OTTAWA - Last January, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn gave a speech to the Economic Club of Toronto in which he touted the virtues of nuclear energy, including a new breed of next-generation reactors.
"As a nation of energy consumers we must be prepared to have an open discussion about nuclear power," Lunn said.
That was then, this is now.
An open discussion appears to be the last thing the minority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is prepared to have when it comes to an issue that, in Australia, is now being called the N-word.
That's because a developing new international nuclear club reopens the politically radioactive subjects of proliferation and nuclear waste.
More than a month after senior Canadian officials took part as observers in a Vienna meeting to discuss the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, the Prime Minister's Office is refusing to permit cabinet ministers to speak publicly about the U.S.-led initiative.
Requests for a media interview with Lunn -- specifically to discuss the pros and cons for Canada of the partnership as spelled out in Vienna -- were passed along, unanswered, to Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier.
After checking with Harper's PMO, Bernier's office ended up issuing the following statement in lieu of an interview:
"Canada has been invited to join this international partnership. The government is carefully considering this invitation before making a decision, which will be announced at a later date."
It was a brush-off with all the subtlety of a palm held up to a camera lens.
Last week, Foreign Affairs finally approved a partial release of documents under an Access to Information request that was made by The Canadian Press in January.
The 139 pages of briefing notes are so heavily censored that single-sentence paragraphs under the heading "The Issue" are uniformly blacked out. So is any discussion of policy implications of the GNEP for Canada, and even many of the proposed "talking points."
All the documents really show is:
- A series of meetings between Canadian and U.S. officials have taken place on both sides of the border to discuss the GNEP and other nuclear issues. There have also been trilateral discussions among Canada, Australia and the Americans.
- Briefing documents have been prepared on the subject for the prime minister himself.
- Another bilateral meeting with Australia was initially proposed for this autumn.
One of the documents also reveals that Harper and Australian Prime Minister John Howard discussed the GNEP "at length" during a meeting in Canada in May 2006.
Last month, after The Canadian Press reported that Harper would be secretly discussing the GNEP during a trip to Australia for a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders, his office issued a furious denial in letters to media outlets.
Sandra Buckler, Harper's communications director, wrote of the story's "unjustified premise that this government is secretly holding talks about the GNEP."
Buckler noted that following his May 2006 meeting with Howard, Harper publicly stated that Canada and Australia planned to work closely together on the nuclear proposal.
Yet in the newly released government documents, most characterizations of the 2006 bilateral -- even partial sentences -- are blacked out.
Australia formally joined the GNEP in September and the ensuing silence from the Howard government on the agreement has become a major issue during the general election campaign currently taking place there.
Harper himself responded to a single media question on the GNEP during the APEC summit in Australia, intriguingly suggesting that the commercial benefits must be weighed against nuclear non-proliferation concerns.
No follow-up questions are permitted during the prime minister's media availabilities and, since that date, no ministers have been permitted to expand on Harper's cryptic observations.
It all raises the question: just why can't the Harper government openly discuss the benefits and pitfalls of such an important international and domestic policy question?
The nuclear industry contributes approximately $5 billion a year to Canada's economy and 20,000 direct jobs. Uranium exports are worth $600 million annually and "growing quickly," according to government reports.
The proposed GNEP could impact on all this economic activity and Canada's industry leaders say they're keen for this country to take a leadership role in the partnership's development.
The GNEP was initially proposed by President George W. Bush in February 2006 as a "cradle-to-grave" system for dealing with nuclear waste by reprocessing it, while promoting and disseminating a new generation of nuclear reactor technology to lessen dependency on fossil fuels. It was touted as an anti-proliferation initiative, although the GNEP reverses a three-decade U.S. policy barring the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
Canada, the world's biggest uranium exporter and a country with a long, taxpayer-subsidized nuclear technology industry, appeared to be ideally positioned for charter membership in the GNEP. Internal government documents from 2006 expressed enthusiastic support for Canadian involvement.
But the partnership, as proposed, has at least two observable sticking points from a Canadian perspective:
- It proposes that fuel-exporting countries take back nuclear waste for reprocessing and disposal.
- It wants to develop a new reactor system that, at least on paper, does not involve heavy water reactors or Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's massively subsidized CANDU technology.
