Party of One (24 page)

After years of successive governments neglecting growing problems at the aging Chalk River facility, it looked like the NRU reactor might be down for a significant period of time. That would mean a gap in the world supply of medical isotopes and possibly major lawsuits. The Harper government opposed the shutdown but needed someone to blame and a reason for blaming that person that would resonate with the public. They chose Linda Keen and used the prospect of a deadly shortage of medical isotopes to bring her down.

The NRU reactor at Chalk River provided 50 percent of the world’s medical isotopes. But in order to lay the blame for the loss of this supply on Linda Keen, one major fact had to be obscured:
Linda Keen had never ordered the shutdown of the reactor at Chalk River; that decision was taken by AECL itself.
¹
After a shutdown for routine maintenance, the company had agreed, for safety reasons, that it would not restart the reactor before installing a second pump. But in early December, the company flip-flopped. The acting president of AECL contacted the vice-president of operations at the CNSC, informing him that, contrary to the commitment made by the company’s chief nuclear officer, AECL now intended to start the reactor with only one of the two licencemandated, backup pumps in place. He said that the change of plan was the result of pressure from the minister’s office, and claimed that he had met with both Lunn and his deputy, Cassie Doyle.

Two days later, on December 8, 2007, the minister himself called Linda Keen. It was a Sunday, and she was at home. In blunt terms, Lunn told her that she must agree to restart the reactor. Keen immediately knew that the minister had “crossed the line with an independent regulator.” Then Lunn told the regulator that he needed to go urgently to attend to another matter and abruptly ended the call. Keen later found out he had been summoned by the prime minister to explain the problem with the CNSC.

Shortly afterwards, Keen received a letter from both her own minister and the minister of health demanding that she solve the problem of the shutdown. She told them that the CNSC was working with AECL, “and AECL is aware of what they need to do”—meet their licence conditions by installing the second pump.

Realizing that Keen wouldn’t be pushed off the letter and spirit of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Control Act, the Harper government did an end run around her. Lunn and his deputy asked for an independent assessment of the safety of the NRU without the two pumps. The “independent” review of safety issues was carried out by former vice-presidents from Ontario Power Generation. They concluded that the reactor is safer with one pump than no pump.

Keen was now in bureaucratic no man’s land. Justice Canada instructed the seconded justice staff who worked with Keen to stop giving legal advice to the CNSC. That was because the government and the regulator were not in agreement. Then, with just two hours’ notice, on December 11, 2007, Prime Minister Harper called the House of Commons into a special session, the first time that had happened in thirty years.

The CNSC, AECL, and the “independent” reviewers were questioned. Keen explained the reasons behind the CNSC’s position, but also made it clear that she respected the right of Parliament to overrule the regulator—and take responsibility for the results. Though the Chalk River reactor was built on an earthquake fault line, and had partially melted down in 1952 and suffered another nuclear accident in 1958, Stephen Harper gazed into the future and declared, “There will not be an accident.”

Minister Lunn and the president of the Canadian Medical Association gravely told the House of Commons that patients “would die without isotopes.” The prime minister himself slagged Linda Keen publicly, wondering if she had the “good judgment” to be the nuclear watchdog, and describing her as a “Liberal appointee”
²
who had put tens of thousands of lives at risk. Keen’s colleagues in the public service were agog. “I can’t believe they named you,” one of them told her.

It was not the finest hour for the opposition. Choosing not to defend the regulator, the NDP sided with the government.
³
Though the then Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, argued for balance in the government’s reaction, it was no match for the prime minister’s crystal-ball assurances of an accident-free future at Chalk River and the prospect of dying patients. The House voted to allow AECL to start the reactors at Chalk River without a second pump in place, a decision endorsed by the Senate. Without any debate, the Harper government invoked a clause of
the Canadian Nuclear Safety Control Act directing the CNSC to consider the supply of isotopes, as well as health and public safety, in its decisions.

