Transport committee  I can say that the coast guard continues to meet its service standards across the west coast, those changes notwithstanding

Transport committee  No, we didn't lower standards. We are meeting the same standards we were meeting before any of those changes were implemented. Those standards are based on the assessment of the geography, the volume of water-borne traffic, and what it takes to respond in different locations. Th

Transport committee  The risks on the B.C. coast are different, there's no doubt. I'll start by talking about one that doesn't exist. For example, you don't have ice in Port Metro to deal with, which changes the scenario significantly. I think the two factors for Vancouver that are most significant a

Transport committee  Pardon me, but I just want to make sure I heard you correctly. Did you say comparing to Rotterdam?

Transport committee  I would be a little bit—

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  I don't have precise figures in front of me. I don't want to guess at this. I would rather provide you information that is more specific. Certainly there are busier ports in the world. Shanghai comes to mind as perhaps the world's busiest port and one of the more complex becaus

Transport committee  Yes, certainly. We have partner organizations that we refer to generally as the Coast Guard Auxiliary. There's one national umbrella organization, and you have regional organizations that operate within that. Essentially, what we're talking about are volunteers who aid in the s

Transport committee  There's a parallel that could be drawn there, and there's a parallel that might be drawn with a volunteer fire department.

Transport committee  We're watching the situation very carefully, as you can imagine. There's a lot of talk about traffic in the north, but in fact the amount of traffic through the Northwest Passage is still minimal. To my knowledge, there was one cargo vessel that transited the Northwest Passage th

Transport committee  I'm going to ask my colleague Mr. Pelletier to also weigh in on this because of this operational background. The Simushir event put into motion a lot of different response activities, and I think that's important to note. First, that event actually started as a search and rescu

Transport committee  No, that's every day.

Transport committee  I don't have with me the regional breakdown of those incidents. I can tell you that the vast majority of these incidents are very small, such as a yacht that has run aground and that kind of thing. We're not talking about three tanker-sized incidents a day. We're generally talkin

Transport committee  That's correct.

Transport committee  In fact, incidents at sea can be reported in different ways. It might be that we get that information through our MCTS centre, our marine communications centre. In some cases, something happening on the water evolves over time, so it comes in as search and rescue first and turns