National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 51

NATIONAL POST, SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2011 financialpost.com 17 ii i) ai i i ii A inn i yp i JL Jl wVk-LVjiiLJ Jl The problems with nuclear support from both right and left Nuclear power extremes COUNTERPOINT Fury of poor would erupt without unions Lawrence Solomon at Ken Lewenza liprp'c nn 1miHt urtiprp thp crlnhal financial rricic nf I 2008, and the resulting worldwide recession, started. I It was in the private sector. First in finance, then it JL. spread to the "real" economy. We can argue about the precise causes of the crisis, and about whether subsequent policy responses were appropriate or not But there can be no argument about where the whole problem started: squarely with business.

This makes it incredibly ironic that as Canada and the rest nf trip wnrlrl arc still rrawlinc nnt nf thp rpcpssinnarv murk wp ..1 a i .1 a luuciu ui viiiiui aiiiicu agduiai uauc uuiuua ulcus iiiuic aggressive than anything since FDR and the New Deal. The stripping of collective bargaining rights from public-sector workers in Wisconsin has captured headlines. But the same BLOOMBERG NKVV'S FILES The turbine hall of the Bruce nuclear power plant in Tiverton, Ont irrationally burden it with crippling regulations. This is wishful thinking, bereft of any evidence. Clear-eyed assessments, including ones from the right, such as those from the Washington-based think-tank, the Cato Institute, confirm that nuclear power fails the test of the marketplace, regardless of environmental regulations.

Attempts to minimize the economic drawbacks of nuclear by building ever-larger complexes to gain economies of scale led to unintended consequences. Nuclear-dependent jurisdictions are far more vul- designed to run flat out, 24 hours a day, making them unable to efficiently ramp up when needed during peak daylight periods, or to throttle back in the middle of the night As a result, nuclear systems tend to generate great surpluses in the middle of the night, giving governments cause to remake the the citizenry. In Ontario, one of the world's most nuclearized jurisdictions, the province's Procrustean Environmental Commissioner advocates lifestyles changes by setting off-peak rates at one-third to one-fifth the daytime rate, whatever is required to convince people of the need to do their laundry and dishes at times convenient for nuclear power. Neither is nuclear benign environmentally. As with other forms of generation, mining the ore it uses as fuel degrades the environment.

And once the fuel has become highly radioactive, nuclear entails health and safety hazards more severe than those faced by workers at other generating facilities. Then there is the gravest environmental danger of all nuclear war. Many of the world's civilian programs in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Argentina under the Junta, Romania under Ceausescu, North Korea under the Kims, South Africa under apartheid, and now Iran under Ahmadinejad have been covers for illicit bomb making. By believing that nuclear power has legitimacy in commercial power applications, as do Monbiot and other recent converts to the pro-nuclear cause, the converts are helping provide cover for tyrannical builders of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. But more importantly, the left-leaning converts are destroying the One Great Reason for nuclear power's survival after a half-century of economic losses the rock-solid and irrational conviction among those on the right that the anti-nuclear movement is no more than a pinko plot.

Once the right sees itself in bed with the left, it will open its eyes, examine the nuclear books afresh, and phase out the subsidy-sucking nuclear power industry. By then the chief reason for the left's recent embrace of nuclear its equally irrational conviction that global warming represents a grave threat will also have subsided. Financial Post LawrenceSolomonnextcity.com I Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers. It's becoming increasingly common for environmentalists to be pro-nuclear the list now includes the U.K.'s James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia concept; the United States' Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog; Canada's Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace founder; and Stephen Tindale, former executive director of Greenpeace U.K. Most recently, U.K.

green journalist George Monbiot announced his conversion to nuclear power, claiming that the modest harm caused by the Fukushima accident in Japan tipped the balance for him. Occasional releases of radioactivity from nuclear reactors may well represent acceptable risks, as these environmentalists, the United Nations and other official agencies have come to believe, and as most on the political right have always believed. But even if nuclear accidents cannot inflict death and destruction on a massive scale, as I too believe, this hardly transforms nuclear power into a desirable way to generate electricity. By any reasonable measure, nuclear fails on economic, social, and environmental grounds. Nuclear reactors have been an uneconomic technology, prematurely brought to market, from the get go.

