Joe Comartin

[Employment Insurance, October 19th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we have been attempting to get an answer from the Minister of Human Resources Development that will help a good deal of Canadians who are currently unemployed because of what happened on September 11. We continue to get platitudes from her.

Could the minister tell us when she will decide whether the hours that are needed to qualify for EI are going to be reduced or not? When will she make that decision?

[Customs Act, October 19th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me pleasure to speak to the bill today, not because of what is in it but for the opportunity to address issues that should be raised concerning the travel of people and commercial goods across the border between ourselves and the United States.

Before I address the specifics of the bill I will express our party's displeasure with the fact that this very important issue has been addressed once again at the Senate level. The issue, which before September was crucial for my riding in terms of ongoing economic viability, has become extremely important since September 11 yet is being addressed by a body that is unelected and unaccountable. This is a policy that the government has unfortunately followed all too often.

I will emphasize a point that a number of other members have made, that the bill and the issues it addresses were all addressed prior to September 11. We have said ad nauseam that our lives as individuals and as a society as a whole in North America have changed dramatically since September 11. As a result the bill is inadequate to deal with the issues around moving goods and people across the border between ourselves and the United States.

To digress for one moment, the Bloc has raised a couple of amendments. I express our support for those amendments. Since both the amendments deal with an early review of the legislation we would like to see the bill withdrawn and sent back to the planning stages because it is inadequate for the needs we faced before September 11 and even more so since the tragedy and the outflow from those events.

I will begin to address the balance that the bill attempted to reach, and that it clearly has not achieved, between the issues of security, the free flow of goods and people across the border, and, because it has raised its head, the issue of civil liberties for both travellers and employees on the Canadian side of the border.

[Canada--U.S. Border, October 18th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is good to see the Deputy Prime Minister back on his feet.

Having said that, he was in Washington yesterday at a committee hearing. In fact that committee was talking about tightening up the controls at the border. That is the last thing we need, at least at Windsor-Detroit. What specific things is the government doing? It has had a month and half since September 11 and I have not seen the government do one thing.

[Canada--U.S. Border, October 18th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Windsor-Detroit has the largest and busiest border crossings in North America. The slowdowns have caused tremendous devastation to the local economy and in fact are threatening the national economy. There have been layoffs in both the auto sector and the service sector, 700 at the Windsor casino last week alone.

What concrete actions is the government taking to ensure that our U.S. counterparts will address this problem and save jobs for Canadian citizens?

[National Security, October 4th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, as a result of the tragic events of September 11 traffic at the Windsor border crossing, the busiest in Canada, has been dramatically reduced because of necessary security measures.

The slowdown has resulted in thousands of jobs being lost. Workers have been laid off at automotive companies, in feeder plants and throughout the whole service sector. It has been quite devastating on our community.

The people of Windsor are acutely aware of the need for the increased security. However they do not want open borders. They do not want to be at risk for the possible influx of crime from the American side of the border.

We know from prior experience that if we work together with our neighbours to the south there are technologies and additional resources that can be put into place to allow for security and the free flow of goods and people.

I called on the revenue minister to raise these concerns with U.S. officials and to encourage them to take immediate steps to increase--

[The Environment, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the minister should read the report in total with regard to funding.

The report also found that the information provided by most departments on the progress of meeting their sustainable development targets fell far short of the government's own guidelines and that it hampers parliament's ability to hold the departments to account.

Perhaps the Minister of Finance, who has said that a so-called green screen is a priority for him, could tell the House why his department, from which participation is considered crucial if we are to meet sustainable development objectives, has the worst grading as far as deficiency in the management of its sustainable development commitments.

[The Environment, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, this year's report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, which was tabled today, is a scathing indictment of the government and its failure to protect our environment.

The report found that in many cases the government is failing to meet its environmental commitments, particularly with regard to the Great Lakes and climate change.

It found federal priority funding to be unstable, insufficient and declining with key commitments not being met.

When will the government step up and start meeting its environmental commitments?

[Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting that whenever I get into this specific topic I always think of the chair of the environment committee and the work he has done, not only with regard to the nuclear industry and the major advantages that we have created for them both by subsidizing and by favourable tax treatment, but also the work he has done with the fossil fuel industry. He is a national expert on this. I believe a couple of private members' bills and some reports have come out of that committee over the years. I acknowledge the work he has done on that committee.

What that work clearly shows is that we have subsidized the nuclear industry and the fossil fuel industry quite extensively. That does not show up in the cost. We have done that with tax dollars as a bottom line. We have subsidized those industries.

Unfortunately I do not have the documents to share with my friend and I will try to get them to him, but what is interesting is that the Canadian Wind Energy Association, which is an association of a number of companies and associations around the country, is trying to develop wind as an alternative form of energy. It was lobbying us in the spring. It was at that time I asked the Minister of Natural Resources for some commitment on alternative energy use.

What that association brought forth was some very interesting research that set out the specific types of subsidies we have had in those two other industries going back to the 1950s. We have not accorded those to solar or wind power companies that are trying to develop those as alternative forms of energy.

