My name is Sonia Simard. I'm here today on behalf of the Shipping Federation of Canada, which represents owners, operators and agents of those big ships, ocean-going vessels, that are carrying Canada's international trade to and from the overseas markets.
The vessels of our members call ports in the Atlantic, the St. Lawrence, on the Great Lakes, on the west coast, and in the Arctic. As such, we have a vested interest in the safe co-existence of ships and whales. I'll take a few minutes here to outline some of the concrete actions we have undertaken so far.
On the east coast, for the North Atlantic right whale we were part of the protection efforts that took place in the Bay of Fundy and in the Roseway Basin in 2003 and 2008. Since then, these whales have moved to other parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which led to a terrible situation in 2017.
The death of several of those whales in the gulf over a very few months has affected all of us. The shipping industry has been affected not only because there has been quite a challenge resulting from the very sudden imposition of a large area slowdown, but also because we have a shared concern for the survival and protection of those whales.
As such, from mid-2017 to the beginning of 2018, the shipping industry got together. We initiated discussions and worked with the North Atlantic right whale scientists whom you heard from this morning in putting together a proposal for dynamic management. The idea was to protect the North Atlantic right whales where they aggregate, which you can see in some of what we've distributed, and then allow the vessel to navigate at the normal speed in very limited shipping corridors away from the aggregation when the whales are not present.
The proposal from the industry was key, and it fed into the dynamic mitigation measures that the federal government implemented in 2018.
Looking into the St. Lawrence now, for the beluga, again the shipowners since 2013 have worked with several partners to put together mitigation measures, including a voluntary slowdown, to minimize the risk of collision with several different populations of whales that operate in the area from May to October. These measures, which have been in place since 2013, have led to a change in behaviour. They have produced a reduction in the risk of collisions.
I know that Carrie will soon be addressing the west coast, so I won't go too much into detail but will just again underline that the shipowners, the operators and the ship agents have for the second year in a row delivered voluntary measures that are delivering noise reduction in important areas used by the southern resident killer whales.
These are, just to complement some of the examples from Mr. Buy, some of the actions that the shipping industry is taking to protect endangered whales in all Canadian waters.
We know, however, that more needs to be done and we are grateful for the occasion to discuss with this committee what the next steps could be. I'll take the rest of the minutes I have to underline some of our perspectives.
First, for us regulations are not the be all and end all. We say this because we think it's important to take into consideration that in some cases, voluntary management mitigation measures implemented on an industry-wide basis are very efficient, adaptive in nature and very swift in results, if you compare them with some of the heavy regulatory processes.
Second, although there's a body of knowledge to the effect that reducing speed to 10 knots can indeed reduce the risk of ship strikes, the situation is not the same when it comes to addressing the issue of underwater noise from vessels. There is an important knowledge gap there.
To give you an example, we are still finding information about the noise that can be allocated to different categories of vessels and how the footprint of a vessel may vary because of such factors as loading conditions or even such fixed factors as the type of propellers on board vessels or the shape of those vessels.
It is then a very complex issue. Efforts are under way to gather the data we need to address some of the knowledge gap, but in our opinion, we are not there yet.
I'm saying this to underline that in some cases regulations may look good on paper but may not always produce the best solutions, because regulations tend not to allow for real-time learning experience and an adaptive approach such as is very critically needed when dealing with underwater noise.
The third point for us is that a “one size fits all” solution is not the way forward. What I mean by that is that if you take the situation of the North Atlantic right whales in 2018, we are seeing indeed that a dynamic approach to minimizing the risk of ship strikes is producing effects, and actually from our perspective it is much better than the big box with a static speed.
There is a learning curve. We are still in the learning process and we have identified elements that could be improved for the 2019 regime. I'll be happy to elaborate more in questions.
Looking at underwater noise, again, if you focus on one speed and crystalize that speed into a regulation, you run the risk that it's not going to be an efficient solution, and we have learned in the last two voluntary measures trials, in 2017 and 2018, that there are different ways of accomplishing a target noise reduction. We need to learn more from these. Again a “one size fits all” approach is not necessarily the solution. Also, if we focus all our efforts on speed reduction, we may deny efforts in ship design, and that's where the solution really needs to lie.
A fourth point that's very important and is common to the problems of ship strikes and underwater noise is the need to know where the whales are. For that we need sustained and very efficient investment in detection technologies.
I'll give you one example. This season we are urging the federal government to invest in real-time acoustic detection in the shipping corridor in time for 2019, so that we combine acoustic detection with aerial detection in order to improve dynamic management.
My very last point—I promise, 20 seconds—is something that this committee has addressed before. You've said that we need to be nimble in our actions to protect the whales. We agree, and for that reason we think that the industry must be part of all solutions. And it's not just about consultation. I'll go one step further: it's about constructive partnerships, which are essential to address and find dynamic management solutions that work and are sustainable.
Thank you for listening.