Fisheries Committee on March 10th, 2016

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

There you go. You're welcome. That's a deep philosophical question.

[Scott Hodge]

I've been in the government service for 35 years now, between the military and the Coast Guard, so I definitely understand your question.

If you look at the sites Mr. Gross had on his chart, you can see all the little radio sites. A lot of those used to be manned sites, and there were people there. Over the years the Coast Guard has consolidated in different places. Alert Bay used to be a radio site, and that was moved to Comox a number of years ago.

With redundancy we're talking about a large area with very low levels of radio coverage. Once you get north of some areas, there isn't even cellphone coverage.

With Prince Rupert, if it went out.... The Prince Rupert area itself is 77,000 square kilometres. When you add Tofino to it, there are another 30,000 square kilometres. If a tsunami hit Prince Rupert and knocked the centre out, you would lose radio coverage from Alaska to Washington State and along the west coast of Vancouver Island. That's not a small area.

You can have too much redundancy. On this coast originally there were only Coast Guard radio stations in Prince Rupert, Tofino, Comox, and Vancouver, and three vessel traffic centres. We actually went to five centres from seven when we merged.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Thank you for answering my redundant question with “redundant” in it several times.

Are there other agencies in B.C. that you're aware of, either federally or provincially, that have a specific tsunami-based redundancy requirement?

[Scott Hodge]

We're the redundancy for Emergency Management B.C. They get tsunami warnings. We get tsunami warnings. When a tsunami warning is broadcast, first it's for the entire coast. EMBC decides which area needs the warning, watch, or whatever, and we broadcast that for them. We're the redundancy for them, so they don't have to have a redundancy.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

The word cloud for this committee is going to be “redundancy”.

[Scott Hodge]

We prefer “emergency backup”.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

“Emergency backup”—okay, that's fair enough.

I know you mentioned some of the overtime costs and the costs to move individuals. You said that if they had asked you, you would have said to close this and not this. Have you done analysis as to what the savings to the treasury would have been for your proposal versus what the government did?

[Scott Hodge]

I don't have those numbers offhand.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Okay. If you had them, I think we would enjoy receiving them.

[Scott Hodge]

I think Mr. Gross can speak to that.

[Dale Gross]

I would like to add that when this announcement was first made, the officer in charge, a supervisor, and a union representative from each of the five centres had a meeting for three days with the regional management. We all put forward to management that a two-centre option was not a viable option. We all strongly urged the regional management to put forward a three-centre option back to Ottawa, but my understanding is that it was never done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Gross, and thank you, Mr. Strahl. Perhaps someday we'll get, as a witness, the redundancy department of redundancy, I hope.

Sorry, Mr. Strahl. I'm not picking on you specifically. It's just that I thought that was a great exchange.

Mr. Donnelly, you have seven minutes.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to both of our witnesses not only for coming to the committee and providing testimony but for your service to the country. You have a huge number of years between the two of you.

Mr. Gross, obviously you're not only a fully qualified and experienced officer in charge, but you've taught at the Coast Guard College. We know the Vancouver port is the busiest in the country. You just heard, as did I and the committee, that the DG of operations and the assistant commissioner say they are confident that Victoria and Prince Rupert stations can handle the workload with fully trained and capable staff who can handle the complexity and the workload of the job by using this technology.

How confident are you that the Coast Guard can handle the traffic, the incidents, and the complexity with two stations on this coast?

[Dale Gross]

I know one thing that Mr. Lick mentioned a couple of times was the surge capability, but when we had five centres, we had three operating positions in Tofino, three operating positions in Comox, and three operating positions in Vancouver. We had a supervisor at each site, and that supervisor was part of the surge capability. If the two main traffic and safety positions got overburdened, you had that third person there.

By the time we finished with consolidation, with Vancouver, Victoria, and Comox all going into one site, you've eliminated two of those supervisors. Now you have one supervisor spread out over eight operating positions. We have lost part of that surge capability to handle the high volumes.

Transport Canada has done studies showing tremendous increases in traffic projected. There's tanker traffic, there are LNG terminals proposed, and we don't have the room for expansion anymore.

As Mr. Hodge stated, we've fitted nine operating positions, plus the supervisor desk, into a building that was originally intended to hold four. We've put all that workload on those extra operating positions, and no, I do not feel confident that the training and the knowledge are capable of handling all that extra workload.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

To go further, you showed the committee a graph of the number of incidents on the west coast in the Inside Passage and the northern Georgia Strait. With that in mind, how important is the Comox station in providing a robust marine communication emergency response safety system in that network?

Will that robust safety system be there under consolidation? I want you to elaborate on dealing with that huge workload and the number of incidents occurring along 40% of the coast. We're talking about the busiest port in the country.

[Dale Gross]

As I stated, when we have three positions in Comox, one is a supervisor position, but when it's busy in the summertime they routinely assist when the number of incidents is more than one safety officer can handle. The same thing is happening in Victoria. They have two safety positions, and they each help each other as safety gets busy. Now you're adding Vancouver's safety position as well.

All these three centres experience extremely high volumes of incidents in the summertime, and they all had a supervisor to back them up. Now all those positions have only one supervisor to back them up.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Perhaps I could ask my colleague in the remaining time to ask a question on that.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you so much for coming here and sharing with us today.

One of the things I heard from the previous group was that it's not about the number of people, it's about the number of stands. Can you please tell me what that means from your perspective?

[Dale Gross]

What we call a stand is basically a workstation. It's a position. It's a position that is manned 24-7. We have a safety position that monitors channel 16, and we have a traffic position that talks to the commercial vessels and maintains their safe passage.

We staff those positions with 5.5 people, on average. When we're talking about guaranteeing a number of positions at a centre, that's what we're talking about. We haven't been able to staff all those positions at a level of 5.5. This has resulted in short-staffing situations and overtime—excessive overtime.

[Scott Hodge]

In 2003, when this committee did a study of MCTS, they made a recommendation that MCTS should go to a staffing level of seven people per position because of the factors that Mr. Girouard just touched on. That hasn't happened, which has led to excessive overtime. If you look at the statistics, MCTS officers do more overtime than any other federal government employees.

That level is not there because we want to work overtime, because you lose time from your family and everything else. Some people seem to think the money is important, but it's not. The reason our officers do that is they're concerned about the safety of everyone else. I've missed a lot of time with my family because I didn't want somebody not to be there when someone calls for help.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

During the consolidation, was a risk assessment made in order to make sure that if there was tsunami damage and destruction, the two remaining centres would be okay? Was there a real risk assessment completed?

[Scott Hodge]

I know that Unifor has put in freedom of information requests for any risk assessments or studies or anything else to do with consolidation, and we have not been able to find anything at all.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

In the case of Comox actually closing, which we hope doesn't happen, has the MCTS found an alternative site to broadcast warning and subsequent communications?

[Scott Hodge]

It will either be done from Victoria or Prince Rupert, and if an earthquake happens or a tsunami happens, then it won't be done.