We always hear the argument from the nuclear industry that it would only cost so many cents--and it is always gets the amount down to pennies--for a unit of energy if we were to go to nuclear energy. It completely ignores the costs that we are talking about, which I think are minimal in this bill, but it does not show up in that accounting form. It is quite significant, arguably, tripling and quadrupling, if not more, the cost of nuclear energy if we were to seriously analyze what it would cost to deal with nuclear waste.

[Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the Progressive Conservative Party caught me on this once before during a take note debate. I went back to take a look at this because I did not have an answer for him then, but I have one now.

The answer is that in fact Germany does buy from some of the other countries, France in particular. In France, by the way, active consideration is being given to phasing out its nuclear industry. Germany has seen the purchase of that, and the continued use that it is making of its own plants, as temporary. Germany has set a quota for alternative energy sources, which I have asked our Minister of Natural Resources to do, and I am still waiting to hear back from him on, and in fact has a specific quota for wind power.

If Germany achieves that, which it fully expects to do over the next 10 to 15 years, it will be able to phase out its own industry and cease purchasing electricity in the form of nuclear energy from France and other countries.

With regard to the time limit, my friend is wrong. It is grossly unfair to impose that type of time limit on anybody when we know there are other options that may be coming.

I want to talk about the storage bins that I saw at Pickering. They are designed to last for up to 50 years and are monitored on a 24 hour basis. If there are any problems with them, any cracks or deterioration in the material, they are identified immediately and can then be placed in another storage bin. There is no reason whatsoever for us to impose that type of time limit other than to dump this stuff on some community in the Canadian Shield and let the industry off the hook for the cost of it.

[Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP is quite pleased to see legislation come forward on this issue, not this legislation in particular but at least some legislation.

If there is any area of the environment that speaks to the necessity of having the precautionary principle applied before an industry such as the nuclear industry is allowed to develop, this is it. It is necessary when one is considering the legislation to look at a bit of the history. As we all know the nuclear industry was an offshoot of the development of nuclear weapons flowing from research and work done during the second world war. It began to be used for non-war purposes subsequent to the second world war. We got our first small nuclear reactors in the 1950s and 1960s and in the process of doing that began to identify even back then the very serious problem of the byproduct, nuclear waste.

However identifying the level of seriousness seems to have come to the attention of governments only after the huge expansion that occurred in the 1970s, particularly in Canada with the Candu reactors. At that point there was a recognition that we would have to do something about nuclear waste.

Because we allowed the continuous development of this industry, what did not happen at that point was an economic assessment of the real cost of nuclear power. In fact, we have not even done that up to this point. That is one of the problems with the bill. However, we did allow the expansion and there was very substantial expansion through the 1970s.

At the end of the 1970s the atomic energy commission of Canada was prompted to begin to seriously look at what it would do with all the nuclear waste from the nuclear plants. Over a period of extensive research and time, it came up with a proposal which was, in simple, man on the street terms, to dump it. It put some fancy words around it and talked about deep rock burial. That is the phraseology. In essence, they wanted to dump it in the Canadian Shield.

As this proposal came forward, as I think any sensible person could imagine it got a less than overwhelming response from local communities that might have been the site of this dump. Because the reaction was so strong from the Canadian citizenry, a commission was appointed, chaired by Blair Seaborn, and it became generally known as the Seaborn commission. The commission studied this over an extensive period of time, almost 10 years, and reported in 1997 with a very damning summary of the AECL proposal.

The government, in response to that, to a great extent rejected the commission but pretends now in the legislation to allow for the implementation, or at least the potential implementation, of the recommendations from that commission.

To some significant degree the bill is a fraud if its intent is in fact to implement the Seaborn commission recommendations because it does not do that. What it does do is allow the industry to make all of the decisions, to do that in a relatively short period of time given the level of intense research required and probably using a methodology that will be relatively inexpensive for the industry but totally unsatisfying for the Canadian public.

As I said when I began my remarks we welcome the legislation coming forward because this issue has to be addressed by the House. We will be supporting the bill on second reading to have it passed on for committee review. The work in that committee hopefully will get us to a result by way of significant amendments that in fact would make the treatment of nuclear waste something in which Canada can be a leader in the world, as opposed to what we see in the bill now.

I want to deal with a few of the specifics in the bill that we will be looking at and attempting to alter at committee stage. The first, which I have already made reference to, is the composition of the decision making body. The bill provides for the establishment of a waste management organization. We welcome that. It was part of the Seaborn recommendations that a body of that nature be established. What we are opposed to and will attempt to get changed is the composition of the panel that will form that commission, because as it stands now the only people who would be on it are from the industry. Those people who need regulation would be doing the regulating.

The Seaborn commission recommended that there be experts on that panel, that it involve extensive public consultation, that it be at arm's length and independent from the utilities that provide the services and the product, from the other vested interests or offshoots of those utilities, and from government itself, in other words, that it be completely independent. We will be looking for those recommendations to be incorporated in the bill.

