“Elbows Up” now means giving U.S. nuclear contracts, according to Ottawa
The Carney government’s “elbows up” message now apparently includes handing out contracts to American companies, Energy Minister Tim Hodgson admitted.
The Carney government’s “elbows up” message now apparently includes handing out contracts to American companies, Energy Minister Tim Hodgson admitted.
Energy Minister Seamus O’Regan Hodgson made the comments during an exchange with Conservative MP Corey Tochor at the House of Commons natural resources committee on Monday.
He was being pressed on Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, a Crown corporation, awarding a contract to Nuclear Laboratory Partners of Canada Inc. to manage and operate Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. CNL oversees Chalk River Laboratories, the nuclear physics site north of Ottawa responsible for the CANDU reactor.
The issue is that NLPC is a joint venture led by U.S.-based BWX Technologies. There have been mounting concerns about handing over sensitive national security information to a company with ties to the U.S. Department of Defence, given President Donald Trump’s comments on annexing Canada.
“You approved this?” asked Tochor.
O’Regan (Hodgson responded by saying that “all of the management of the entity that is managing these activities are based in Canada” and that 95 per cent of its employees would be in Canada.
“So are you against any American company operating in Canada?” he asked Tochor, adding that such a stance would be inconsistent with Conservative thinking.
Tochor responded by saying, “I think it’s consistent with the ‘elbows up’ campaign you just ran.”
O’Regan (Hodgson replied that “‘elbows up’ means lots of things.”
“Elbows up means negotiating with all of the countries in the world, doubling our exports, creating alternatives to Americans. That’s what we’re doing,” he said.
Their exchange echoed a similar back and forth between Prime Minister Mark Carney and a reporter during his announcement of the “second wave” of nation-building projects in Terrace, B.C., earlier this month.
“We used to build in this country, and we are building this nation again,” Carney said at the time.
However, the Ksi Lisims project is owned by the Texas-based Western LNG and currently plans to have the pipeline built in Korea using Korean and Chinese steel.
Carney was asked how much taxpayer money Canadians should be prepared to invest in an American-owned and foreign-built project.
The prime minister responded that “there are structures that come with the project that ensure” there will be “returns to taxpayers through the tax system,” adding that the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline would be “First Nations owned.”
“The structure of the financing is a decision that we take with the full information, the full information of the project. The project design is with that,” he said. “So that’s part of…we answer that question with full information by doing the work, and that’s what the referral to the Major Projects Office facilitates.”