Evidence of meeting #6 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was comox.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Vice-President, Western Region - Local 2182, Unifor
Oh, sorry. There were outages before and there will be outages after.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
How, then, is the technology to blame for the outages?
Officer In Charge, Programs - MCTS - Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Prior to this digitized communications system, all the data except for a few sites was transmitted by microwave links. In my 17 years working in Kap 100, or the old Vancouver VTS, and now Comox, Vancouver, and Tofino, I can recall probably fewer than five outages that were attributed to microwave link failures. We've had more outages based on the third party provider, and that is what the new CCS equipment is dependent on.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Thank you.
To that point, if outages can happen, and if Comox were to stay open, would it not have to be modernized as well?
Officer In Charge, Programs - MCTS - Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Yes, and that's what I ran out of time to say. The CCS equipment is at Comox. It is there. It's all installed.
All our remote sites feed into the centre at Comox. The building isn't going anywhere. The technologists aren't going anywhere. There are no additional savings from closing Comox MCTS, because the building and equipment all reside there. The site of Comox is where it's handed over to the third party network and sent down to Victoria on those data lines, on those network lines.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Is it fair to say, then—and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to make sure that I get it right—that your major concern is the third party provider?
Officer In Charge, Programs - MCTS - Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
A lot of our concern is with the third party provider and the distance that the data network has to transit.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
The problem is not necessarily the outages or the staffing, it's the third party provider. That seems to be your biggest concern.
Officer In Charge, Programs - MCTS - Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
That is one of our biggest concerns.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Thank you.
You also talked a great deal about tsunamis and that being the only MCTS station not in a tsunami area. My understanding is that you are in a high-earthquake area. Is that correct?
Vice-President, Western Region - Local 2182, Unifor
Yes. The whole B.C. coast is a high-earthquake area.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I'm actually from Nova Scotia, and any time I've been to B.C. I've only ever been to the interior, so I don't know the geography of the coastal area of B.C. and I apologize.
Is Comox about three hours from Victoria?
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
If a tsunami hit Victoria, would Comox not be affected at all?
Vice-President, Western Region - Local 2182, Unifor
The centre would not be, because it's 100 feet up on a cliff. By the time a tsunami reached there, it would be—
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
However, an earthquake could affect you, but not Victoria. Would that be...?
Vice-President, Western Region - Local 2182, Unifor
An earthquake would actually affect Victoria more than it would us. The Comox building was built to earthquake standards. It may be on a sand cliff, as Mr. Girouard pointed out, but we felt the Seattle earthquake in Comox. I was sitting, and my chair suddenly started moving. The building was designed to withstand an earthquake. It's a post-disaster building.
Victoria MCTS was put into what was warehouse space at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Victoria. They took a chunk of warehouse and put it inside there. That building was built in the 1970s or earlier. Also to do with earthquakes, there is a fault line in the middle of Georgia Strait that is also part of the subduction zone, and there could be an earthquake there that could cause a tsunami in the the Strait of Georgia, not necessarily a tsunami coming in from the west coast.
There is also a fault line—I was watching the news the other night—in Victoria that actually runs from the American side across the border into the Canadian side and meets the Saanich Peninsula, which is very close to where the Victoria centre is located.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Scott Simms
Thank you, Ms. Jordan.
Thank you, Mr. Hodge. I appreciate it.
Your seven minutes are up. Mr. Strahl, you have seven minutes, please.
Conservative
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Thank you.
Mr. Hodge, referring back to your presentation—and I asked this same question to the Coast Guard officials here—you mentioned that it was a union-led effort to consolidate, between 1995 and 1999, 30 Coast Guard radio stations and 14 VTS centres to form the 22 marine communications and traffic services centres.
If that exercise was undertaken in the 1990s, was there no opportunity for further consolidation based on improved technologies since that time? I guess I'm trying to understand, given that consecutive ministers have said that this is going from old analog to new digital technology, if there is not room for further consolidation, or was that exercise that happened in the 1990s as consolidated as these services could ever become, in your view?
Vice-President, Western Region - Local 2182, Unifor
No. If we had been consulted, our suggestion would have been to to close Vancouver traffic and move it to Victoria, as long as there were cameras available to monitor the harbour, because that line of sight thing that people have been talking about is important.
I worked in Vancouver, and the radar coverage in the harbour doesn't tag radar tags. They don't have a little thing on them telling you which boat is which, just because it's too congested, and there are blind areas in the harbour. You could have a contact go in and two come out, and you don't know which one is which unless you can actually see them. The line of sight in the harbour there was very important.
As far as consolidation is concerned, we would have suggested that Vancouver move to Victoria, because Vancouver was unsustainable in that they could not keep staff there. It was very difficult to train, and the retention rate was very low.
As for Tofino MCTS, the building there needed replacing. Most of the staff did not live there anymore because the Coast Guard got rid of the housing that they had in the early 2000s. Most of the staff actually lived in Port Alberni and drove an hour to work and an hour home. The suggestion would have been to move Tofino to Comox, and to leave Prince Rupert alone where it is, because Prince Rupert, again, has a low retention rate for staff.
Conservative
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
I infer from that that it's not necessarily that consolidation shouldn't have happened, but that it shouldn't have happened this way.
Vice-President, Western Region - Local 2182, Unifor
We're not opposed to consolidation as long as it's done in a logical manner, and this doesn't seem logical to any of us who work in the system.
Conservative
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Another point you've made, and that we've heard, is that any time we're talking about marine safety—and without getting into Coast Guard stations themselves, such as Sea Island or Kitsilano—there is always this desire for redundancy. I guess that's my question. How do you determine that you don't need a redundancy on a redundancy? When does it become redundant to be worried about redundancy?