In brief…

1. The U.S. Iraq invasion of 2003 removed two nuclear proliferants from the world stage: Iraq itself, and Libya. Libya, six months following Saddam’s ouster, fearing an Iraq-style invasion, renounced its secret nuclear program. The international community rewarded Libya for this, only momentarily as it turned out, by lifting international sanctions and resuming commercial relationships. One of the companies that re-embraced Libyan business was Canada’s SNC Lavalin. That proved to be disastrous for SNC.
2. To get Libyan business, thereby being a good corporate and world citizen, some executives at SNC felt they had no choice but to engage in business practices, such as bribery, that were commonplace in Libya but illegal under Canadian law.
3. SNC, trying to be a good corporate global citizen, was legally pilloried in Canada for doing exactly what international anti-proliferation policy said it should do—conduct business with a corrupt government as that government’s reward for renouncing nuclear weapons.
4. The legal troubles related to this case made it impossible for SNC to compete as the vendor of CANDU inside Canada, where CANDU was invented. In SNC’s absence, an Ontario electric utility, seeking a new reactor, waived competitive procurement and sole-sourced a U.S.-made small reactor. This was at a time when “Buy American” had emerged as a major element of U.S. international trade policy.
5. Numerous businesses in America today pay bribes and “protection money” to the current president in return for favourable treatment, just as SNC paid bribes in Libya. Often this is in public view. None has suffered any sanctions in Canada similar to what SNC underwent for its Libya transgression, even though such payments are still illegal under Canadian law. There are serious questions about the rule of law in U.S. commercial transactions, and this forbearance on Canada’s part is a glaring double standard.

When the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003 and drove Saddam Hussein from power, most observers did not realize nor acknowledge that this signaled the first instance in history of forcible disarmament-by-regime-change. Nor did anyone acknowledge, much less celebrate, the next instance of disarmament, which occurred literally within months of Saddam’s ouster, in Libya. The CIA in October 2003 intercepted a Libya-bound ship in Italy, carrying components of a gas centrifuge plant. The plant’s purpose was to separate uranium isotopes. This cargo was from the A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan, which had sold centrifuges to Iran and North Korea and tried to sell them to Saddam.

The Americans gave Libyan dictator Muamar Gadaffi a choice. He could voluntarily renounce this hiterto-clandestine nuclear weapons program and open his country to international inspections, or he could turn his gaze toward Iraq and note what had happened to his fellow dictator Saddam, who had played it so fast and loose with inspectors that he got invaded.

Gaddafi opted for the former. An international pariah for its role in terrorist attacks in Europe including the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988, his oil-rich dictatorship was heavily sanctioned. Renouncing his illegal nuclear weapons program could get the mostly American-led sanctions lifted.

And indeed it did. Tony Blair, UK prime minister at the time, welcomed Gaddafi back into the fold. Years later, after Gaddafi’s violent overthrow and death, Blair defended Gaddafi’s momentary re-admittance. “If a country is prepared to… give up chemical and nuclear weapons capability… we should be willing to open up to that and give them the hand of partnership and show that, when they do that, they get a proper response—they get a relationship which is normalised.” The west, encouraged by the U.K. but mostly by America, re-opened embassies in Tripoli, lifted sanctions, and encouraged western corporations to resume business in Libya. SNC Lavalin was one of the corporations that responded positively to this encouragement.^*

The problem was that Libya, in spite of having renounced its nuclear program, remained a corrupt and venal dictatorship. If you wanted to do business there, you had to grease the palm of somebody close to the regime. In SNC’s case, that somebody was Gaddafi’s son Saadi. An SNC executive appears to have become Saadi’s personal handler and financier (with SNC money) in a secret arrangement the company discovered only much later, when an internal review turned up certain dodgy financial accounts. SNC referred these to the police, and the subsequent revelations about some executives’ association with Saadi led to criminal charges in Canada that nearly brought SNC down.

