Natural Resources committee  While the tribunal is being set up, not while it is being--

Natural Resources committee  No, once it is established, the minister would not be able to pay any--

Natural Resources committee  That's right.

Natural Resources committee  No, it would not be.

Natural Resources committee  Oh yes, but we're talking about the establishment of the tribunal, so this interim payment would only be made between the time that a declaration was made, saying, okay, stop the payments under insurance--

Natural Resources committee  That's correct.

Natural Resources committee  I'm not saying that it's necessarily problematic. What I'm saying is that the rationale for us to have the 20% was to seek to maintain as much of the moneys as possible for distribution by the tribunal. The 20% was chosen as minimizing the payout before the tribunal was in place.

Natural Resources committee  The situation would be that these demands would be coming to the minister to pay out, as opposed to a tribunal that would be in place and would have the expertise to deal with payouts like this. Our view was that it would be best to try to minimize the amount of funds that was be

Natural Resources committee  That's correct, and it would reduce the amount of funds available for the tribunal to pay out once it was in place.

Natural Resources committee  Well, I guess my last comment would be that it's always open to the government to provide additional payments outside of the scheme entirely, in the event of an incident.

Natural Resources committee  That is correct.

Natural Resources committee  The rationale for putting the 20% was to limit to 20% the amount of the $650 million fund that the minister could pay out before the tribunal was put in place. It's correct that of the $650 million, some of those funds would be private insurance and some would be federal moneys.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, we would.

Natural Resources committee  Our interest was, in the event of a very serious accident, to rely very heavily on the tribunal to provide effective, efficient, and equitable compensation of victims. So we wanted to hold onto as much of the fund as possible for, actually, the claims determination by the tribuna

Natural Resources committee  The situation is that we explicitly indicated that damage relating to acts of terrorism would be covered under the legislation, because it was our view that these were things that the operator could take measures to preclude, whereas acts of war, and so on, were outside that scop