Madam Speaker, I must say that I was enjoying the comments of my friend from Joliette so much that I would not mind letting him go on, but I know that we are all limited to time.
It was interesting to listen to the minister as he introduced the bill this morning. As we saw in its previous incarnation, he continued with the suggestion and the spin that this is not much of a bill, that it is a very minor amendment, that it is no big deal; let us just get it done, get it through the House and committee, and get it passed. That is being quite disingenuous to the House because the bill has some very significant ramifications.
It is really about the Liberal government getting into bed with the Ontario Conservative government because of a big mistake that both levels of government, and I suppose the nuclear industry, made a year and one-half to two years ago. This was all about the Ontario Conservative government deciding to privatize nuclear power. It had already been working extensively on privatizing energy across the province from a number of different sources in advance of this.
They entered into a very favourable contract with Bruce Power and British Energy which would allow that company to operate the Bruce nuclear power plant up near Kincardine on Lake Huron. They started this by that contract and British Energy took over the operation of the plant.
The plant has eight nuclear reactors, four of which are operational and four of which are not and which are in a mothballed state. When they began to look at reopening the four mothballed nuclear reactors, which is what they want to do, they had a substantial need for new financing. They entered into some agreements with regard to that new financing. Only when the tentative contract was placed before their lawyers was it drawn to their attention that the Nuclear Liability Act exposed the financiers to the potential of liability should an incident take place at that plant.
The existing section which the bill proposes to amend talks about a number of categories of persons who would be responsible. The part that catches them is where it says “any person with a right to or interest in”. As far as the law is concerned, that would include someone who is financing one of the plants. The bill proposes to remove that verbiage which I just read and replace it with a reference to only those people who have the management and control of the plant.
When they discovered that verbiage, the financial interests backed off. They said they would not go ahead as it exposed them to too much liability. Given the power the nuclear industry has in this country, a number of governments, the federal government in particular and the Prime Minister, are the salespeople for the Candu reactor around the world. They have been pushing that type of energy. The nuclear industry immediately went to its friends and said the government had to get the section changed.
Last spring we were faced with a big push by the government to respond to the government's friends in the nuclear industry to get this amendment through the House. To the credit of my party and the Bloc Québécois, we blocked it at that point but it is now before us once again.
It would be interesting to take another quick look at what has happened to privatization in Ontario because we could learn some lessons. What happened specifically with Bruce Power is that in late August or early September it came to the government's attention that Bruce Power may not be in a position to meet the regulatory requirements regarding posting a bond to continue to maintain its responsibility should there be a nuclear incident, or that it does not meet the regulatory requirements of safety, et cetera.
Only after the government in England bailed out the British company was the British company able to continue its guarantees to the Ontario company. That is the type of tentative and soft arrangements that protect citizens of this province and country in terms of proper regulations and safety mechanisms. It was that tentative. It almost collapsed in late August.
We have heard a number of speakers say that we have to do this, that it is not fair to the nuclear industry if we impose this liability. It is important to appreciate that this liability has been in existence since the 1970s when the legislation was first passed and became law.
A number of examples could be given to show that this is no different in its practical application than what would happen if a person bought a piece of property. In fact one of the parliamentary secretaries used that as an example. He was about to buy a piece of property and found out on the closing day that the property had an oil tank or gas tank on it, and that he would have been responsible had he bought the property. It is interesting to note that his mortgage company would also have been responsible. That is the existing law at least in Ontario.
What we would be doing here if we passed this amendment would be to shelter the nuclear industry with the same type of practical responsibility that all other financiers have with regard to properties that are contaminated with toxic material. In this case it is probably the greatest type of toxic material that is available on this planet in terms of its radioactivity.
The other point I want to make is with regard to not treating them fairly. Whenever I hear that, it ignores the sentiment behind those comments and ignores the fact that this is an extremely dangerous operation. If there is a leak or a reaction that is not controlled, the consequences to the country and to the planet more generally are extremely grave. Probably the most clear examples of this are Chernobyl, and to a lesser degree, Three Mile Island.
The House of Commons has a responsibility to send the message to the operators of these plants and to the people who might finance them that this is a very high risk industry. Being high risk has to be taken into account when one is lending money.
Before I was elected, I sat on a credit union board. With respect to the loans that we made, it was no different from how the nuclear industry should be treated. Ultimately we would be responsible for the cleanup of the property because we would take back ownership of the property.
It is no different for a small financial institution or a major national or international lender. They also have to take into account the risk. We as a government should not be limiting that risk. We should be very clear what it is. We should be pointing that out, as I believe the existing legislation does. Anybody who is considering lending money should be required to take that into account before they advance funds.
I want to make one final point around the issue of lending funds. We have heard and in fact had some objection to the discussion we have had about Kyoto and how it is relevant to this amendment.
