Lisa Raitt Consults Her Public

Yesterday, Lisa Raitt carried out a blitz of Milton, Oakville and Burlington in the form of three rather hastily organized 'public consultation' meetings. She booked the small meeting room at the Milton Sports Centre for ours, which was announced less than a week in advance. All of which told me that she really didn't want or expect much of a turnout.

That, and the panicked looks on the faces of those running the registration desk.

The room is supposed to have a capacity of 35, but there had to be 50 or 60 jammed in, with at least a dozen standing in the back. Apparently it was the same at the other two meetings. And from the comments I heard and the questions that were asked, hardly any of them qualified as Conservative supporters. Not any more.

Her staff was there, of course. Former local Conservative Riding President Pat White was in the crowd, as well as a younger guy who seemed pretty partisan, but it was generally the same as what I've heard reported from the other two meetings: mostly critical, several neutral, and only a very few supportive.

Some got downright angry.

The event certainly drew the finest people. Some of the local personages who showed up were Donna Danielli, Colin Best, Mike Cluett, Mike Grimwood from the Rural Residents' Association, Joan from MiltonGreen, local reporters, and probably more I didn't recognize.

There were a few people who wanted to talk about energy and the environment, including one denier who droned on and on (they cut him off when he started quoting Lord Monkton). Other than him, the consensus was that that the Conservatives haven't done enough. Lisa took the opportunity to launch into a defence of the tar sands and 'clean coal', citing her Cape Breton roots as the reason for her affection.

We had one representative of an engineers group who spoke rather eloquently about AECL and the need to retain Canadian intellectual property. Apparently the AECL people completely swamped the other two meetings.

There were several very critical comments and questions on the HST - even Pat White said the timing was bad, and nobody was buying the line that the Federal government hadn't applied pressure to the provinces to harmonize. And then there were the usual random issues: income splitting, investment rules for horse farms, cheap imports, regional transit, Glenorchy Conservation Area, gun registry, family farms, pension reform and Nortel.

I asked the first question about prorogation. Lisa and her staff all know who I am, so I don't generally want to pound her too hard at these things and get dismissed as a Liberal partisan. Besides, I don't hold grudges, and she's always very friendly with me. So I just thanked her for holding these meetings today, and then I asked her how she was going to be filling the rest of her time over the next two months. She said that she'd be spending a lot of time in her constituency office and some in Ottawa - and then she said that she gets invited to a lot of local events like ribbon cuttings and Rotary functions, and this will give her a change to attend a lot more of those.

Seriously. Rotary lunches. Your MPs at work.

That seemed to break the ice on the issue because after that there were a number of critical comments about prorogation. The most intense came from Mike Grimwood, who really laced into her about it and wouldn't let it go. His best quote: "Why even bother with public meetings when the PMO makes all the decisions anyway?"

She didn't really address any of these concerns directly, even at later meetings where she just said that she would take our concerns back to Ottawa. But really - what is there to say?

Couple of funny moments: she still can't pronounce Nassagaweya and tried to laugh it off (note to all Halton candidates: if you can't pronounce Nassagaweya, you're as good as dead in the rural wards). She knew I was running for Council and congratulated me before the meeting, saying how much fun it was campaigning, and engaging in a little girl talk about all weight I would lose door-knocking.

Afterwards, she offered me this final piece of advice: "Don't read anybody's blogs but your own".

Thanks, but I'll not only read others' blogs - I'll even keep taking comments on my own.

(for a review of the Oakville meeting, check out Matt and Ashley's blog)

UPDATE: The Champion has a brief article about the event. I didn't count, but there's no way they fit 100 people in that room. I know - I rented the same room for a Liberal meeting tonight. Like I said, the room has a capacity of 35 and is only about 750 sq.ft. That would be like fitting 100 people into the main floor of my house. No way.

No Surprise: AECL Officially on the Auction Bloc

Shorter Lisa Raitt:

“Nuclear energy is experiencing a renaissance around the world that will reap huge profits for the industry, and our government is committed to ensuring that the Canadian public won't see a penny of it."

