He was first elected to Parliament in the federal election of 1997 as a member of the Reform Party of Canada and was re-elected in 2000 as a member of the Canadian Alliance. In April 2001, Lunn was one of the first Alliance MPs to openly criticize the leadership of Stockwell Day, and was suspended from caucus in May of the same year as a result. He briefly sat with the Democratic Representative Caucus under the leadership of Chuck Strahl, but in November 2001, he left to rejoin the Alliance after Day agreed to hold a leadership race. He was permitted to return to the party in January 2002, during the leadership of John Reynolds, following Day's resignation. In the federal election of 2006, he won re-election against Liberal Candidate Sheila Orr and NDP candidate Jennifer Burgis.
Lunn was Minister of Natural Resources in the Cabinet of Prime MinisterStephen Harper from February 6, 2006 to October 30, 2008, when he became Minister of State and Minister responsible for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.
Chalk River reactor shutdown
Lunn fired Linda Keen, the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, on January 15, 2008. Keen, who was due to appear before a parliamentary committee the next day, had ordered a shutdown of the NRU reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, which is operated byAtomic Energy of Canada Limited, in November 2007 over the AECL's failure to perform safety upgrades. Appearing before a parliamentary committee January 16, 2008 Lunn refused to cite one example of what Linda Keen had done wrong in her job, only that she had lost the confidence of the government. "These are the kinds of Republican tactics this town has never seen before," Liberal MP David McGuinty told the natural resources committee. "The Prime Minister and the people around the Prime Minister will stop at nothing.... They will fabricate, in my mind, a case to dismiss a senior official, an independent regulator," McGuinty told reporters later. Lunn told the committee: "We do not believe she fulfilled her duties. There was an urgency to this situation, make no mistake... it would have meant life and death for some patients." Nobody seems to have died during the supposed world wide crisis. The proof is that the NRU soon started leaking again and had to be shut down again, on 2009 May 14 for another 15 months of repair. AEC and Nordion were interfering in the world Medical Isotope Market by dumping cheap medical isotopes from a half century old corroded Cold War Relic, making it unviable to use newer, safer, more reliable production methods. Technetium-99m can be made locally with a cyclotron, no need for a reactor and rushing it around the world before it decays. The leaks were discovered when the reactor shut down because of a power outage in the area, proving the NSC's point about the reactor needing backup power. Web searches for Medical Isotope Crisis only turn up Canadian web sites, or references to Canadian sites. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/chalk-river-reactor-repaired-isotope-production-to-resume/article1377305/ There was also the Curious Case of Saanich Gulf Islands a small scale version of what "Pierre Poutine" did in the 2012 election. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-curious-case-of-saanich-gulf-islands/article550187/ AECL falls under Lunn's management as Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. The reactor shutdown caused problems with supply shortage of medicalradioisotopes, which are used for testing to determine whether a patient has a disease. Canada produces more than half the world's supply. The House of Commons of Canada passed emergency legislation in mid-December 2007, with unanimous support, to get NRU restarted quickly. There has been no backup reactor for NRU since NRX was decommissioned in 1992, making it very difficult for upgrades and maintenance to be performed on NRU.