Despite hopes that they would provide power too cheap to meter, the Eisenhower administration learned that nuclear failed the test of the marketplace in 1957, in a report produced for the federal government's Atomic Energy Commission. France the most go-hung nuclear electricity country in the world thought it could overcome nu-clear's economic shortcomings and failed: The financial results of its investments in nuclear were "catastrophic," according to the president of Electricite de France, the state utility. The U.K.'s British Energy, the only privately owned nuclear generating company to ever operate in a competitive environment, went bankrupt, despite having inherited the best reactors in the U.K. fleet after the country's state-owned monopoly was broken up and privatized. In fact, no nuclear electricity generating company has ever operated without government subsidy, and given the state of the technology, none will any time soon.

Nuclear power's champions, mostly those on the right of the political spectrum, argue that nuclear would be competitive, if only those on the left didn't crusade is underway in many other jurisdictions. Dozens of U.S. states are pondering measures to limit or prohibit union rights, across increasingly far-flung swaths of the economy. Never mind that most of the world (including Canada, since the historic Supreme Court Health Services decision in 2007) considers collective bargaining to be a fundamental human right, and hence many of these new U.S. laws would be immediately struck down.

(The United States, in contrast, never ratified most United Nations conventions on labour rights, and its constitutional protections for union rights are weak.) Yet the politics of this anti-union tide, if not its precise policies, are certainly bubbling up here in Canada, too. Several mayors (such as Toronto's Rob Ford) have declared outright war on unions. Provincial politicians like Ontario's Conservative leader Tim HiiHnV fuhn Vine alrpaHv naintpH lnhniir arhitratnrc ac P11K. lie Enemv No. 11 aim to fan the anti-union fires, for maximum electoral gain.

If the Harper Conservatives should win a major- .1 i r. .11 iiy 111 uie current election, i luiiy expect a similar lune iu iiueci labour policymaking at the federal level. Once the right sees itself in bed with the left, it will open its eyes riow is it, tnen, that the wake 01 the most spectacular tail- ure 01 private enterprise in ho years, tne most pointed locus ot populist animosity has been the very organizations that were formed to protect common working people against the excesses of private enterprise? wny wouian populist jealousy De directed against DanKers or nerable to blackouts and the disruptions they cause, for example, because a single event can take down a substantial portion of an electricity grid. The Fukushima accident at a complex of six reactors caused rotating blackouts throughout Japan, in part because radioactive emissions from one stricken reactor hampered repair efforts at others, preventing repair crews from containing the accident To make nuclear plants and their high capital costs less money-losing, they are We'll all lose if this crucial channel for their frustrations is closed off Russia a natural partner for Canada David Emerson CEOs, whose gluttony dwarfs the salaries and perks of any unionized workers? After all, Canada's big six banks alone paid out a record $9-billion in bonuses last year, while other Canadians struggled to make ends meet. Strangely instead, it's the humble garbage-collector on the receiving end of the vitriol.

Don't accept for a moment that this is because bankers' bonuses and CEO fortunes are determined by the "market," while union wages reflect some kind of "distortion." There's no bigger distortion than someone anyone who takes in eight or even nine figures in a single year, and whose behaviour is perverted by the all-encompassing drive to boost the share price, at any cost. More likely, the misdirection of modern populism reflects the business-friendly power of media and think-tanks, which glorify highly paid executives while demeaning those who perform the more humble tasks that really make our economy go round. All this finger pointing against unions is misplaced and dangerous. It's misplaced: unions did not cause the financial crisis or the recession, unions did not cause deficits, unions did not cause $1.25 per litre gasoline. Corporations did all those things.

The finger pointing is dangerous: an orchestrated effort to vilify and scapegoat any identifiable group of people, and to I take away their rights, justified by economic tough times. This fundamentally undermines democracy; it paves the way to the marginalization and repression of other vulnerable groups. Unions play a constructive and valuable economic role. That rnlp is inst as imrmrtant diirinB' times nf crisis as during timps nf vi- lion people and trading blocs containing hundreds of millions. Competitive success is about establishing and building durable Canadian roots and managerial leadership of tightly integrated networks of commerce and value creation that span the globe.

Anything less is vulnerable to emerging competitors. Notwithstanding high-profile examples like Research in Motion, Canada currently accounts for an extremely small percentage (about 2 or 3 and declining) of the world's innovation. And we are relatively poor when it comes to commercializing leading edge science. Our future as a knowledge-based economy will increasingly come from science, technologies and research related to the core economic drivers we love to dispar- 1 brant growth. We limit the erosion of wages during times of mass Large Arctic presence is just one point we have in common energy; transportation technologies and approaches adapted to the environmental and ecosystem fragility of the North are very specific examples of low-hanging fruit that can be harvested through scientific and technological collaboration.

