Okay. I might have that wrong.
The report I'm referencing is the one that the government commissioned. It looked at two reactors around which we had much discussion here. There were three factors. One is, the report is eight years old. That's when this bill was constructed. It was constructed around an eight-year-old report.
Second, the two recommendations that came out of the report—there were only two—said that the government should look at Pickering, a place with a higher density of population, and it should also look at different types of accidents, more severe accidents than the one the examiners studied. They were given a direction to study two more isolated reactors under a limited set of conditions for a design accident, one that was imagined, as opposed to a more severe accident. The nuclear insurance group came before us, and under a question from my colleague, Mr. Rafferty—I'll repeat this, because I think this is important—the question was, “As a lawyer, would you think it would be fair to limit liability to an entity if an accident were to happen because of negligence and incompetence?” That is what we're dealing with here.
The answer from Mr. Walker—this is from the nuclear insurance companies themselves—is that “the classical answer would be no”. I guess there are no countervailing arguments in a nuclear environment. From the insurer's point of view, to Mr. Allen's point, when the concept that's brought up here about proven negligence and given the moment where you can have this limited liability, the insurance said no. They said that when you look at it this way, you shouldn't do this.
Our report is eight years old, and the government ignored the only two recommendations that came out of the report to study what may in fact happen. We're going to a question of proven negligence, in which the insurers themselves said that if you have proven negligence, the special circumstance that Bill C-20 creates should be modified. Our amendment is modifying that circumstance in saying that we're giving you special treatment as an industry because it's so hard to insure you guys flat out--that it can't be done. That was said by the nuclear industry themselves: without this type of legislation, you don't have a nuclear industry, period.
We're saying that's fine to an extent. We've argued already for a higher liability limit. There's disagreement on that. We're now saying that just in a point of proven negligence, should they still be afforded that special privilege of limited liability? We're saying sure, that it still is afforded to them, but charge them more for it, because they were negligent, and it was proven, and the insurance companies themselves who are involved said that would make sense.
Those are the arguments we're making around NDP-5. I think for all the points I raised, it makes sense. We submit ourselves to the vote of the committee.