Janice Harvey
January 23, 2008
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has fired Linda Keen as president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Notice of her dismissal was delivered the evening before she was to testify before a House of
Commons committee on the medical isotopes affair. Her offense, it appears, was that she took her job to protect Canadians from the inherent dangers of nuclear facilities too seriously.
I have just read Linda Keen’s Jan. 8, 2008 letter (pre-dismissal) to Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn, and the lengthy appendix detailing the Nuclear Safety Commission’s record of the NRU affair from 2005 onward. Given this record, I expect Mr. Harper would have great difficulty convincing a judge that Ms. Keen has been derelict in her duty. The issues are much too complex to go into here, but here are some highlights.
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), which runs the Chalk River nuclear facility, informed the Nuclear Safety Commission in 1996 that the 1957 NRU reactor would be out of service by December 2005. With
the replacement MAPLE reactors nowhere near completed by then, this didn’t happen. In July 2006, the Nuclear Safety Commission extended the NRU licence to 2011 based on assurances by AECL that several
safety upgrades had been completed.
On Nov. 5, 2007, Nuclear Safety Commission staff discovered inadvertently that one of the critical safety upgrades had, in fact, not been made. Rather than apply for a licence amendment, which it could have done, AECL made the decision to extend the reactor’s routine maintenance shut-down scheduled for Nov. 19 in order to complete this safety upgrade.
At a regularly scheduled Nuclear Safety Commission public meeting on Dec. 6, AECL reported on its plans to get the reactor into compliance with its licence. There was no request for a licence amendment. The
very next day, however, AECL informed the Nuclear Safety Commission that they wanted a licence amendment based on a revised safety evaluation. The Nuclear Safety Commission asked for more technical
information to support the request, and it was promised by Dec. 13.
Meanwhile, the minister intervened. In a Dec. 8 conference call with Keen, the minister requested that she immediately convene the Commission to permit the restart of the NRU. Keen replied that the
Nuclear Safety Commission had not yet received from AECL a licence amendment application and safety documentation as procedures required. On Dec. 9, Lunn’s deputy minister informed Keen that she would be
receiving a letter from Lunn and Health Minister Tony Clement requesting that she “show flexibility” in balancing reactor safety with “patient impact.” One day later, Dec. 10, the letter was received.
That same day, the Department of Justice withdrew legal services from the Nuclear Safety Commission without notice. The Deputy Minister of Justice explained that “there is a potential conflict, real or perceived, between the interests of the Commission and those of the Government, and hence it is essential for the Commission to have independent legal advice in respect of all matters pertaining to the shut-down of the NRU reactor.” A subsequent letter stated, the department is “currently advising the Government of Canada in relation to [the NRU shutdown] and we are therefore not in a position to provide the CNSC with legal advice to the same matter.”
With this act, the Harper government essentially declared war on Linda Keen, signalling its disregard for the procedures in place to ensure the safety of Canadian nuclear facilities and disrespect for the professional credentials of the Nuclear Safety Commission.
This forced the Nuclear Safety Commission to hire independent counsel uninformed on a very complicated file, not only to deal with AECL’s licence amendment application but now to defend itself and its
independence against whatever government action was obviously brewing.
On Dec. 11, legislation was passed ordering the reactor to be fired up without the safety upgrades, taking the NRU matter out of the Nuclear Safety Commission’s hands entirely. The next shoe to fall was Lunn’s
Dec. 27 threat to fire Keen, a threat that was carried out last week.
From my read of this, it seems the Nuclear Safety Commission’s only fault was to take AECL at its word in 2006 that the safety upgrades had been completed on the NRU reactor. I trust the regulator will be
more rigorous in monitoring compliance in the future.
A bigger issue is the willingness of this government to interfere in independent processes meant to ensure credibility and accountability.
Clearly, Stephen Harper fails to appreciate such attributes of a democracy, preferring instead the brute force approach to getting his way.
Canadians can only hope Linda Keen sues the government for wrongful dismissal. Otherwise, it will likely get away with this egregious abuse of the checks and balances within a democratic system.
Janice Harvey is a freelance writer and a long-time director of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. She can be reached by e-mail at waweig@nbnet.nb.ca. Her column appears on Wednesday.
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