Without the slightest subject knowledge, and against the advice of a science-trained administrator taking scientific advice from a professional staff, politicians reopened the Chalk River reactor on December 18, 2007, twenty-eight days after it was shut down by AECL. There was one fact that even the politicians couldn’t change: AECL, the operator of the NRU reactor at Chalk River, was in violation of its licence. Yet it was the regulator who lost the battle in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa.

What Linda Keen did not know was that she had lost more than a battle; she was also about to lose her job. On December 27, 2007, Canada’s nuclear regulator received a letter from Minister Lunn. The minister informed her that he was considering removing her as president of the CNSC, but he was giving her an opportunity to reply. The letter was drafted by Justice Canada, a requirement before the removal of a governor-in-council appointment. Sources say no Justice Department lawyer wanted to draft the letter, so the work fell to senior departmental personnel. The letter was also anonymously leaked to the press. Linda Keen replied to Minister Lunn in a letter she herself made public at the time.

Then came the Godfather moment. A senior deputy minister of the Harper government called Linda Keen at home and told her a possible deal was still on the table. Keen would not be fired in the short term if she said publicly that the CNSC had made the wrong decision on the Chalk River reactor. In return, the government would allow her to resign in six months instead of being fired immediately. To her caller, it was a good deal. “You get to resign anyway, honey,” she recalled being told. Her reply sealed her fate: “So, my professional staff is committed to their professional technical views on the NRU and I accepted their advice.
Your proposal would mean that I would be double-crossing my staff. I can’t do that. It would wound the staff permanently in their trust in the president. I depend upon my staff.”

It was the end of the conversation and of Linda Keen’s career. At midnight, the evening before she was set to testify in front of the Parliamentary Committee on Natural Resources, she received a letter from the PCO removing her from the presidency of the CNSC. The letter stated that she was being removed because of a “lack of leadership,” parroting the language used by Stephen Harper and various other ministers when the “Slaughter on Slater” became public. Keen cancelled her appearance before the committee, convinced that the Harper government had used the isotope crisis to set up her firing. When I asked her what her personal experience told her about the Harper government, she replied, “The traditions don’t matter at all. In the past, we’ve had a very competent public service which mostly gave good advice. Now the process has been politicized. How far has it gone? There is no science department in the federal government run by a scientist, not Health, Environment, Natural Resources, Agriculture, or Fisheries and Oceans. That says a lot. A good public service is top-drawer people with good ideas. You risk all that when the new role is ‘give the minister what he wants.’”

For a time, AECL got what it wanted. Linda Keen’s successor was Mike Binder, a long-term assistant deputy minister at Industry Canada. He immediately reinstated AECL’s pre-licence approvals for new reactors. Binder reported to Richard Discerni, one of two deputy ministers who joined AECL’s board in May 2008. The old cozy relationship between AECL, the regulator, and the Harper government had been restored. If Linda Keen had really been the problem, AECL should now have been ready to fly.

It never got off the ground. After burning through $820 million of taxpayers’ money in 2010, and still without a new reactor
order since 1978, AECL spiralled toward a hard landing. It also soon became apparent that Stephen Harper was badly in need of a new crystal ball. The man who said there would be no accident at Chalk River was proven wrong less than a year later.

On December 5, 2008, 47 litres of heavy water containing tritium leaked from the reactor. When the leak stopped on its own, the reactor was restarted by AECL without finding the source, after receiving approval by the new president of the CNSC. The public was informed of the accident but not of the amount of radioactive material that was involved. The same reactor had been leaking 7,001 litres of light water per day from a crack in a weld of the reactor’s reflector system. Just five months later, in May 2009, the NRU was shut down yet again. It was discovered that heavy water was leaking from the base of the nuclear reactor vessel. The location of the leak was the same as in 2008, but the flow was greater. Unless one believes that the danger to patients decreases the longer they are deprived of medical isotopes, the shutdown of the NRU reactor at Chalk River laid bare the vicious political assault on Linda Keen and the disingenuous nature of the government’s arguments at the time.

