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Federal Government Selling CANDU Reactor Division

 
Old 12-17-2009 at 05:52 PM   #1
Taunton
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Federal Government Selling CANDU Reactor Division
Canada's federal government is selling off it's CANDU reactor division, relinquishing control over the high-demand technology.

Read the story here: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/...u-reactor.html

This is a very bad move in my opinion. Natural resources are only getting scarcer and the ability for CANDU reactors to use natural (non-enriched) uranium to produce power, while at the same time destroying weapons-grade byproducts like plutonium make them an extremely valuable technology to control.

I feel like our government has no will to maintain control over anything that seem advantageous for the future, whether it be oil, nuclear technology, or other resources.

What do you think?
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Old 12-18-2009 at 01:02 AM   #2
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:( Noooooooo! We need the CANDU! The gov't made some horrible decisions this year with respect to Nuclear Tech/Isotope Industry. First Chalk River, now this!!

More privatization :(
Old 12-18-2009 at 10:35 AM   #3
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Privatisation has been a constant trend by both Liberal and Conservative governments in the past couple decades, and it hasn't had good results.

Petro Canada, in the Trudeau days, was owned almost entirely by the government. But then Mulroney sold it off the make a quick buck and now instead of Petro-Canada's billions of dollars in profits going into health care, education, or tax cuts, it going into some fat cat's pockets.

The 407 was another screw up by another right-wing leader. It was supposed to be just another public highway until Mike Harris, again, wanted to make a quick buck off of it. Now we are forced to pay insanely high prices to some spanish company to use it, and traffic in Toronto is even worse than before it was built.

Im all for the free market, its just that there are alot of advantages for the public when the government itself competes directly in that market. This holds true especially in an industry so vital as nuclear technology.
Old 12-18-2009 at 11:47 AM   #4
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They also want to privatize LCBO, and the OLG among other things. It seems like we are selling of our assets... why? To make more money?? This is part of the Canadian identity.
Old 12-18-2009 at 11:57 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Infinity View Post
They also want to privatize LCBO, and the OLG among other things. It seems like we are selling of our assets... why? To make more money?? This is part of the Canadian identity.
Some things should be privatized (like alcohol sales) but the privatization of Canada's trademark nuclear technology? Give me break! It's only going to become more popular in the future. Canada would only benefit from hanging onto it.

This makes no sense to me, and appears to be driven only by political agendas, not logic.
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Old 12-18-2009 at 07:08 PM   #6
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Alright, I feel I have to step in here to defend the government (a role I very rarely take, lol).

The issue isn't necessarily that the government is "privatizing" things they shouldn't be, its that they're getting rid of things they shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Why should the government run an airline or a gas company? Why are we paying taxes so that they can run a business? Sometimes the companies are profitable, sometimes they aren't. But the point is that its not the job of the government to worry about turning a profit.

When defining what you think the federal government should be responsible for, would anybody list running businesses?
Old 12-18-2009 at 07:10 PM   #7
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LCBO would never be privatized; It's the only crown corporation that is in the black. It generates a lot of revenue for the government.

The 407 on the other hand was a major screw up. I can't believe they sold it.
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Old 12-18-2009 at 07:11 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by A.Marlowe View Post
Alright, I feel I have to step in here to defend the government (a role I very rarely take, lol).

The issue isn't necessarily that the government is "privatizing" things they shouldn't be, its that they're getting rid of things they shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Why should the government run an airline or a gas company? Why are we paying taxes so that they can run a business? Sometimes the companies are profitable, sometimes they aren't. But the point is that its not the job of the government to worry about turning a profit.

When defining what you think the federal government should be responsible for, would anybody list running businesses?
The problem is that controlling nuclear technology isn't just running a business... it is a matter of controlling the country's resources. Sure, running an oil company isn't really what the government is supposed to do, but I feel like nuclear technology isn't something that should just be sold to the highest bidder - it's something that governments should control for a number of reasons, including the risk of it getting into the wrong hands.

Not to say that the technology can't get into the wrong hands through the government, but I feel like it has less of a chance.
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Old 12-18-2009 at 09:32 PM   #9
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It's not just that; the issue here is that the nuclear program was created via tons of tax payers dollars. They funded this enterprise for decades and now it is being sold at a cut price to some private investor. The intellectual property owned by the program is something that belongs to the people since they helped pay for it!
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J-Met, Taunton like this.
Old 12-18-2009 at 11:38 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by A.Marlowe View Post
Alright, I feel I have to step in here to defend the government (a role I very rarely take, lol).

The issue isn't necessarily that the government is "privatizing" things they shouldn't be, its that they're getting rid of things they shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Why should the government run an airline or a gas company? Why are we paying taxes so that they can run a business? Sometimes the companies are profitable, sometimes they aren't. But the point is that its not the job of the government to worry about turning a profit.

