Harper Tories refuse to discuss international push to have Canada enrich uranium

Not if you happen to live outside Canada. The Canadian government has been campaigning internationally for months to add this country to the small, tightly circumscribed club of nuclear enrichment states.

But the diplomatic arm-twisting only came to light less than three weeks ago, when the United States announced it was dropping its insistence on a ban on uranium enrichment technology to non-nuclear states.

Anonymous negotiators at the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting in Vienna emerged to say the American demand had been shelved primarily at the insistence of Canada, which wants to build uranium enrichment plants.

Who knew?

As it turns out, a great many people - but few in Canada and certainly not the news media whose job is to inform the public about federal policy.

Canada's interest in uranium enrichment is controversial because enrichment is the critical step needed in bomb building.

Nobody's accusing Canada of having atomic arsenal aspirations, but Iran's enrichment program is being challenged for just this reason. Some observers have suggested Canada's lobbying undermines the international non-proliferation effort.

In the wake of the Vienna meeting, requests by The Canadian Press for interviews with Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn or Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier were summarily rejected.

Foreign Affairs said it might be able to arrange a background briefing with officials. But almost two weeks later, the request remains stalled somewhere in the Prime Minister's Office or its bureaucratic arm, the Privy Council Office.

It's not a simple oversight.

While Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has been touting his province as the "Saudi Arabia of uranium" and loudly endorsing a high-tech enrichment industry this spring, there's been silence in Ottawa: no ministerial statements, no announcements in the Commons, no friendly questions from Tory backbenchers during question period.

Nowhere in the blizzard of Conservative advertising has there been any mention of this profound nuclear policy shift. Hundreds of thousands of Tory flyers delivered to Canadian households this spring never mentioned uranium enrichment - or nuclear power, for that matter.

"This is typical of the Harper government's duck-and-cover nuclear strategy and sets a dangerous precedent on the international stage," said Shawn Patrick Stensil, a Greenpeace researcher on energy issues.

"It undermines Canada's historic approach to nuclear technology and arms proliferation."

Never mind that Stensil's latter point is debatable, and was contradicted by an eminent American non-proliferation expert contacted by The Canadian Press.

"If you handle it effectively with nuclear diplomacy, send the right signals, I don't think this is going to cause the non-proliferation regime to unravel," Charles Ferguson, scientist-in-residence for the Center for Non-proliferation Studies, said in an interview.

Ferguson said the Canadian embassy has been doing off-record information sessions in Washington to make the government's case, which includes highlighting Canada's world-leading uranium export industry, long-established domestic nuclear technology sector and track record of supporting global non-proliferation treaties.

"So putting it all together, doesn't it make sense from a business perspective for Canada to add value to its natural uranium by doing some enrichment?" asked Ferguson.

"I'm not worried that material is going to fall into the wrong hands, especially if it's just truly low-enriched uranium, not highly enriched uranium."

Yet it remains a debate the Harper government appears terrified of having with the Canadian public.

Industry players say the Conservatives have been quietly and consistently pushing the enrichment strategy abroad for months.

Canada's stance goes back directly to Washington's controversial Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. The GNEP proposed a closed nuclear fuel cycle that would promote the global spread of nuclear technology while tightly controlling bomb-making - essentially enrichment and fuel reprocessing - capability.

Canada, which exports about 30 per cent of the world's unprocessed uranium, would have been shut out from becoming the world's 13th known enrichment nation.

"Certainly there were overtures made early on by the prime minister that that was not acceptable in the Canadian context," Murray Elston, president of the Canadian Nuclear Association, said in an interview.

As GNEP's initial principles were dropped during the course of negotiations last fall, Canada quietly joined the partnership in November.

"So it's been out there for quite a long time now," said Elston. "It's not a surprise that keeping open the option of reprocessing is one of the (government's) strategies."

Elston's forthright knowledge of a policy the Harper government refuses to publicly discuss is made all the more startling by his casual reference to reprocessing.

Lunn, the natural resources minister, floated the notion of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in a single newspaper interview last September and has been gagged on the subject ever since.

Enrichment of natural uranium is just one side of an industrial equation that could permit Canada to reprocess and reuse spent nuclear fuel.

Is that Ottawa's plan?

The Harper government isn't saying. Just don't call it a hidden agenda.