There is a second group that is established under the bill, advisory panels and committees. Again, that was recommended by the Seaborn commission. These would be more broadly based and somewhat localized to the areas where there are current nuclear facilities. The bill would restrict participants to being from just that area. In effect the local community would be given a chance to sit on these committees but would not be given any resources either in the form of personnel to act as secretaries or money for things like travel or hiring experts. The bill does not provide for any of this. Again, the Seaborn commission recommended all of that. In addition, any people from the outside who may be able on a volunteer basis to provide expertise would not be allowed to sit on the committees. We will be looking for some significant changes in that structure.

It is important to note that after all its research, study and consultation, one of the Seaborn commission's major conclusions was that even though deep rock burial may be technically feasible, not one community in Canada would risk accepting the nuclear waste.

The credibility of both the waste management organization and the advisory councils is extremely important. Ultimately, the only way nuclear waste will be adequately dealt with and dealt with to the satisfaction of the Canadian public, both generally and specifically in some of these communities, is for it to have absolute credibility. Bill C-27 goes in the opposite direction.

I want to spend a few moments on the funding for nuclear waste disposal. I had the opportunity to spend some time at the nuclear site in Darlington, Ontario, which has currently four reactors operating and four more that are idle. I spent the better part of a day looking at the system. The current system is simply that it is stored, first in water and then it is moved into containers, very high tech in both cases, but obviously short term in that it does not deal with the waste itself. It is strictly storage. That is the only methodology we have at this point.

The financing that is being recommended in the bill, I believe, and it is where there is some shortfall, is based on the original AECL proposal of deep rock burial. I am not entirely convinced that the proposed funding will even be sufficient to do that because of what I expect will be very strong opposition from whatever community in which the site may end up, if that ever proceeds.

However, I am convinced that it is clearly not enough money if we continue short term storage. The reason for that is that this waste has no end in terms of its lifespan. The best scientific minds in this field cannot tell us what the life expectancy is of this material.

We may be storing nuclear waste above ground or in limited, below ground facilities for centuries and millenniums, and that has not been costed into the bill at all. This is very clear from the dollars. We are not talking about peanuts. We are talking about billions and billions of dollars that are being proposed but the amount will be nowhere near adequate for long term storage. That is a matter that has to be looked at very closely.

If the government were serious about paying attention to the work done by the Seaborn commission, it would do a number of things in this legislation as opposed to the smokescreen it is creating here. If it set out the legislation along the lines of what the commission recommended, we could have a real independent agency, one that would be arm's length from the nuclear industry and from the government.

That independent agency would be entitled and authorized to look at the various options. This is another real flaw in the legislation. It really only provides for two options: the storage that is going on now, short term, or the deep rock burial.

There are other potential options. Extensive research has been going on over what is called a transmutation of the waste. It is believed there are ways of reprocessing it. This has not been done yet, I would hasten to add, but it is believed that we may be able to run the waste back through the system. At this point it would be very dangerous to do that but if it can be developed, it may reduce the volume of waste quite significantly and, subsequently, storage capacity requirements would be dramatically reduced.

The other research that has been going on has to do with using the waste as fuel repeatedly and eventually completely eliminating the issues of storage and disposal. The forecast of us ever being able to do that, either in this country or any place in the world, is long term. The point is that there are some other potential options to look at rather than just the two that the waste management organization, which will be authorized by this bill, are supposed to look at.

The other problem with the bill is that it only allows the waste management organization three years to come up with its proposal. Again, what we will be faced with is an organization that is completely dominated by the industry, which has already taken the industry's position of what it wants to do with it, and it will be given three years to come up with a recommendation. We already know what the result will. We will be going back to the original AECL proposal of deep rock burial.

As I have said, if the bill remains the way it is and is passed into law, this will be, to a great extent, a charade that the government has put us through.

I would like to talk a bit more about the options. We have heard some hair-brained ones. I thought that one of the most interesting ones, which was quite star trekkie, was to load the nuclear waste onto a spaceship and shoot it into the sun. With this option we would not only have Star Wars , we would also have all this nuclear waste that potentially could end up in our outer atmosphere. This is not an option that I think any reasonable commission would follow, but there are others.

A fair amount of research is going on in this area and it should be pursued. We are not the only ones doing it. A number of other countries are very active in this regard.

With regard to the timeframe, whatever the waste management organization eventually ends up looking like, there is no way it should be mandated to come back with a report within that timeframe. We have been working on this issue since the late seventies, although it probably should have been longer, and to mandate the organization now when we have this type of controversy, is grossly unfair however it is composed.

In conclusion, I just want to make one additional point concerning the whole issue of the phase out of the nuclear industry.

Although I think most of us are already aware of this, I want to bring to the House's attention that Germany has now moved on this issue. The German government has formerly reached an agreement with the industry that it will phase it out. A number of other countries in Europe are following suit. This waste issue with which we are dealing cries out for Canada to do the same. We have a major problem on our hands that may go on for centuries or even millenniums. We do not need to compound that by increasing the volume of this waste.

As I said earlier, we will support the bill at second reading to get it to committee and for us to make those significant changes. It is obvious from my comments that if those significant changes do not come forward we will be vigorously opposing the legislation at third reading.