions of dollars fairly readily. With the nuclear system such as the one in New Brunswick, the cost of repairs to keep it going are in the billions of dollars. Where does all that money come from? It has to either come from the public or private enterprise, or the industry has to shut down.
These are enormous costs that are thrown upon the industry and the public without any real control. That is why we in the New Democratic Party prefer other methods of energy generation, for example, electricity generation. Some of my colleagues have talked about wind power, solar power and hydro power.
We have enormous potential in hydro power that has not yet been developed. My colleague from Manitoba spoke about the 5,000 megawatts of power in Manitoba that is yet untapped. We have a huge power potential in Lower Churchill, Labrador, that has not yet been developed.
These are the kinds of first choice developments for energy needs that we would want to see promoted and encouraged by the Government of Canada. It can do that in a number of ways. There is a lot of talk about an east-west power grid where we can provide, within our own country, for our power needs by being able to trade and transport electricity from one province to the other.
We saw an example recently, and it is a model example, where Newfoundland and Labrador is selling power not to Ontario but in this case to the United States through Hydro-Québec's power grid, under the wheeling rights provisions that Quebec is party to.
We should have similar rules in Canada with respect to allowing the transport of electricity so that one province can generate and another province can use. This requires a bit of cooperation and it requires a bit of help from the Government of Canada, for example, a loan guarantee for the province of Manitoba's power corporation or Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro in the case of Lower Churchill.
These are the ways in which the Government of Canada could make these projects more viable. It could allow access to capital at an easier rate for what is essentially a green technology that is renewable, sustainable and will be available for decades to come.
In the case of nuclear, the shelf life of nuclear plants inevitably results in the deterioration of the plants and the need for decommissioning in some cases. My colleague from Burnaby—Douglas talked about the project in Washington State in the United States costing $2 billion a year. Those costs will go on for decades in order to decommission a nuclear facility that is not producing any power.
These are the kinds of long-term costs that are very difficult to predict. What we can predict is uncertainty. We can predict uncertainty and a certain amount of certainty that many of these costs ultimately will be passed on to the taxpayer.
We do not see this as the way to go when it comes to the development of power in this country. We see a lot of other alternatives that are better for the environment, produce more jobs, have less risks and less danger and will not contribute to the proliferation of nuclear technology and weapons in the world.
There has been some talk about the changes that are taking place, for example, with India and the sale of nuclear plants and the transfer of nuclear technology. Now India, which did not sign the nuclear non-proliferation agreement, is a nuclear power. Pakistan is in the same boat. There is some hope that a new round of nuclear disarmament may take place. I look forward to a government in Canada that can provide some leadership on that. We have not had it from the current government. I guarantee that we would have it from an NDP government.
We are seeing signs that one of the largest nuclear powers in the world, the United States, is ready to embark on a policy of nuclear disarmament. That is a very positive sign. We cannot have a situation where they are the ones holding nuclear weapons and they do not want anyone else to have them. However, if they are saying that they believe in world nuclear disarmament and are prepared to play a part in that, that is a different story. That is a recipe for possible future progress and peace. It is something that I would like to see happen.
This bill is not a step in the right direction. We cannot support it in the form that is before the House.
