On reactions

On their face, the caveats and cost-sharing provisions in Sask Party's nuclear isotope reactor proposal could have been taken to reflect at least some acknowledgment that it wouldn't be a great idea for the province to say "cost and public opinion be damned!" in pushing ahead. But Bill Boyd has set the record straight, declaring that the Sask Party will be happy to funnel more money in and trying to minimize any possibility that public concerns might be worth addressing.

Here's Boyd's stunningly ill-advised comment on the question of cost:

Bill Boyd, Energy and Resources Minister in the Saskatchewan Party government, acknowledged to reporters that the provincial government itself could end up carrying more than the funding share outlined in the proposal submitted to the federal government last week and made public Tuesday.

Under the plan put forward by the U of S and the province, the federal government would pick up 75 per cent of the construction costs, with the province paying for the remainder. Saskatchewan also wants the federal government to pay 60 per cent of the operating costs, with the province covering 25 per cent and the rest coming from isotope sales and industrial science.

“I suppose that those are negotiable items that the federal government might want to negotiate. We think they are good starting points,” Boyd said at the legislature.

“They are our proposal going forward. The federal government may have some different ideas with regard to cost-sharing for these types of things.”

Boyd did say the project would be unlikely to go ahead without a significant financial commitment from the federal government.

So in effect, rather than reflecting a serious allocation of costs, the numbers in the proposal don't appear to be much more than a cap on what the federal government might be called on to contribute. And with Boyd publicly stating that the province is willing to put in more money if the federal government would like to spend less (and do we seriously need to ask whether that might be the case?), it's painfully clear that the final result won't be anything like the current proposal.

So what about Boyd's concurrent suggestion that the province would require a "significant financial commitment" from the federal government? On its face, the phrase is vague enough to allow for almost any federal contribution to be spun as being sufficient. But the context is even worse than the lack of content: given that one of the flimsy rationales for building a reactor in Saskatchewan is supposed to be the support of the provincial government, does anybody think the Sask Party would have a reasonable response to a federal suggestion that the proposed provincial share of the cost should be seen as meeting the standard? That would leave the province on the hook for $500 million-plus during construction and $40 million-plus during operation - which presumably serves the Sask Party's purpose of tying the hands of future provincial governments, but can't be seen as a plus for anybody else.

Meanwhile, Boyd's take on the proposal also involves both trying to predetermine the outcome of the UDP consultation process, and declaring that the Sask Party will ignore it if it doesn't like the results:

If the report of Dan Perrins, who chaired the public consultations, puts forward that public opinion is dead-set against a research reactor, it could derail the government’s proposal, said Boyd.

He added that he does not expect that to be the case, given the submissions in public hearings, but said that the public debate over the issue won’t necessarily be ended by Perrins’ report.

In case it wasn't clear enough how disingenuous the latter statement is, remember that the UDP hearings didn't often discuss an isotope reactor in detail precisely because the UDP report itself didn't consider an isotope reactor to be a high priority. In fact, it was only after the public hearings were done with that Wall declared that he wanted to push ahead with an isotope reactor. Which means that Boyd's attempt to paint the fact that large crowds turned up at the public meetings to oppose a reactor for power generation as support for an isotope reactor looks to be at best nonsensical, and at worst the height of dishonesty.

But then, Boyd apparently recognizes that there was some time after an isotope reactor became a topic of public conversation in which participants were able to make their concerns known. Hence his last attempt to hedge his bets by declaring that if the public managed to dodge his government's misdirection to make its concerns clear during the consultation process, the Sask Party still won't take that as ending its efforts to keep foisting nuclear development on the province.

Fortunately, there's still reason to hope that the federal government will actually compare the price tags of the different proposed projects and correctly conclude that the Sask Party's makes absolutely no sense based on the expected return on investment (which I'll deal with further in another post). But the fact that the Sask Party's point man on nuclear development doesn't seem to care about the cost involved and is eager to distort the public input received so far should signal that we still shouldn't expect any reasonable decision-making from within Wall's government.