Chalk River Quotes of the Day

From a G&M article entitled, "How Canada let the world down":

What's disappointing about the crisis isn't so much that the Chalk River reactor sprung a leak (or, rather, several of them) – that's what happens to a 52-year-old reactor, said Norman Laurin, a nuclear physician at the Trois-Rivières Regional Hospital in Quebec.

What's frustrating, he said, is that the ensuing crisis was entirely avoidable.

“Those are very, very complex technical issues. I don't blame them for taking the amount of time that is necessary,” Dr. Laurin said. “It's not the government's fault that the NRU reactor is broken. … It's the management of the crisis that should have been a lot better.”

Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is disappointed. In AECL. And so is Lisa Raitt:

The day before the prime minister made his comments, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and Raitt released a joint statement saying they, too, were disappointed about the latest setback for the still-offline reactor.

"We have asked AECL to provide a firm return-to-service plan as soon as possible, and we have underscored to them that their first priority is to return the NRU reactor to service, consistent with maintaining the highest standards of safety and security," the ministers said in the statement.

And:

...Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt said that fixing the reactor is the best way to ensure a supply of isotopes in the coming years.

"That is the main fact of it," she told CTV News Channel on Thursday.

Because apparently one can repair holes, reverse corrosion, and safely restart a leaky reactor through sheer force of political will. Now get to it!

(for a somewhat more nuanced summary of the situation, check here.)

Heads Are Gonna Roll

Lisa Raitt might just be destined to join Maxime Bernier on the backbench over this one:

Secret federal documents reveal full AECL funding

Sensitive government documents left behind at a CTV News bureau reveal Ottawa has poured far more money into the aging Chalk River nuclear reactor than the public has been told.

The binder of documents was left nearly a week ago at CTV's Ottawa bureau by either Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt or one of her aides. Some of the papers are clearly marked "secret."

Oops. Of course, it's unclear at this point which is worse: the fact that 'secret' documents dealing with our nuclear industry were left for a week in a TV studio without anyone noticing, or the actual information contained in those documents:

...In documents headlined "Background for discussion with chair of Atomic Energy Canada," the government lists funding for the Crown corporation at $351 million for 2009-2010. That figure was in the January budget.

However, it also lists $72 million to "maintain the option of isotope production." The public 2009 budget does not specifically mention funding for isotopes.

The documents also include a hand-written note that lists total funding for Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd. since 2006 at $1.7 billion, and then a talking-point memo to characterize the spending as "cleaning up a Liberal mess."

...Publicly, Ottawa has downplayed Ontario's interest in the sale of AECL's Candu division. But included in the binder is background information for a May 25 meeting with Glenna Carr, who chairs the board of directors for AECL: "The government continues to support AECL's bid in Ontario, but the announcement will probably raise questions about this support. We will have to manage this very carefully."

On the bright side, this little faux pas has probably saved the government at least a year and a half of ducking freedom of information requests.

Meanwhile, according to a recent interview with our man on the nuclear beat David Akin, Lisa Raitt's plan is apparently to give up Canada's leading role in nuclear technology in favour of a "continental" approach. And by "continental", she means...

"We have to look to . . . the United States. For all the medical isotopes that they use — and it's 100 times more than what we use — they don't have a reactor to produce their own medical isotopes. So we are working with them as well because I think it's really important to approach this from a North American continent point of view and not have a situation where we're depending on five aging reactors in the world."

John Ralston Saul is whispering in my ear again: "...fear of owning...". I never thought I'd say it, but thank God for people like Frank Stronach, or this country would just be one big goddamned branch plant.

Spanish Highways, French Reactors. Welcome to Canada.

Government of Canada Moves Forward on Restructuring Atomic Energy of Canada Limited

“Our Government is acting now to inject strength into Canada’s nuclear industry by enhancing the culture of growth; the culture of efficiency; and the culture of leadership,” said the Honourable Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources. “The ultimate objective of this restructuring is to leverage Canada’s long-term investment in nuclear energy and strengthen Canada’s nuclear industry at a time of global expansion.”