This time, no floor show took place in the House of Commons, complete with dire predictions from the Harper government that patients would die if the Chalk River reactor were not restarted. No lone bureaucrat was singled out for blame. Stephen Harper didn’t call a special session of Parliament because human lives were on the line. And this time, it was not just a twenty-eight-day shutdown, but closure from May 2009 until August 2010—a staggering sixteen-month interruption in the production of raw medical isotopes.

So what did the prime minister do? He merely sent out his health minister of the day, Lisa Raitt, to say that there was no problem with the lengthy shutdown at Chalk River because there
were other sources for the badly needed medical isotopes—the polar opposite of the message that Stephen Harper, Tony Clement, Gary Lunn, and the CMA had delivered in their attempt to discredit Linda Keen.

It is noteworthy to remember the words used by the new president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Mike Binder, when he appeared before a parliamentary committee to answer questions about the heavy water leaks from the NRU reactor at Chalk River: “The Commission’s (CNSC) decisions are final and binding. They are subject to review only by the Federal Court and not by the government.” One can only imagine the wintry smile those words put on Linda Keen’s face.

While Keen was accepting the Women in Nuclear Global Award in Marseille, France, AECL was going through the first of a series of painful changes. After spending $680 million on the project, and falling seven years behind schedule, the company cancelled the Maple reactor program. The fact that Maple reactors were owned by Nordion but were being designed and operated by AECL sparked a $1.6 billion lawsuit against the company. No sales of the old CANDU design were recorded, despite years of promises to Parliament from AECL. Finally, little progress had been made in the development of their new ACR reactor design and the potential for sales was limited. Companies in the United States and the United Kingdom had already rejected the new reactor design.

It was atomic sunset in Canada: the nuclear industry was too expensive even for the Canadian government. In the end, Stephen Harper “sold” AECL’s reactor business, though the facts of the transaction could bear another interpretation. Since SNC-Lavalin gave Ottawa a cheque for $15 million, and then the Harper government handed Lavalin another one for $75 million, it could be argued that the feds had paid Lavalin $60 million to take a dubious asset off its hands.
⁴

The cabal that worked to get rid of Linda Keen did not prosper. Natural resources minister Gary Lunn was demoted in the next cabinet shuffle to a minister of state. He would lose his Saanich-Gulf Islands seat in the next election to the leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May. SNC-Lavalin has become mired in international fraud and corruption charges after admitting it paid bribes to acquire contracts. The World Bank has banned the company and its affiliates from working on any project financed by the bank for a ten-year period. As for Stephen Harper—the man who accused Linda Keen of putting thousands of lives at risk during the twenty-eight-day shutdown at Chalk River—he announced on June 10, 2009, that Canada would be getting out of the medical isotope business altogether.
⁵

When you tangle with Stephen Harper, it is never really over. Although Linda Keen remains one of the leading experts in the world on nuclear safety, she has not worked again in Canada since being legally, but unjustly, dismissed by the Harper government. “To this day, I have not had a dollar’s worth of consulting in Canada,” says Keen, “and most of my expertise is being contracted to the US. I have been blacklisted completely.”

As for the colleagues she left behind in the Public Service of Canada—Harper’s most likely whipping boys in the next federal election as they negotiate new contracts—Keen has an important lesson to pass on: “The gentleman’s agreement promised in the Accountability Act never happened. We now know all of this was a house of cards. The traditions don’t matter at all.”

nine

THE EXONERATION BLUES

I
had just come from covering the Conservative Party convention in Calgary, an event that gave journalists little information but an excellent idea of what it might be like to take part in a cattle roundup—on the four-legged side of the process. Winter beat me to Edmonton. As I picked my way through the slush on Whyte Street on a raw Alberta afternoon in November 2013, I kept wondering if there was life after the “busty hooker” affair. I would soon find out. I was on my way to the Artisan Café to interview the star player in this tragicomedy: former Conservative cabinet minister Helena Guergis.