Paying bribes to get foreign business was still a crime in Canada, regardless of good nuclear behaviour on the part of the corrupt payee. Should SNC have even entered Libya after 2003, given the illegality of the business practices required for a successful engagement? Was “taking one for the anti-proliferation team” worth the subsequent damage to the company? Whatever your answers to these questions, Canadian prosecutors went after SNC tooth and nail for the Libya transgression. At the time there was nothing in Canadian law that resembled a deferred prosecution agreement whereby criminal litigation against a company could be conditionally suspended, allowing the corporate defendant to continue operating while it demonstrably cleaned up its act. Prosecutors sought to bar SNC from bidding on government contracts—which were the company’s lifeblood—and if they were successful SNC would disappear as a business entity, along with many thousands of Canadian jobs.

SNC, which, let’s remember, had itself alerted authorities about the Saadi Gaddafi dealings, mounted an intensive and ultimately successful lobbying campaign at the Canadian federal level to add DPAs to prosecutors’ legal repertoire. And once DPAs were written into law, the prime minister, who was also a Quebec member of Parliament (SNC was headquartered in Quebec), leaned on the Justice Minister, who in the Canadian system also doubles as Attorney General, to make use of the new legal avenue and grant SNC a DPA. The Minister/AG refused, so the PM shuffled her out of Justice in favour of a new minister who would and did grant the DPA.

Though nothing whatsoever about the above-described dealings was illegal or anywhere close to it, they were what in Canada amounts to a political scandal—no theft, no sex, not even any swearing. Ninety-nine out of a hundred Canadians could not coherently describe what exactly made it a scandal, yet the publicity surrounding it ended the careers of the PM’s principal secretary as well as those of the Clerk of the Privy Council and the recalcitrant minister/AG. It also severely damaged the PM’s own reputation. And it quite possibly destroyed the Canadian nuclear industry, though that industry’s official representatives would likely disagree with this assessment.^*

The incumbent nuclear power reactor technology in Canada is CANDU, which stands for Canadian Deuterium Uranium. CANDU runs on natural, unenriched uranium, moderated and cooled with heavy water. It was designed explicitly to avoid entanglements with “Yankee Wire Pullers”: Canada in the early Cold War deferred to American pressure to not separate uranium isotopes on our own soil. This pressure was for the very silly reason that having failed to prevent the leakage of nuclear weapons secrets to wartime allies and Cold War enemies alike, the Americans decided to really clamp down on Canada and make sure we, of all people, stayed out of the Big Boys’ enriched-uranium sandbox.

The excuse was America had to protect the world from nuclear weapons proliferation. Unfortunately that horse had left the barn in 1941, when the British spy John Cairncross informed his Soviet handlers the Anglo-Americans had begun a “top secret” program to build an atomic bomb. Nonetheless, because America offered Canada shelter under its “nuclear umbrella,” we went along with the charade and didn’t complain.

But offstage, separate from all the highfalutin game-theory mumbo jumbo that characterized early Cold War American nuclear doctrine, there was a plain old commercial angle to American disapproval of Canadian enrichment. The Americans thought they would develop a world monopoly in uranium isotope separation (though that monopoly had disappeared very soon after 1945), which they hoped would make uptakers of nuclear power dependent on U.S. fuel supplies.

However, depending on foreign fuel supplies for power generation is bad for domestic energy security, so Canadian reactor designers performed an elegant, and successful, technological end-run around the U.S.’s imaginary monopoly by figuring out how to make nuclear electricity without separating uranium isotopes or requiring large heavy forged pressure vessels; this was CANDU. Early prototypes proved the technology, which spawned not only a hugely successful Canadian industry, in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick, but also an international one—there are CANDUs in South Korea, China, Romania, Argentina, and Pakistan. The U.S. attempt at a global civilian nuclear monopoly was a complete failure.

That is, it was a complete failure in the First Phase of the Nuclear Age. Thanks to the compliance of both the Canadian federal and provincial Ontario governments as well as the Canadian nuclear industry, the Americans staged a second attempt in the Second Phase, targeted specifically at Canada. This time, they were successful.