I don't think I've ever heard so many corporate weasel words come out of somebody's mouth since Enron, but the upshot is this: The government is planning to split AECL, sell off its ownership stake in the profit-making reactor sales division (probably to a foreign entity like France's AREVA), and keep the leaky, expensive, isotope-producing NRU and all the financial and environmental liabilities that go with it on the public books.

Not only that, but they'll be selling AECL before it officially wins the expected multi-billion dollar Ontario reactor contract, but after the price has been driven down by the recession, the failure of the Maple reactors and a fresh new isotope crisis.

Private wealth and public squalor.

None of comes as a surprise to anyone, of course. The minute the government initiated its "strategic review" of AECL back in 2007, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the review would tell Jimmy P.E. ("Privatize Everything") Flaherty exactly what he wanted to hear. And it's not like we haven't seen all this before. Those of us who suffered through his buddy Mike Harris' 'Common Sense Revolution' will recall their bargain-basement sale of the income-generating 407 toll highway to a Spanish consortium, as well as the (thankfully failed) attempts to privatize the LCBO and Ontario Hydro after carving the latter up in a very similar way to what's being proposed for AECL.

I would love to be able to blame Lisa Raitt for all this. I really would. But really, now that all the renegades have been culled from the Conservative herd, you know that none of this was actually her idea. Besides, she is just doing what is in her reptilian corporate nature to do. Maximize profits. Divest toxic assets. And above all, don't think beyond the numbers to fuzzy, human considerations like quality of life or a national strategy or the long-term benefit to the nation. In fact, this situation is perfectly suited to her skills. You can tell when words like "restructuring" and "leveraged investment" drip so effortlessly from her lips - she's in her element.

Hear now the words of John Ralston Saul, from "A Fair Country". He's talking about the private sector, but he could just as easily be talking about AECL:

When you look at how Canada came to lose its entire complex and successful steel industry through a series of takeovers squeezed into little more than two years, ending in 2007, you conclude with the same answer. The industry leaders, financial market potential investors, regulators, civil service leaders and politicians all saw themselves as followers, as temporary holders of wealth. And since others wanted control of our industry in order to shape it to their own interests, it was our duty to hand it over as rapidly as possible. Why? In order that the new owners should derive downstream, complex, long-term benefits. Our reward for such passivity? Some handsome payouts to short-term, first-tier managers. And with luck the new owners would allow the second-tier and below employees to continue as their employees.


... [speaking of the owners and CEOs of Barrick Gold, Bombardier and other major Canadian businesses] All of them would agree that the statistics showing our legal corporate headquarters to be growing in number are nonsense. "A head office of a subsidiary is not a head office." Why? Because it is missing the leadership jobs, the key ser vice jobs, the research and development jobs.

These five men represent some of the most powerful business leaders in contemporary Canada. Yet Conference Board of Canada economists, who do not earn their living in the marketplace, accuse these most successful of our corporate leaders of "sentiment and emotion," of being "commercially xenophobic." These protected employees, who rarely leave their cloistered offices in Ottawa, hide behind the Conference Board to accuse a few Canadian businesses leaders who do well around the world of suffering from "fear of foreigners." They argue with a certain glee that foreign owners are better for Canada than Canadian owners.

... The economists in the Ministry of Finance use almost the same numbers and makes reassuring sounds about head offices, without analyzing the type of head office and what they do or do not contain. They reveal no understanding of economic strategy - the sort of strategy used by other countries. They use the old concept of foreign direct investment, which does not differentiate between real investment - that which works to create wealth - versus buying out fully developed corporations - or entire sectors - in which the purchase implies no investment in wealth creation. In fact, the buyer usually uses the wealth of the company bought out to finance his taking control. Often the buyers then treat the company like a car wrecking yard - they cut it up and sell off the pieces that can make them quick money. When you read the assertions of the finance ministry thinkers over foreign investment or corporate headquarters growth, it is as if you are dealing with the brain dead. Strong words? Not at all. The strong words are those of economists in positions of influence who refuse to think. For example, although the figures are available, they make nothing of the difference between takeovers and new investment. Approximately 97 percent of what they call foreign investment is for takeovers; approximately 3 percent is for real new investment.

