Wild About Writing

It’s beginning to look like it. First there was the controversy over the disruption in the making of medical isotopes at the Atomic Energy of Canada Chalk River nuclear reactor. Then Prime Minister Harper’s announcement that Canada will get out of making these vital keys in diagnosing cancer, cardiac and other diseases.

Now comes the news that Canada’s one-time hi tech global flagship, Nortel Networks, is going to be sold off to Nokia-Siemens, the Finish-German telecommunications powerhouse.

As more than a few people have commented, it’s reminiscent of the 1959 shutdown of the Avro Arrow fight jet by Conserv ative prime minister John Diefenbaker. Or the earlier, less remembered, cancellation of Canadair’s commercial jet. The Liberal government cancelled that one in 1952, in order to divert funds to support UN operations in Korea.

What is it about Canada that once we get a leg up in some scientific field, our government bails out at the first sign of crisis?

Until a few months ago, Canada produced 31 per cent of the world’s supply of medical isotopes. Fifty thousand procedures a day have been carried out using these isotopes. They were supplied by MDS Nordion, a Toronto company which used technetium, a byproduct of molybdenum-99, from the aging nuclear reactor at Chalk River, Ont.

This sorry episode of research failure and technical blundering has been overshadowed by the cheap political games played out on Parliament Hill.

It started when the nuclear safety administrator tried to shut down the AECL facility for safety reasons in 2007. No way, shouted the PM. Just a Liberal appointee, he asserted. We won’t allow isotope production to be affected.

An apparently unstoppable heavy water leak earlier this year forced another shutdown. Nobody knows for how long. But the headlines went to Lisa Raitt, the energy minister, caught on tape saying it was a sexy issue that she’d solve in no time.

She can’t, of course. Now she’s appointed an “expert committee” to review the options. The preferred one, it seems, is to find other countries willing and able to take up the slack. So Canada once again becomes a consumer rather than a producer, a follower rather than a leader.

The alarms have been sounded all over the scientific community.

“It’s going to be a drain of brains outside Canada,” says Jean-Luc Urbain of the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine.

“If we don’t act now, maybe we should just put out the lights and go home,” says Domninic Ryan, prominent scientist.

Stephen DeFalco, head of MDS, disputes the government’s contention that the new Maple reactors, which were expected to replace the aging NRU facility, have fatal design flaws. Ottawa refuses to put any more money into that project.

According to Defalco:

The Maple reactors are complete, they are safe and they await final commissioning.

The tragedy in all of this is not only the health risks facing millions of people around the world due to Canada’s failure to maintain isotope production. As serious as that is, what may be even worse is the failure of successive Canadian governments to invest adequately in pure science and R&D.

We’ve got a Science Minister — Gerry Goodyear — who is an avowed religious creationist. An Opposition leader, Michael Ignatieff, who put isotopes on his list of concerns but has since been silent on the issue.

But there’s a glimmer of hope. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, supported by scientists at the University of Saskatchewan, has plans to build a reactor in Saskatoon. It would be a 10-year project. And McMaster University, in Hamilton, says it can use its cyclotron to make isotopes.

One way or another, alternative supplies will be found, in Canada or abroad. But what a sorry commentary it all makes.