The American re-approach began when the Canadian nuclear industry, feeling it needed federal government financial support for a new build, found that uttering the acronym CANDU put any prospect of that support in jeopardy. This was because SNC Lavalin had in 2009 acquired exclusive license rights to the CANDU 6, a well-proven design that was the closest thing in the CANDU world to a commercial-off-the-shelf new reactor. So any CANDU new build would involve SNC, and the name SNC had turned politically toxic due to the scandal that had sprung out of SNC’s Libya business mentioned above—which had originated, let’s repeat, in SNC’s responding to the U.S. encouraging the commercial world to reward Gaddafi for his good anti-proliferation moves. The acronym “SNC” under Trudeau’s first premiership became unmentionable, therefore so was CANDU, due to the perceived need for federal dollars.

SNC, then, was hors de combat as a reactor vendor and competitor to foreign vendors during this entire time. And the American nuclear industry, correctly seeing a soft touch in Canada, took full advantage of the Canadian incumbent’s absence. Unable to convince any U.S. utility to guinea-pig its paper (unproven, never built, never licensed) 300-MW boiling water reactor hastily rebranded a “small modular reactor” or SMR, General Electric–Hitachi (GEH) found a Canadian federal government willing to pay close to a billion dollars of public money to a profitable Ontario electric utility for “site preparation” at Darlington to host the SMR, which the utility had sole-sourced after a cursory and opaque review that apparently did not consider cost of generation. Darlington had been federally cleared for 4,800 MW of new nuclear capacity and under the Wynne government in Ontario there had been musings that at least one CANDU 6 (735 MW) would go towards the 4,800. The utility, Ontario Power Generation (OPG), scrapped that plan, saying 735 MW of well-proven CANDU was insufficient to handle projected load, only to decide a couple years later that 300 MW of unproven light-water-enriched-fuel was the perfect choice.

The SMR deal held a dual benefit for the feds. First, they could put to rest well-founded accusations of ideological anti-nukery while supporting a technology unlikely to get off the ground. Second, they could do all this while avoiding any mention of CANDU, which mapped to the toxic acronym SNC, which in the PM’s mind mapped painfully to JWR, the initials of the now bitterly estranged former Justice Minister and AG who had refused to extend a DPA to SNC.

All this occurred during the first Trump administration, which cemented “Buy American” as the predominant stricture of U.S. international trade policy. OPG, whose predecessor Ontario Hydro had co-invented the CANDU expressly to keep Yankee Wire Pullers out of Ontario electricity, obeyed Trump’s “Buy American” even before the U.S. nuclear industry did.

Today Trump’s second administration is even more aggressively protectionist than the first. It is also openly lawless, soliciting bribes and demanding—and getting—protection money from a mostly domesticated and compliant corporate America. In the midst of all this, OPG, the Ontario provincial government, and the Canadian federal government remain loyal to “Buy American,” doubling down on the U.S. SMR at Darlington—and American management of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories—even as Trump moves ahead with publicly announced plans to kill the Canadian auto industry. The Canadian law that forbade bribes to foreign governments, the same law that, sans DPA, nearly led to SNC’s demise as a major revenue-generating corporate entity, continues to forbid Canadian companies to pay bribes to win foreign business. But in this case, Canada didn’t “win” the foreign business it engages in. We simply rolled over and invited foreigners in, sole-sourced their unproven never-licensed paper reactor, and when they proved abusive bad neighbours and trading partners we bent over backwards and rolled out the red carpet.

In this remarkable circumstance, AtkinsRéalis, the recently-renamed SNC Lavalin—which was punished to near-extinction for taking one for the American-led anti-proliferation team—is by virtue of the name change safely back in the reactor-vendor and lobbying game. But now it struggles to play catchup against an American incumbent in Canada. Who will present the best case to a Canadian public that in April 2025, amidst a gratuitous tariff war started by our abusive neighbour, elected a PM who promised “Elbows Up”?

Like Schwarzenegger in Terminator II, AtkinsRéalis is the Resistance’s T-101 sent back in time to protect Canada (John Connor) from the T-1000 (GEH) that Skynet (Trump) sent to kill Canada. The question is not who will find Canada first; GEH already won that contest. The question now is, which Canada GEH found.

I fear it wasn’t the one with the elbows up.