Beijing — On his farewell tour of the world's most populous country, Jean Chrétien won't get a chance to meet China's new leader. But he has set aside most of a day to pursue one of his most zealous foreign activities during the past 20 years: peddling Canadian nuclear reactors.
President Hu Jintao will be travelling in Australia when Mr. Chrétien visits China this month in his final Asian tour as Prime Minister. Canadian diplomats insist it is not a snub because Mr. Chrétien's counterpart is technically the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, even though Mr. Wen ranks below the President in China's hierarchy.
Officials are trying to arrange a meeting between Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Hu on the sidelines of the APEC summit, Oct. 20 and 21, which will be attended by 21 world leaders.
Even if his political meetings in China are expected to be relatively low-profile, the Prime Minister will still have plenty of opportunities to flog Candu technology. On Oct. 23, he will devote a day to celebrate the completion of two Candu reactors near Shanghai, where he will sing the praises of the Canadian-designed nuclear power plants and make another pitch for more business.
Mr. Chrétien has already lobbied Mr. Hu for nuclear business this year. He used their first face-to-face meeting, during a summit in Russia in May, to try to sell more Candu reactors. He also promoted the Candus in a meeting with Romania's Prime Minister in London in July.
Nuclear salesmanship, which he has always pursued with astonishing gusto, is perhaps a fitting way for Mr. Chrétien to end his prime ministerial career. He began his sales pitches for Candus more than 20 years ago, when he was the federal energy minister. One of his biggest foreign trips as energy minister was a nine-day visit to Japan and South Korea in 1983 to seek Candu sales.
Two decades later, he is still relentlessly promoting the same technology. But Canada has sold a lot fewer Candus than it had aimed to -- only three were sold to foreign customers in the past seven years.
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which designs and markets the Candu reactors, has described Mr. Chrétien as "an enthusiastic and long-time supporter of AECL and Candu." It is unclear, however, whether his personal efforts will be enough to rescue a faltering marketing program.
China is the biggest remaining hope for substantial Candu export sales, with optimists suggesting that China might buy dozens of Candu reactors during the next several decades.
But the competition will be stiff. Intense lobbying has begun at the highest levels of international diplomacy. France and Russia are both bidding aggressively for nuclear deals with China, and the top leaders of both countries have used their latest meetings with Chinese leaders to promote their nuclear technology.
In this competition, Mr. Chrétien's personal involvement in selling the Candus is "extremely important," said Keith Bradley, the AECL vice-president for business development in Asia.
"It underlines his personal engagement," Mr. Bradley said in an interview. "It underlines the Canadian commitment to being a steady partner of China in nuclear power."
Antinuclear activists say Mr. Chrétien is obsessed with a failed product that wastes a huge amount of government money. They estimate that the federal government has spent $17.5-billion on subsidies to AECL during the past 50 years, including a controversial $1.5-billion loan and government guarantee for the two Candu reactors in China -- the biggest such loan in Canadian history.
The federal financing to China was so generous that it came close to prohibited practices, according to the Sierra Club of Canada.
If there are any further sales of Candus to China, the deals "would likely be dependent on generous financial terms that tread into the murky ground of concessional practices that are supposedly banned," the Sierra Club said in a report this year.
Mr. Bradley denied the charges, saying that any future Candu sales to China might not require federal financial aid.