What is frightening is that Canada's economic policies are largely shaped from the ideas and advice of Ministry of Finance economists.

Here endeth the lesson. God help us all.

Lisa Raitt's Nuclear Yard Sale

My husband studied physics engineering at McMaster University, and worked at the accelerator lab there as a nuclear safety technician. So he knows his nukes.

He's yelling at the TV right now.

(more later)

Linda Keen and Some Actual Scientists Weigh In on Chalk River

The most interesting thing I found about this article was not so much Linda Keen saying "I told you so" about the slow death of the Chalk River NRU, but the perspective she and others have on the now-mothballed MAPLE reactors - and why they think they still might be salvaged.

A project to build two isotope-producing reactors called the Maples to replace the aging NRU was cancelled a year ago when AECL could not solve a design flaw in the cores of the proposed reactors that would make them more prone to a meltdown. At that time, the infrastructure to house the cores had already been built.

Ms. Keen said she was told the Maples had problems in 2001, when she arrived at the CNSC.

“One of my staff who has since retired said, ‘You know, we are going to be bringing out the cement machines to fill that in,'” she said.

“The fact that it took seven years to decide [to scrap it] and many millions of dollars is because the AECL engineers tried their hardest to make it work. But the CNSC had really great physicists – and still has, I believe – and the CNSC said, ‘No, it is an inherently flawed design.'”

I tend to view the world through the lens of whatever book I happen to be reading, which at the moment is "Voltaire's Bastards" by John Ralston Saul. I admit to being a bit out of my depth with this one, having no background in philosophy whatsoever (I knew Voltaire was French...), but I read that last paragraph and instantly recognized the work of rational technocrats who truly believe that no problem cannot be solved through the application of hard work and a well thought-out plan - even if that plan is based on a faulty premise and the results are demonstrably catastrophic.

This is the same mindset that had kept the U.S. fighting unwinnable wars for the past five decades and has kept our leaders committed to the notion that Friedman-esque free market capitalism is the best way to run an economy, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I thought of all this as I envisioned these doggedly determined engineers slogging away at their project, all the while assuming that the problem somehow lay in the execution and not the design. And, of course, the government bureaucrats prodding them along saying, "You can't stop now - we have too much invested!"

Meanwhile, the actual scientists are looking at this problem and are stating what seems obvious to us non-technocrats:

But nuclear-medicine specialists are questioning why AECL and the government walked away from the project without a contingency plan.

Robert Atcher, the New Mexico-based president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, said doctors are asking “Well, they've built the infrastructure, why don't they consider using some other reactor design?”

A committee struck by the U.S. National Research Council to examine ways of producing medical isotopes without highly enriched uranium – which the Americans fear could be used to build bombs – suggested in a recent report using a different kind of core for the Maples.

Thomas Ruth, a senior research scientist at the British Columbia Cancer Agency and TRIUMF – Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics – was also a member of that committee. He said the decision to walk away from the Maples was probably tied to political and business issues.

“To the non-expert, it looks like a solution,” Dr. Ruth said yesterday of the committee's recommendation to use different cores.

“They have the processing facility, they have the control room, the infrastructure is all there. What is involved with changing out the core? ... But government is supporting [AECL] in that decision. It's not like government is saying, ‘Hey, guys, get in there, fix it, find a solution.' They're not doing that.”

I'll have to add that to my list of questions for Lisa Raitt.

Yet Another Chalk River SNAFU

The Chalk River NRU is leaking again. It's been shut down, again - this time for at least a month. And once again, people are questioning why nothing has been done.

There are a few differences between this crisis and the one a year and a half ago. For one thing, the medical community at least is somewhat better prepared and has a contingency plan in place that should see them through for a little while. Maybe a week.

For another, this time it only took four days between the shutdown and discovery of the leak and its revelation to the public and (presumably) the government in the form of a quiet notice on the AECL website. But hey, it was a long weekend, right?

We also have a whole new cast of characters as well. Instead of Tony and Gary we now have Leona Aglukkaq and Lisa Raitt, both of whom have issued identical "Everything is just fine" statements buried in the back pages of their respective ministry websites.

