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CHALK RIVER, ONT. AND OTTAWA — Health Minister Tony Clement vowed Wednesday that the Harper government would “get to the bottom” of the medical-isotope crisis set off by the shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor as questions swirled over when exactly Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn first learned of the problem.
“The Prime Minister was serious when he said he wanted to get to the bottom of this and [we] will get to the bottom of this,” Mr. Clement told reporters at a high-profile visit to the old reactor northwest of Ottawa designed to highlight resumption of operations at the facility, ordered last week by Parliament.
Mr. Lunn, the minister responsible for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), which operates the reactor, told the House of Commons last week that he learned of its prolonged closing on Dec. 3. Mr. Clement has said he found out about the shutdown two days later.
But Michael C. Burns, who quit last month as chair of AECL, has told The Globe and Mail that he and Mr. Lunn were first advised 11 days earlier, on Nov. 22, that a routine shutdown of the reactor was going to have to be extended because of regulatory problems raised by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The extended shutdown eventually led to a worldwide shortage of isotopes.
Standing in front of fuel storage tanks at the Chalk River plant Wednesday, federal Minister of Health Tony Clement speaks to reporters. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)
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Breaking several days of silence, Mr. Lunn's office Wednesday issued a statement questioning Mr. Burns's account of events. The minister's office said that on Nov. 22, an e-mail was sent to three senior departmental officials and to a seconded civil servant in the minister's office, presumably about problems at Chalk River. “There was no briefing,” it said.
Contents of the e-mail were not disclosed but the statement said that “it did not raise the issue of the production of medical isotopes.” None of the four recipients of that e-mail raised any concerns about the e-mail “nor did the information get communicated to the Minister until Minister Lunn learned about this issue on December 3, 2007.”
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said that if Mr. Burns is right, then Mr. Lunn deserves to lose his job in the cabinet.
“The Prime Minister should fire this guy,” Mr. Dion said in an interview from Iqaluit, where he is on a trip to the Far North.
“If his minister lied to him [Mr. Harper] or lied to Canadians, this is very serious,” he added. “For 10 days, the minister was passive and inactive” as the crisis grew.
In Chalk River, Mr. Clement sidestepped the questions about when Mr. Lunn was apprised of the crisis and refused to blame his colleague for the mess.
When reporters pressed him about whether he had taken Mr. Lunn to task for waiting so long to alert him that the reactor would be shut down for an extended period of time, Mr. Clement responded: “I can tell you that Gary Lunn has acted to ensure that the lines of communications are better and quicker and tighter. I have been working very closely with Gary Lunn since the situation became evident … I have found him to be a professional individual who is doing a job under difficult circumstances.”
Asked about Mr. Burns's allegation that the Conservative government had “clumsily” politicized his resignation, Mr. Clement stuck to his script.
“I don't want to get into ‘he said or she said,' I don't think that's what Canadians want to hear about.
“We are here today because what Canadians want to know is: Can someone who needs medical isotopes for cancer therapy or heart therapy, can they get the isotopes?”
The Society of Nuclear Medicine said this week that the incident would push the United States, which currently relies heavily on the Chalk River reactor for medical isotopes, to find its own domestic sources.
Mr. Clement said that's a decision for the Americans to make but he said that the Chalk River reactor is “the best in the world,” adding that it's not a simple process to find another one.
The government's handling of the issue has also caused consternation in the federal public service because of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's extraordinary attack on Linda Keen, chairman of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, whom he accused of acting on behalf of the previous Liberal government that appointed her.
Mel Cappe, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, the nation's top public servant, said he was worried about turning professional civil servants into partisan pawns.
“Public servants have no voice,” he said in an interview. “When they become political footballs, public servants can't defend themselves. They are loyal to the government of the day.”