Joint initiatives between universities, research institutions and among private-sector organizations Could put both countries at the leading edge internationally in areas vital to our economic future. But we need government-to-government framework agreements to define the modes of collaboration, deal with human mobility issues, security issues, funding mechanisms and so on. If government does not put the foundation in place, it probably will not happen. Russia will soon be a member of the World Trade Organization, which will reduce the risks and uncertainty of trade and investment for Canadians and Canadian companies. With a framework in place that creates greater certainty and a fair basis for dispute resolution, companies in forestry, energy and mining from both countries will have endless opportunities to trade and to combine, often through joint ventures, to create highly advanced supply chains and value networks that can compete with the world's best The Russian economy is expected to be among the most rapidly growing in the world over the next 50 years.

Governance and political risk remain, but Russian engagement with stable, democratic and non-imperial countries like Canada can only help. It's time to go beyond the global value networks of professional hockey to forge a deeper, long-lasting partnership with Russia. Both countries can reach a higher plateau of knowledge-based competitive success. And, just maybe, we can develop co-operative approaches to managing the Arctic in a more peaceful, more economic and more environmentally sound way. Financial Post I David Emerson is a former federal Minister of Foreign Affairs Industry and International Trade.

In this era of galloping globalization, geopolitical shifts and game-changing economic challenges, Canada has no choice but to develop much stronger economic linkages beyond North America. The primacy of the North American partnership, and the need to strengthen it, I believe, is a foregone conclusion. But our asymmetric dependence on the United States is a major risk exposure that must be balanced by new and more vibrant relationships with other countries. The maturation of linkages with Europe is underway and urgently needed breakthroughs in the Asia-Pacific region are at least on the radar. But there are other unique opportunities as we develop a strategy for Canadian prosperity in the years ahead.

A more substantial, committed and forward-looking relationship with Russia is a case in point. With a population of 140 million, the world's largest national land mass, the world's largest Arctic presence, and a wealth of natural resource and agricultural potential, Russia is a natural partner for Canada. Some might say we're too similar; that we are more competitors than collaborators. But in today's world of global networks of value creation that is no longer the case. Virtually every product we buy today has significant elements of value originating elsewhere.

The research, the embedded technology, the innovation, the manufacture, the skilled labour and the components will inevitably be drawn from around the world. Even Canadian exports of goods and services often come back home embodied in imports. Similarly, market scale to enable efficient production, distribution, marketing, branding and finance now depend on worldwide reach and commercial integration. Neither Russia nor Canada has the market size to achieve competitive success in a world of countries with more than a bil unemployment, thus stopping deflation. We negotiate innovative 1 provisions, like work-sharing and early retirements, which share the pain and preserve needed jobs until the recovery comes.

We i boost productivity by reducing turnover, facilitating lifelong learn-1 ing, and forcing employers to treat labour as a valuable resource I (rather than a cheap, just-in-time, throwaway input). Above all, we push both employers and governments to act with a measure of fairness in the labour market, promoting equality, inclusion and hope. No society without free and brant unions is truly democratic. And no economy without widespread collective bargaining has ever attained truly mass prosperity. Imagine if the Scott Walkers of the world had their way, and unions were somehow banned altogether.

The non-union work- ers at the local fast food outlet would still be making minimum wage, with no benefits, no security, and no pension. But a cru- rial, constructive channel through which their hopes and frus- trations could be directed, has now have been closed off. Who knows where and how the simmering fury of exploited, poor people would then bubble up? Thoughtful opinion leaders in Canada's business community, 't therefore, should think twice before throwing in their lot with this anti-union bandwagon. We can work together to build pros- perity, fairness and innovation. Or we can expend all our energy and creativity in a fight to the end, over whether unions are even allowed to exist.

Even if business was to eventually win that fight, it's our whole society that would lose. 1. i I Ken Lewenza is national president of the Canadian Auto Workers union. This commentary is excerpted from remarks delivered March 29 to a policy roundtable at the CD. Howe Institute in Toronto.

age natural resources and agriculture. "Hewing wood and drawing water" has gone high tech, while high tech is com-moditizing at breakneck speed. When you think of Canada's alternative economic futures in this way, the potential for teaming with Russia, and expanding commercial and technological linkage, begins to resonate. Research collaboration around Arctic stewardship, natural resource opportunities and challenges, environmental imperatives, transportation and logistics, northern agriculture in a warming climate all offer potential for a powerful partnership. And it's more than wishful thinking.

Livestock breeding and crop selection in a northern climate; space and GPS technologies with numerous global monitoring applications; nuclear co-operation with applications in critical areas of medicine, computing and low-carbon.