A public opinion poll commissioned last February by Natural Resources Canada suggests both those issues are a tough sell.
The Ipsos-Reid survey found general support -- 71 per cent -- among Canadians for nuclear power remaining as a part of the energy supply, but considerably less support in Quebec (46 per cent).
That's one broad consideration for a Conservative government fixed on making a breakthrough in Quebec.
But the survey suggested deeper concerns that go to the heart of the GNEP proposal.
A large majority of Canadians, 82 per cent, said no new nuclear plants should be built until the problem of dealing with nuclear waste is resolved. Again, concern was highest in Quebec.
An even bigger majority, 85 per cent, said it's important that the nuclear industry in Canada be controlled and owned by Canadians. And seven in ten said any new nuclear facilities must be based on Canadian-developed technology.
The GNEP - which already has 16 countries signed on including Australia, China, France, Japan and Russia - poses potential challenges to these heartfelt preconditions of Canadian public support.
And, as an international plan proposed by an unpopular U.S. president dealing with the charged subject of nuclear waste, the whole issue gives government critics a bulls-eye the size of a barn door, said one energy policy consultant from Ottawa.
"It's a difficult technological issue that involves nuclear waste . . . . Every step of the way is controversial," said the consultant, whose government business makes him reluctant to speak on the record.
The consultant understands the Harper government's reticence, but believes the Canadian public should start getting informed about a critical policy question in an age of curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
If nuclear energy is indeed part of the solution, what is to be done with the nuclear waste?
The whole issue of reprocessing and re-using spent fuel is fraught with controversy - which is the reason most western governments had followed the U.S. lead of banning the practice since the 1970s.
Here's why.
Most spent fuel from current nuclear power generation is so highly radioactive that anyone who tried to steal the material would be fatally poisoned almost immediately. The waste provides its own security perimeter.
Reprocessing to use up all that unspent energy makes the waste less deadly, but potentially more portable.
"What's safer?" asked the consultant. "Depends on how you look at it."
"Do you run (the fuel) once through the cycle and it sits in the pond until we figure out where to bury it?"
Or, he asked, do you "make it a little bit more possible for some nutcase to come in with a suicide team and steal plutonium and bring it back - they all die - but he's got plutonium and can still build a bomb?
"Those are crazy scenarios, but that is what people think about when we talk about nuclear proliferation."
It's the kind of profound conundrum that makes a minority government in constant election readiness as skittish as a cat.
"There's no pay-off for the Conservatives in this right now," said the consultant.
"They're not going to get elected on something like this. They're only going to get defeated."
The black-out points
When does government censorship of released documents cross the line from protecting national interests to farce?
Blacking out year-old "talking points" -- the pasteurized lines prepared for public consumption in case a minister is asked about an issue -- would appear to be one likely threshold.
The Canadian Press made a request under the Access to Information Act last January seeking government briefing materials on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.
Among the 139 heavily censored pages produced last week by the Department of Foreign Affairs are a number of old documents that end with "talking points."
In every instance, some of the points previously prepared for public consumption (but never publicly delivered) have been blacked out.
"Canada is very pleased with bilateral consultations with Australia on uranium and nuclear issues in Canberra on Nov. 20 (2006)," begins one set of talking points, dated Feb. 20, 2007.
"Our officials agreed to seek a trilateral meeting with U.S. officials . . . ," begins the next point, before blacking out the rest of the line.
The entire next "talking point" is black.
A document dated Feb. 10, 2006, cites five talking points and two "Responsive Only" points, prepared in case of specific questions from media. The responsive points are blacked out.
Following an April 12, 2006, meeting on the GNEP between Canadian and American officials, 11 talking points were prepared by Foreign Affairs officials. A year and half later, eight of those points are blacked out.
The latest release of documents to The Canadian Press arrived last week, the same day that a national newspaper detailed statistics showing that the public release of government information is being choked off under the Conservative government.
The Globe report said the share of access requests that were released in full in 2006-07 was 23.1 per cent, down five percentage points from 2005-06 when the Liberals were mostly in power.
The Conservative government was also found to be increasingly using Section 15(1) of the Access to Information Act, which protects information that "could reasonably be injurious to the conduct of international affairs."
This section was used to black out talking points in the GNEP documents.
