Madam Speaker, I would like to say that I enjoy rising to speak to the bill but that would be dishonest. All the opposition parties were quite offended by the process we were put through at committee stage with regard to the conduct around processing the bill. Although I am new to the House, I found this very difficult.
After talking to other members of other parties who sat on the committee, the so-called democratic process was a real sham for all of them.
As we have already heard from both the Alliance and the Bloc members, over 75 amendments were brought forward, on a bill that is not very large, and not one, in whole or in part, was accepted.
Speaking on behalf of all opposition parties, there were some very appropriate amendments that would have significantly strengthened the bill and made it more palatable not only to the opposition parties but, more important, to citizens of the country. However, not only was every amendment and any part of the amendment rejected, it was rare to get any response from government members as to why the amendment was not appropriate.
We need to put the conduct of the government in the context of what has happened with nuclear waste. It is not like it is a new field. It is not like we have not been studying this for quite some time as a society. It is not like we are going to come up with a solution tomorrow or anytime in the near future to properly deal with this waste. There is no sense of urgency, real or perceived, that is applicable in these circumstances.
This is one of those bills and one of those issues that needed full consideration through the democratic process but it did not even come close to that.
I will try to set some of that background. As we all know, we began having a problem with how to deal with nuclear waste from the very inception of the development of nuclear weapons. However, there was a real hiatus during that period of time until we began developing nuclear sites for power purposes.
By the early 1970s, in this country and around the world, we knew we had a major problem with this power source in the form of not only radiation but of radioactive fuel waste. Every other country that has nuclear power is in the same situation. No one has been able to come up with, in any fashion, an adequate means of dealing with nuclear waste. What it has led to, in a number of cases, is that countries have begun phasing out or stopping their use of nuclear power. However, they still have no solution for disposing the waste or, for that matter, what to do with the plants as they are decommissioned.
Some interesting research is going on now. The scientific theory is that we may be able to run the fuel back through the process again and significantly reduce its volume or to perhaps eliminate it completely. However, we are literally years if not decades away from perfecting that if in fact we ever do.
The bottom line is that no one on this planet knows how to deal with nuclear waste. We only know how to store it.
The Atomic Energy Commission came up with a proposal called deep geological disposal, or, what I call it, dumping in the Canadian Shield. When the proposal surfaced it received such a negative reaction that a further commission was appointed by the federal government. It was called the Seaborn commission and it did its work over about a two to two and a half year period. If nothing else came out of that, it was that the proposal for deep geological disposal of waste was something that no one in Canada wanted: no community, no matter how small or large, would accept it.
The Seaborn commission came to the conclusion that there was no trust in the country for AECL with regard to a methodology for disposal. The commission was very clear in its recommendations: that whatever steps we took as a country we had to build consultation into the methodology so we would build that trust in whatever community or communities would eventually end up with the waste.
Then came the bill and the process we went through. The bill and the conduct of the committee were supposed to build trust. Let me assure members it did not do that and it will not do that. The bill has some major conflicts of interest built right into it. The industries that create the waste will be the ones investigating and making recommendations to the governor in council on to how dispose of the waste. The Seaborn commission specifically recommended against that type of structural institutional setup. It recommended an independent body and we got just the opposite.
The Seaborn commission recommended extensive consultation processes be built in. We did not get that in the bill either. It recommended that whatever was necessary from a time standpoint be allowed both for the recommendations and the process. We have some very tight time limits that were built in here.
The bill also has some very limited parameters for the waste management organization that would be set up, the one that would be entirely controlled by the industry, as to the methods it would address. The way the bill is worded it basically limits the methods to three types: the one we have already heard about, the deep geological disposal methodology; leaving it the way it is now, which is stored at the sites owned by the plants; or bringing it all together in what is being called a temporary or interim storage site.
Basically the bill does not leave open the possibility of a breakthrough in technology in terms of dealing with this. The bill is all about burying the problem, and I mean that both figuratively and literally. The government just wants to get rid of it by shoving it through. It is quite clear that the committee's reaction to the witnesses we heard confirmed the statement I just made.
I would like to talk a bit more about some of the other witnesses but I will concentrate on what we heard from the mayors of three communities in Ontario. They appeared at the last minute because all the witnesses were sort of being rushed through so the committee could get to the clause by clause debate. They all showed up but they were given relatively short periods of time to address the bill. They thoroughly impressed members from all parties. Their position was relatively straightforward and simple, but it was also very eloquent and very telling.
What did they tell us? They told us that they had lived with the problem for decades, that they understood what it meant for them but that it did not make their lives simple as municipal councillors. They said that they strongly believed they had the right to be involved in the decision making process as to how the wastes would be disposed of.
They were given short shrift by the committee. Although several amendments were brought forward that specifically dealt with their concerns and what they would like to see done with the bill, the amendments were simply rejected by members of the government with no discussion and no comment about why we should not give them some representation or why we should not augment the consultation process so they would have some input. There was total silence. A vote was taken and the proposed amendments were rejected.
Those three mayors had every right to be angry for the cavalier fashion in which they were treated and in the total rejection of the proposals they had put forward in such a simple but eloquent manner.
The consultation process is meaningless. There is no funding for it. In fact, if we look very closely at the bill, the bill proposes to cut out all the NGOs across the country. These are people who have followed this issue for over a decade now and who participated in the Seaborn commission study and research. The only people with whom the government will allow any consultation, and that is fairly meaningless, will be the people in the communities it picked as proposed sites. A number of the NGOs across the country who have real expertise in this area will not even get any notice and certainly will be extremely limited in their ability to be involved in the process.
The other issue we raised, because of the September 11 incidents in New York City and in Washington, D.C., involved security. The amendments put forward would have heightened the level of security and the analysis of security brought forth by the waste management organization, but they were also defeated. If there were some urgency, that was definitely one area but it was rejected.
Some of the amendments put forward would have prohibited the importing of waste so that Canada would not become a dumping ground for the rest of the world, and it is at some risk, but those proposed amendments were rejected without discussion. The vote was taken and the proposed amendments were rejected. That was the process.
I will finish by saying that at second reading our party indicated its willingness to vote in principle to pass this over on the basis that there would be serious consideration given to the recommendations that were in the Seaborn report and to try to implement the amendments that came from the opposition parties. We did not get any of them, nor did any of the other opposition parties.
As a result of that, perhaps the last chance we had as a government to convince the Canadian populace that we needed to deal with this issue was lost, and it will be lost assuming the majority on the Liberal side pushes this through.
What will be the effect? Let me do a little prophesying, because I have heard this already from some of the groups and I think it is going to just flow out automatically. We will have communities across the country, many of them in the Shield, passing resolutions, whether they are first nations or local municipal councils in Ontario and Quebec in particular. They will start passing resolutions to prohibit any consideration of this waste being moved into their communities. We will have ongoing work done by those groups interested in this issue which will give no credibility to the government at all and will simply reject it out of hand. That will be the result.
