There is a certain irony in that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is now dogged by two Cold War relics from previous regimes.

One of those relics is Karlheinz Schreiber; but enough about him already. The other is Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which outlived its usefulness as one of the people’s assets long ago. There have been signs for months now that the feds would like to unload AECL.

The Harper Tories haven’t yet formally put the rusted-out Crown corporation on the market yet. However, AECL has already put them through enough grief — culminating in the messy firing of Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission president Linda Keen — that it could cost them a majority in the next election, or even send them back to the Opposition benches.

The Harper Tories have learned the same painful lesson Brian Mulroney’s Tories learned in 1986, when they had to purge the balance sheet of another basket-case Crown asset — Canadair. It takes a great deal of political skill for any government to get rid of an unnecessary asset.

Canadair was a state-owned aerospace company with a shrinking order book that had long outlived any policy or economic justification as a Crown asset. To get Bombardier Inc. to take this Cold War relic off Ottawa’s hands, the Mulroney government had to promise it would award the company a lucrative maintenance contract for the CF-18 fighter.

The trouble was that the CF-18 contract had already been won fair and square by Bristol Aerospace Ltd. of Winnipeg in a public tender. Ottawa set aside the results of the tender — something it could not legally do today — and handed the contract to Bombardier’s new Canadair division.

Western Canada was outraged. Indeed, the beginning of the erosion of Mulroney’s support in that region can be traced to this event.

In the end, Bombardier was able to make something commercially viable out of Canadair. But that was well after the Mulroney government became history.

Turning to AECL, not only does this company have trouble selling its nuclear technology, it seems to have a genius for trouble.

AECL got caught paying bribes to Koreans in the early 1990s. The auditor general refused to sign off on AECL’s annual report for several years straight over the absence of accounting provision for decommissioned reactors. Two new AECL reactors are years behind schedule because of internal screwups and there was a litany of troubles at the nuclear power plant in Pickering, Ont.

Nobody wants AECL’s technology. Even Ontario, which badly needs new reactors, is reluctant to do business with the firm — even though it employs residents of the province.

And, of course, AECL has had a long history of run-ins with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which have culminated in the regulator ordering AECL to keep its reactor at Chalk River, Ont. shut down before Christmas because two auxiliary pumps designed to prevent overheating had not been installed as promised.

Among the first things the Harper government did after taking office was to sneak a clause into its much-hyped Accountability Act to exempt AECL from access to information requests. It is easy to understand why the government felt compelled to side with — and defend — AECL in its latest regulatory soap opera.

So, how do you unload a troubled company deemed unsafe by the federal nuclear regulator?

The Liberals simply ignored the auditor general or anyone else questioning AECL’s practice or existence, leaving the cleanup for someone else to worry about.

The current Tories, unsubtle creatures that they are, have opted to discredit the nuclear regulator to the point of demonizing it. Now, they have fired Keen as president of the CNSC — and one can be sure her successor will be a lot more flexible in dealing with AECL.

Of course, there is the little matter of building a book of business before AECL can be sold to a buyer, such as Areva SA of France. So, watch for Ottawa to put pressure on Ontario to buy AECL’s next generation of reactors in some sort of quid pro quo. After all, the only alternative to selling off AECL is decommissioning it as a company in an accounting writedown the size of Chernobyl.

Regardless of how the AECL story ends, it has already provided a valuable lesson to governments as to why they should be careful about staying involved with a business activity after it has outlived its strategic usefulness — and why they should be just as careful when it’s time to unload.

@page_break@Already, the Tories have paid a terrible price, just as the Liberals paid for screwing up the gun registry. This government will be remembered for years for a regulatory chill that threatens the independence of all regulators.

By this point, someone has probably said to Keen that it was nothing personal, just business, as they say in the gangster movies. Let’s hope the government learns to be more business-like in cleaning up its balance sheet. IE