I have one. I read in the newspaper this morning that two people have been charged with bringing Tamil refugees to Canada a couple of years ago onboard two vessels. I wrote the Minister of Public Safety at the time. I think I should have written the Minister of Transport. We need to make sure that these vessels never enter Canadian waters.
In our previous network, we did a risk assessment of vessels coming into Canada, and we found that high fouling of the vessels was associated with poor hull husbandry, which means that the ships had not been coated with anti-fouling paints for a long time. I suspect that the gentlemen who brought these vessels to Canada knew that they were going to be grabbed by the Canadian government, and they probably hadn't been treated with any anti-fouling paints for a long time.
They were coming from tropical waters, which is another risk factor. They probably had been sitting in ports in Sri Lanka before they came to Canada. These are risk factors. These things are like floating little islands of species, and we brought them into our coastal waters in British Columbia. I think it posed an enormous risk to the country.
I don't want to talk about the migrants. That's not my area. We should have offloaded the migrants well offshore, kept the ship offshore, and done something with it out there. We should not have allowed it into Canada.
As part of our study, we found that we never found hull fouling on vessels that had been coated in the previous 180 days. The Australian regulations stipulate that the ship falls into a high-risk category requiring at least some level of scrutiny when it comes in. They use a 90-day window. If you've been treated in the previous 90 days, they don't view you as a threat. If it's been more than 90 days, when you come into shore, someone's going to stand on the dock, and he's going to look for fouling organisms on the side of the ship. If he doesn't see any, the ship is deemed to be safe. If he finds fouling organisms, they would get SCUBA divers to go in and look for more. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can look at what these people have done and adapt it for Canada.