When defining what you think the federal government should be responsible for, would anybody list running businesses?
I've always had a beef with any natural resource being controlled by a private company. The tar sands are a great example. There we have private oil companies extracting oil out of the ground, causing massive environmental damage, and making a good deal of money out of it.

But Ive always wondered....what gives anyone the right to make a profit off of something the earth has created. Those oil companies have no more right to those resources than any other Canadian, or any other human on this planet for that matter.

The vast wealth of resources this earth provides should not be arbitrarily given out to a bunch of private profit seeking companies. I see no reason why natural resources shouldn't be considered collectively owned by humanity.

I know placing these resources under the control of national governments far from solves my moral dilemma, but I think its at least a start in ensuring that the wealth the earth's resources provide is at least a little bit better distributed.

Edit: Ive realized this kind of relates to the CANDU technology as well. As Huzaifa said, CANDU research funded in large part by the Canadian public. Again, what gives anyone the right to make a profit off of something we all collectively own.

Last edited by J-Met : 12-18-2009 at 11:41 PM.
Old 12-20-2009 at 05:12 PM   #11
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Sorry for the delay in posting, I've still got two exams, so I'm still doing a fair bit of studying. It might be a while after this one as well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Taunton View Post
The problem is that controlling nuclear technology isn't just running a business... it is a matter of controlling the country's resources. Sure, running an oil company isn't really what the government is supposed to do, but I feel like nuclear technology isn't something that should just be sold to the highest bidder - it's something that governments should control for a number of reasons, including the risk of it getting into the wrong hands.

Not to say that the technology can't get into the wrong hands through the government, but I feel like it has less of a chance.
This may be a bit idealistic, but we should never be trying to keep technology from people. Its a lot like the whole "Guns don't kill people..." thing- the technology can be used to do bad things, but that's not a valid reason to keep people from having it. We should be addressing the problems that would cause people to use technology to less than desirable means.

And lets be honest, governments aren't known for their integrity or competency. Sooner or later dangerous people will end up with dangerous technologies, no matter who controls the tech. Its more productive to go after the dangerous people.

Quote:
Originally Posted by huzaifa47 View Post
It's not just that; the issue here is that the nuclear program was created via tons of tax payers dollars. They funded this enterprise for decades and now it is being sold at a cut price to some private investor. The intellectual property owned by the program is something that belongs to the people since they helped pay for it!
That seems like more of an argument against why the government shouldn't have started the program in the first place than an argument about why we shouldn't get rid of it now.

I'm not so sure the price will be a cut one either; its unlikely we'll get the money invested back, but the reactor is probably not worth that much. Governments don't usually tend to worry about the efficiency of the money they spend. I'm sure we'll get what its worth.

I'm not sure how giving the government the right to start a program like this on taxpayers money is separate than their ability to end a program like this and collect money on behalf of the taxpayer. The two would seem to be equivalent.

Quote:
Originally Posted by J-Met View Post
I've always had a beef with any natural resource being controlled by a private company. The tar sands are a great example. There we have private oil companies extracting oil out of the ground, causing massive environmental damage, and making a good deal of money out of it.

But Ive always wondered....what gives anyone the right to make a profit off of something the earth has created. Those oil companies have no more right to those resources than any other Canadian, or any other human on this planet for that matter.

The vast wealth of resources this earth provides should not be arbitrarily given out to a bunch of private profit seeking companies. I see no reason why natural resources shouldn't be considered collectively owned by humanity.

I know placing these resources under the control of national governments far from solves my moral dilemma, but I think its at least a start in ensuring that the wealth the earth's resources provide is at least a little bit better distributed.

Edit: Ive realized this kind of relates to the CANDU technology as well. As Huzaifa said, CANDU research funded in large part by the Canadian public. Again, what gives anyone the right to make a profit off of something we all collectively own.
Well, the question of private property and resources is a topic that has a lot of different points of view- but lets look at it this way. What an oil company sells is not oil, but the extraction of oil. When its buried deep beneath the earth oil may be communal property, but it is also useless. Before it has any real value, it must be extracted- if a company spends money to extract and distribute the oil they should be free to charge for this service (with profit as a motive for starting in the first place). Locke's theory of property (or any labour theory, really) states that by adding your labour to a common property you create private property. In this case the labour is extraction and the common property is oil.

In the case of the CANDU reactor, the property is communal in the sense that we all paid for it. However, we didn't really all pay for it, the government did, with our money. I'll pose the same question I asked Huzaifa- if we give the government the right to buy/fund/create something with our money, why don't they also gain the right to sell that item?



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