Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, no, I do not know of any regulator of that type. Since I was the president of the Convention on Nuclear Safety, which included all the world's countries with safety organizations, I have a very good idea of what is the international standard. And I was president of that for three years.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chairman, I think there are two aspects to the question from the honourable member. First of all, as I indicated in my letter of January 8 to the minister, I strongly believed that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission was an independent organization and that we knew what it was like to be a quasi-judicial tribunal.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much for the question. Well, of course, I was preparing to come to the committee on the 16th and very much looking forward to this. About 8 o'clock I went home. The staff were still putting some materials together, copies of the presentation, because I had a presentation to give to you then, and they received a call from PCO—it wasn't clear which part of PCO—saying that something was coming over for me and to wait.

Natural Resources committee  I actually have in front of me the letter I received. It goes on for a number of pages. It has a lot of “whereases”. There's one “whereas” that is applicable, I believe, to the question: Whereas, the President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission failed to take the necessary initiative to address the crisis in a timely fashion using the means at her disposal, and failed to demonstrate the leadership expected by the Governor in Council; That's the explanation I was given.

Natural Resources committee  As I spoke to in my presentation, the Nuclear Safety and Control Act is a new act relative to much legislation of this type around the world, and it doesn't specify this in terms of the supply. We had opinions by our legal services some time before of what the act covered. We've always examined the act, continuously, and independent counsel agreed.

Natural Resources committee  No, Mr. Chair. I have no understanding of that because economic factors are not to be included in the decision. The decisions of the commission are to be about health, safety, and the protection of the environment. And that's what the legislation tells us to consider when we give a licence, not what the cost would be to that facility to put that in.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, members of the committee, for this opportunity to meet with you today. The recent events surrounding the nuclear facility at Chalk River and their impact on the supply of medical isotopes has raised a lot of questions among Canadians. Canadians want to know—quite rightly—how such a situation could have developed.