Evidence of meeting #59 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was countries.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
Yes, that would be a good idea, to leverage funds.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
Is another possibility that the government would simply back loans or--what's the word?--co-sponsor them or co-sign?
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
Loan guarantees, yes, which again would provide leveraging.
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
They would provide leveraging, yes. I'm not sure the current Treasury Board would be in favour of those.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
There was some discussion about airport modelling, and I think your report looked at the way airports are managed. I wonder if you'd care to describe or compare and contrast that for us, so we can see what benefits there might be in a model applying to small craft harbours. Or do you see that as applicable?
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
I'll try first with the United States, where one would think that private industry is heavily involved. But the real facts are that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration provides a high level of funding to airports at all levels, and that's probably to over 400 airports.
They are owned and operated at a local level through quite a few different models. So there is local-regional ownership and operation.
On airports in Canada, we have a little bit of a similar situation I think as we have for harbours and small craft harbours in that the larger airports, under the national airports system--Toronto to Vancouver to Calgary to Winnipeg--are on long-term leases. They are 50 years or longer. Again, small craft harbours are for only five years.
So airports have long-term leases. They are free to raise their own capital through debt, not equity. They're not-for-profit. Of course, the larger ones can make money. They have enough traffic, so they're all right.
Once we get into smaller airports, I think you would have two classes of airports. One can exist and can generate enough revenue to meet its operational needs, but in the long term it may not be able to meet all its capital needs. There is some aviation funding available through Transport Canada for certain capital projects, but not all. It is usually for things related to safety--the runways, the navigation equipment, the snow-clearing equipment.
Then you get another group of much smaller airports. There, as you know, the government has divested itself of smaller airports and given responsibility to local municipalities. There are some benefits to that, because the local municipalities can provide some tax space and can do some borrowing, yet at the same time there are a lot of those smaller airports that are struggling and will continue to struggle. They're not going to make it in the long term.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
We were talking about a trust fund being available. I know that our preceding committee a few years ago did a report. What year was that report? Does anybody remember offhand?
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
It was 2001. They recommended I think at that time that about $400 million over five years be made available to help with infrastructure for small craft harbours. I guess that was the estimate of the day.
If the federal government were trying to help with some kind of harbour fund, we could call it--we're having some experimenting with ideas today--that they could draw on, how much money would be necessary to give the harbours a fighting chance to recover if harbour authorities were able to leverage money from other sources? Would you need that much money, or would you need a smaller amount that they could leverage if they were getting money from other sources?
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
I really wouldn't know. I couldn't answer that question. I don't have enough information. Even at the time of the study, I probably couldn't have answered that one.
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
My gut reaction is that $400 million seems like a goodly amount of money.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
Yes. That's a lot of money by anybody's standards, I think.
Harbours seem to be pretty good at spending money, though. I guess the cost of wharves and breakwaters and so on....
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
Any type of a trust fund.... I also think the harbour authority and municipality should put up a certain percentage of the capital funds--
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
--because there are local benefits. I think if people have to put up their own money, they treat it very seriously, instead of thinking that the feds are going to cover all of that.
Liberal
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Thank you very much.
Just on that point, fishermen do have an input and do put dollars into the small craft harbours repairs. They're involved in what's taking place. I think that has worked quite well.
First of all, Mr. Bol, welcome. We're glad to have you here. We need your expertise to try to make the thing better.
How do we compare worldwide? You were given some briefing on what the situation was back in 1999. How would you compare us to other places around the world that are like Canada? Are our wharves in a lot worse situation, or are they not as bad?
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
That's difficult for me to comment on. I didn't get into trying to address the physical condition of the wharves at all.
It did come up in several countries where the conditions of the wharves were a concern. I think it was Australia and New Zealand where the central government was no longer involved in small craft harbours. So that did come up as an issue. They were concerned about safety issues.
In other countries, again because the central government really isn't involved, the people I talked to really didn't know the condition of small craft harbours. They are all locally owned and operated. It really depends how much the fishers want to put into the harbours, how much the local municipality wants to put into it. They didn't know where they were or what was happening to them or their state.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Thank you very much.
You're telling me that they're all pretty well localized. There's no funding from the federal system in most of the other governments you looked at. It was mostly the province, the state, the fishermen, or the community itself that took care of the wharf. Is that correct?
If so, would you recommend that centralizing could be a way we could go? Did I understand that you felt the decisions could be made better here in Ottawa than by the five different regions across the country. Or did I not understand you correctly?
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
I think decisions can be better made at local regional levels than at a central level. I think that is the experience in the other countries, even where there was central government involvement.
In Iceland there was a very strong regional organization involved in the planning and funding. I thought the central government was acting much less in a control role. They said that everyone who had gone through this process met the criteria and the criteria were good. They gave them the money. They were not heavily involved at all in small craft harbours.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Do you feel then that the minister should be involved? It's pretty hard to take the politics out of politics when you're in politics.
I'm wondering where you're going with the decision-making process on this. Should it all be handled by the bureaucracy? Should the minister not have input at all? I mean, if he has input, then he's going to have decisions on where dollars are spent.
If I understood you correctly, did you tell the committee that in some places they changed this and the decisions weren't much different after?
Director, Jacobs Consultancy Canada Inc.
You asked me a question about whether the minister should be involved, and I think the answer would be no. I don't think the minister should be involved. It's probably my own personal bias. I'm not a politician who has to worry about who I'm representing in a riding. I would think decision-making should be moved as close as possible to where the action takes place.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
I think it's fair to say in small craft harbours in this country that the decisions are all submitted through the regional offices. Of course, it comes back to the dollars. The fact is that it's questionable right now if $400 million would even put us back on an even keel, with the wharves being in the situation they're in. We have a major problem.
You were also indicating that there should probably be other ways of creating income from the wharves.
