Hon. Céline Hervieux-Payette:

Honourable senators, I must first tell you that I received a warm welcome from my colleagues on the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. I would like to thank them for their patience. It was a pleasure working with them, notably on the two files that I would like to discuss briefly.

The first is the issue of credit unions that have become banks.

As Vice-Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, I can say that we would certainly have liked to have studied the 128 pages in this section that were part of the bill's 900 pages.

I would also like to mention that there was no consultation in Quebec before this bill was introduced. And while Quebec's Desjardins Group might not be upset about this, I think that all of the players should have been consulted, out of respect for the public. It is not simply about one institution; it is about a major player in Quebec. Small groups in certain parts of the country were the only ones consulted, and parliamentarians from Quebec did not hear anything about this bill before it was introduced.

My main criticism has to do with the fact that were no consultations, and also, as my colleague mentioned, that perhaps another financial instrument has been created that does not necessarily meet the current needs of the industry.

I remind senators that the objective of a cooperative movement is the community; it is about having good financial advice is close to home. A Canadian institution that can operate across the country, a near bank, is rather far from embodying the spirit of cooperatives. I simply regret that legislative procedure was not respected.

The other section I worked on with my colleagues was that dealing with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. I still wonder why the government is ordering public opinion polls at the cost of $100,000. An in-depth poll was conducted last summer, in 2009, which showed that three out of four Canadians wanted this corporation to remain a Crown corporation because it has served Canadians well for 50 years. Similarly, seven out of ten Canadians did not want it to be privatized. In addition, seven Canadians out of ten were worried about what kinds of safety measures a private company would have. They are quite right, because even if nuclear energy were to become more popular again, we could not forget the two tragic events at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl that cooled down political leaders, especially in OECD countries. We all saw the consequences and will remember these disasters.

Although Canada has continued to work in this field, certainly not at the same pace, we must remember that Canada is the world's largest supplier of uranium, the primary material used in nuclear reactors. Canadian technology uses natural uranium, while most other technologies use enriched uranium, which can be more of a threat to national security.

I would just like to read from the testimony of a professor from the École Polytechnique; he is more qualified than I am. Professor Guy Marleau, director of the Institut de Génie Nucléaire at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, recipient of the W.B. Lewis medal from the Canadian Nuclear Society, told us he has done physics research on reactors for 27 years. I think he knows the sector quite well. He wanted to enlighten us.

We received the top men of science — for there are more men in this field than women — and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the witnesses who appeared before the committee and dropped their summer plans in order to speak to us. I must say that my colleagues and I greatly appreciated their presentations.

We learned that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited won a Nobel Prize for its research in nuclear science. It is a cutting-edge industry that is recognized worldwide. AECL also created an original technology: the CANDU. This reactor has proven its worth over the past 30 years with a performance factor of 90 per cent — those who know technology know that very few technologies provide that kind of performance — with strength and versatility in the use of different fuels.

We were also told that AECL offers support to the entire Canadian industry — we had representatives from the entire Canadian industry, which involves roughly 70,000 people — in the development of cutting-edge nuclear technologies such as food irradiation, neutron radiography, radioactive material detection and national security, radio isotopes and radiation standards.

We are dealing with an extremely broad field and the research done by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited is valuable to the entire scientific community. In Quebec, we have a laboratory at the École Polytechnique, and there are labs in British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario as well.

But the attitude of our colleagues opposite saddens me. When the operations and business practices of an enterprise are to be restructured, there is no need to discriminate and especially not to make up stories. We must remember nevertheless that AECL recorded a deficit one year. That was last year and it was directly related to the refurbishment of the Point Lepreau reactor. Why? Because negotiations are still ongoing and it is not up to the province of New Brunswick to pay for all the expenses and all the research and development that will be useful for the 25 other similar reactors in the world. Discussions must be held and I agree with Senator Murray when he says that there are probably some discussions and negotiations now that AREVA is involved. I believe that the Pointe Lepreau nuclear reactor must be started up and that the work must be completed. We should realize that, in Finland, AREVA is currently experiencing delays of one and a half years for similar work, with $300,000 in overruns as well.

When innovating in this area, adjustments are always required to mesh the design with the reality in the field.

The Conservatives cannot forget about the frigate contracts that were supposed to cost $300 million at the start and ended up costing $900 million each. Perhaps changes in the design plan were ordered.

