@N0-11: More or less. Radioactive waste is anything containing an active isotope (so smoke detectors technically qualify). In this case, the waste is equipment, materials, and structural debris from decommissioned laboratories irradiated by long-term exposure, officially classified as Low-Level Waste.

The Stephen Harper government (2006–2015) wanted to get the cost of waste legacies off the public ledger, which in of itself is a reasonable goal. The problem is, it opted to do that through the "GoCo" model: Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated, which in theory means you get private contractors to execute the government's plan for maximum financial efficiency, but in practice leads to a game of Hot Potato over who takes the hit when something goes wrong. AECL, the Crown corporation that originally operated the nuclear sector directly, was gutted in 2015 into what's basically a liaison office between the Federal Government and whoever they've hired to operate the sites. The contractors involved, a consortium dubbed the "Canadian National Energy Alliance", is nominally headed by the criminally incompetent SNC-Lavalin but primarily comprises American firms completely unfamiliar with Canadian regulations, and originally featured the same bigwigs responsible for the Sellafield scandal. To make a long and highly-technical story short, the CNEA, tasked with developing a radioactive disposal facility for Low-Level Waste*, has opted for the fastest and cheapest solution while steamrolling IAEA guidelines and basic common sense. To wit:

The proposal, dubbed the "Near-Surface Disposal Facility", is

• 18 metres tall
• On the side of a hill
• Sloping toward a wetland
• That drains into the Ottawa River.

Basically, they're building a landfill on a hill. You don't even need an engineering degree to see why this might be problematic.

Now, had the government regulator been doing its job, this would have been nipped in the bud back in 2015 when it was first proposed. But seven years earlier, Harper sacked the Commissioner for doing her job and ordering a reactor shut down for years-overdue safety upgrades, and the lesson the CNSC took was "rubber-stamp what the Feds say". So, ~8 years later and now a billion dollars a year in procurement funding for no demonstrable return, the license to actually build the thing was apparently granted this month—which will now see lawsuits filed by the local First Nations, because native consent is a constitutional obligation and most weren't even consulted.

* One of the early signs this project was bad: the initial design proposal explicitly identified cobalt-60 as part of the waste inventory. Cobalt-60 is an Intermediate-level isotope, which would require the facility be redesigned for Intermediate-level storage. To date, they have neither removed cobalt-60 from the waste inventory, nor updated the design for Intermediate shielding.