Even after years of neglect and mismanagement, there are still solutions available to fix this mess. But none of them are pretty, or cheap, and none appear to have been actively pursued by the Federal government. One is to get serious about refurbishing the Chalk River NRU instead of continually patching it together with duct tape and baling wire while placing buckets under the leaks. But that would take money, and a commitment by the government to keep the place up.

Another is to try to salvage the now-mothballed Maple reactors. Unfortunately, that may prove to be even more difficult and expensive to accomplish since the problem there is a fundamental design flaw that would require starting again from scratch so they don't... you know... Chernobyl.

Possibly the best potential long-term solution is the use of particle accelerators to produce medical isotopes. Such a plan is actually in the works between MDS Nordion and the TRIUMF particle physics lab, but unfortunately its still in the feasibility study phase and wouldn't actually start producing isotopes for many years. The government could probably help things along, but since TRIUMF is funded through the National Research Council and the NRC is having $27.7 million cut from its budget over the next three years, it may take a while.

With the government apparently determined to maintain their hand's-off approach, it's hard to imagine how we might avoid the worst case scenario described by David Akin's unnamed government friend. That scenario would involve MDS Nordion pulling up stakes and moving their operations out of the country, possibly out of the continent, leaving 1,000 people in Kanata thrown out of work and the Canadian taxpayer on the hook for the decommissioning and clean-up of the Chalk River site.

Not a pretty picture at all.

BTW, when I asked Lisa Raitt about the government's plans for AECL a few months ago, she said that they were waiting to find out whether the Crown corporation would be getting the contract for Ontario's nuclear power expansion. Now that it appear they will, in fact, be taking on the $26 billion project, what does this do to the Federal government's planned "restructuring" of AECL? Will some of that contract money and/or money from the sale of assets be spent to fix Chalk River once and for all, or on the approximately $7 billion it's estimated it will cost to shut it down and clean it up? Or will the cash simply get tossed into the deficit hole as part of Flaherty's still undefined "revenues from asset sales"? And what exactly were the results of that strategic review of AECL that was supposedly completed months ago?

I'll be sending a note to Ms. Raitt with all of these questions. I'll let you know what she says.

The Plan for AECL: Private Profit, Public Liability

Those of us following the Chalk river / AECL saga have been anxiously awaiting a report from the National Bank of Canada regarding the crown corporation's disposition.

Actually, 'anxiously' might be an overstatement, since the report's recommendations were pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Ottawa urged to sell controlling interest in AECL

TORONTO, OTTAWA — The federal government should relinquish control of its flagship nuclear energy company but retain its problem-plagued Chalk River research facility, says a report commissioned by Ottawa.

The report by National Bank of Canada recommends that the federal government sell off at least a 51-per-cent interest in Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.'s commercial operations, according to sources who have been briefed on its contents.

Ottawa has refused to divulge the report's recommendations and has left the fate of AECL in limbo until the Ontario government decides whether to buy the Crown corporation's Candu technology or opt for its main rival, France's Areva Group.

...But even if AECL succeeds in winning the bid, the federal government, which has been heavily subsidizing the business since the 1950s, plans to restructure the company to make it more competitive.

The National Bank report recommends the government break up AECL, sources confirmed yesterday. The commercial venture, with new investors as majority owners, would handle reactor sales and service, while the government would retain ownership of the research and technology division, which runs AECL's Chalk River laboratories and the NRU reactor.

... National Bank recommends that the Chalk River site be excluded because AECL – and its government shareholder – face liabilities totalling about $7-billion to clean up waste at the Chalk River site.

“No company would want to buy that,” said Greenpeace energy campaigner and nuclear opponent Shawn-Patrick Stensil.

In other words, they're selling the store and keeping the dumpster out back.

I shouldn't be surprised, though. This is exactly what the government wanted to hear. When you don't believe in public ownership, it's easy to find ways to make public assets unprofitable so you can justify selling them off to your corporate buddies - and then call it being 'competitive'.

Welcome to Canada's new Free Market Nuclear Industry.