I would also like to talk about the most embarrassing aspect of this bill. The government is failing to do what any private Canadian company must do when it wants to participate in this type of transaction, that is, sell off all its assets. In sections 409 and 410, The Toronto Stock Exchange states that disclosure is required if there are changes in share ownership that may affect control of the company. Normally the terms of reference are also given and the shareholders must be aware of them.

In the case of AECL, all Canadians are the shareholders. But they do not know the terms of reference in the contracts given to the Rothschild financial advisors. They were not made aware of the terms of reference in the contract given to the National Bank for restructuring. We are in the dark. We do not know the future of this company. They are proposing a bill, asking for a blank cheque, as some senators have said. It is anyone's race. We have no idea what will happen to the company. It could be just about anything because usually, when there is a good plan and we know which direction we are headed, there is transparency and information is simply made available. But in the case of public companies that are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the important information about prices, share costs, the number of shares to be traded, the terms and conditions and when it is all to happen — all of that should be made public. It is obligatory under stock exchange rules. So why does the Canadian government not have the decency to follow the same rules for a company as large as AECL?

I want to emphasize that this industry is made up of 165 Canadian companies. We are not talking about a small number of industries that are affected and that were not consulted. If this bill had been divided, as was the case with Petro-Canada, Air Canada and other companies, we could have heard from people whose daily lives were directly affected, and they could have told us how to proceed to best serve the interests of their industry, and how everyone could contribute.

I support the report of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. By removing part 18, we are telling the government: do your homework, hold public hearings and consult the industry. As parliamentarians, we must take action, because this is an important asset. Let us stop telling fairy tales about the alleged $8 billion invested over 60 years. Whether it is $8 billion or $16 billion discounted dollars, this money brought in $160 billion in tax revenue from employees working in this sector and from businesses that paid taxes during the entire period. We are far from a deficit here. There was just one year in the last five when AECL did not earn a profit. The Rothschild report shows that 2009 was the only year AECL did not make a profit.

When the Minister of Natural Resources, Mr. Paradis, was asked about the objective of the bill that he is responsible for, he replied that only the business side of AECL was at issue for the time being. What is the business side of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited? It is the construction and refurbishment of nuclear reactors. The research and development arm is responsible for the production of isotopes and the management of nuclear waste, and remains the responsibility of the government.

We must also consider the matter of risk transfer. We must stop propagating myths. It is difficult to know, for example, whether British Petroleum, a multinational that is much larger than AECL, will be able to survive after spending $3 billion without managing to staunch the flow of oil. If we were to have a Chernobyl tomorrow, no private corporation could survive. Those in the financial sector — I am referring to the syndicates that appeared before us—are prepared to invest in this corporation as long as the government is a partner and does not allow the company to be resold after being sold in part to the private sector, as long as there is a public-private partnership where some elements of the transaction would restrict the new corporation from divesting itself of all activities, and especially if an agreement were in place. All witnesses agreed that the Prime Minister had to be the lead salesman. I agree that the restructuring should be transparent and specific and that the details should be known to everyone.

I would like to close by saying that we have not been as generous to research and development in the nuclear industry as we have been to research and development in other sources of energy such as the oil sands. As far as the discovery of oil off Newfoundland is concerned, we are talking about tens of billions of dollars invested by Canadians.

We are all proud of that. We have also seen money invested in developing technologies for the oil sands project and still today we are granting subsidies to the oil industry.

The government's continuing activity in research and development in the nuclear industry would serve the interests of all Canadians. In Quebec, Hydro-Québec has agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on reconditioning a nuclear reactor, while 50 per cent of Ontario's electricity comes from nuclear reactors. I am certainly not in a conflict of interest. In Quebec, we are much more involved in hydroelectricity than in nuclear energy, but as a Canadian citizen and a mother of a daughter who is an engineer and physicist, I am standing up for our young people, for jobs of the future that will help our young people excel throughout the world. That is why I support my colleague's report. I want to thank all senators for the excellent work they have done on the rest of this legislation which, unfortunately from a budgetary point of view, probably had some good qualities, but became flawed with the introduction of a potpourri of legislation that had no business being there. It is a shame that our job as parliamentarians does not get the respect it deserves from the government.

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