One of the things that will occur under Kyoto is that there will be a large need for new financing of new technology, particularly in the area of wind and solar because those are fairly immediate. In the longer term, we will require financial institutions and financiers generally to come forward and assist in the development of new technology.
If we continue down this road with this bill, then we will be draining a chunk of that financing out of the market here in Canada and internationally. Less financing will be available to deal with alternative energy and the development of those technologies. I believe we have to take that matter into account.
The government would have us believe that the bill has nothing to do with privatization. A number of people from that side of the House have said that to me, including the minister, but they are wrong. The legislation would in fact facilitate the privatization of the nuclear industry. If it goes through, it will allow British Energy to get its financing.
There is another nuclear plant, the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick. The Government of New Brunswick, as recently as in the last few weeks, said that it will not put in the $875 million that plant needs to be safe in its operation. That plant will be on the block for new operators and perhaps new owners if the bill goes through. I have to say that we have been proven right so often that $875 million is probably a light figure. It will probably cost as much as double that amount.
There are corporate interests, as we have seen British Energy from England and some of the companies in the United States, which in fact, if the bill goes through, would be interested in either managing and operating Lepreau or perhaps even purchasing it if the government of that province were prepared to sell it.
The bill is very much about privatization and facilitating the privatization of the nuclear industry. Based on the experience of privatization that we have seen in other energy sectors, the privatization of this industry causes my party great concern and it should cause great concern in the country generally. We should not be going down that road for a number of reasons.
Let me deal with safety first. If we are looking at maximizing the safety history of these plants, privatization is not the route we should be going down. It is simply too easy for the managers and operators of the plant to look at the bottom line, say that is what they are concerned about, but that if they do make the improvement or the repair it will cost millions of dollars, hundreds of millions in most cases. They will just let it go a little bit longer.
We have had all sorts of examples where our regulatory authorities were not well enough equipped to keep on top of that and make sure those repairs were done in a timely fashion.
The second feature we need to take into account is the cost factor of privatization. In every case that I am aware of where privatization has taken place in the energy sector across the continent and across the globe it has cost the consumers of that energy more money than it would have cost if the privatization had not occurred. The legislation is about privatization and there are serious consequences if privatization goes ahead.
Inevitably when we take part in this debate we need to know the alternatives. Let us say we do not go down this road and that we hold the liability as it is now, that would mean the nuclear power plants would remain in public hands and the private sector would not move in and provide the financing to take over these operations. We would then be facing, as have a number of countries in Europe, Germany probably being the best example, of what to do with the industry.
I treat the nuclear industry as a sunset industry. It is one that eventually will be phased out. The cost of disposing nuclear waste is simply so high and so risky that we cannot afford nuclear power.
A bill went through the House this past year where we were trying to deal with the disposal of nuclear waste. All sorts of suggestions were made on how to do that. The proposal that ended up in the bill was in my opinion totally unsatisfactory but it is one we will follow through on.
The scary part is that right now Canada is producing on a per capita basis more nuclear waste than any country in the world. We produce more than the United States in spite of the size of that country. By 2010 we will be outstripping the United States by a very large margin. The United States started earlier than Canada and have more plants, but by 2010 we will actually have more nuclear waste on our soil than the United States will have on its soil.
There is no methodology on this planet to deal with this issue. As I said earlier, we heard a number of suggestions. We did hear some silly ones, such as put it in a rocket and shoot it at the sun.
There is no way of disposing of this. Quite frankly, there is no way of putting a dollar cost on what it will ultimately cost the planet to dispose of the waste. We heard an Alliance member earlier today talk about the costs of operating a nuclear plant and saying that it was clean and cheap. However, as my friend from Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore pointed out, she was dead wrong on that. It is not clean because of the waste and it is not cheap because of the waste. If we factored in those costs it would be by far the most expensive type of energy on this planet. We ultimately do not know what the costs could be for the next generation, on down to thousands of years if we look at how long that radioactivity will continue.
When we look at a bill such this and we are told go ahead and pass it, that it is not very important, that it is a minor thing and that the nuclear industry needs the break, that is the wrong attitude. We should not be treating the financiers in the nuclear industry any differently or, in fact, as the bill would, more favourably than financiers in the rest of the field.
We should not be passing a bill that would allow the privatization of the industry. We should not be sending a message to the country that we will attempt either the privatization of the industry and allowing it to continue that way or to facilitate it as a government operation. We should be sending a very clear message to the industry and to the country that this is a sunset industry, that we will be phasing it out and that we will be dealing with the problems of phasing it out, both in terms of the waste and in terms of the training and retraining that will be necessary for the workers in those industries and for the communities that will be negatively impacted as we phase this industry out. That is the approach we should be taking. It is a much more logical and sensible approach and one that the country requires.
