Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this study.
I would like to provide you with a bit of my background. I started as an officer with vessel traffic services in Vancouver in 1980 when it was separate from Coast Guard radio. I went through the amalgamation of vessel traffic services and Coast Guard radio in 1995 when MCTS was created, combining both disciplines.
During the amalgamation I took a three-year assignment as an instructor at the Coast Guard College in Sydney from 1997 to 2000. After my assignment I transferred to the office of boating safety in Dartmouth up until 2005, when I returned to the west coast as the officer in charge, or OIC, of Tofino MCTS, which was consolidated with Prince Rupert in April 2015. I then briefly worked at Vancouver MCTS as OIC, assisting in its consolidation with Victoria in May of 2015. Currently I am the OIC of Comox MCTS.
During my time with the public service I have definitely become accustomed to change, but I was not prepared for the announcement that came in 2012 that involved the consolidation of MCTS centres, resulting in the western region going down from five centres to two centres.
Over the last 15 years there have been many studies of MCTS: workload studies, least-cost analyses, change initiatives, and strategic reviews. MCTS has been discussed several times during previous parliamentary sessions of this committee. I would like to refer to statements made on October 9, 2003, by Mr. Martin Grégoire, who was the union president at the time.
Mr. Grégoire stated:
We believe there is a limit to the number of frequencies and noise that a human being can listen to. We believe there is a limit to the knowledge an employee may have of an extended geographical area. We believe there is a limit to the workload that a single employee can handle at any given time. We believe local presence and knowledge is important in order to provide adequate services, and we believe a reduced number of centres increases the risk of losing all communications over an extended geographical area, as opposed to a limited and smaller geographical area with many smaller centres, when facing major events like hurricanes, floods, ice storms, fires, or earthquakes.
These statements are still valid today, and we can add tsunamis to the list of major events.
The slides that I am about to show you are just a few of the many statistics that have been gathered from the various studies. The first couple of slides I will go over quite quickly because there are a lot of numbers.
The next one is a graphical representation, but it definitely shows that the workload of Pacific region, which is now western region, is double the other four regions that have been combined now to central and Arctic region, and Atlantic region. These are all using the statistics compiled from our vessel traffic management information system between 2011 and 2014.
The next two slides display the same vessel traffic movement statistics for 2013 and 2014, and show that 50% of the vessel movements occur in western region. This slide not only shows national 2015 statistics but breaks down western region into the traffic positions of the three remaining centres in western region after Tofino's area moved to Prince Rupert and Vancouver harbour moved to Victoria.
In the bottom pie chart are the four busiest positions: blue, which is the south area; red, which is Bowen; green, which is the harbour; and purple, which is Comox. That all makes up 83% of vessel movements in western region. These would be the four positions that are going to be put together in Victoria.
One of the reasons the old Vancouver VTS was split up was that it was determined that the combined workload for the entire area would have been excessive for one centre after amalgamation with Coast Guard radio. The checkout rate, or success rate, for new officers training in Vancouver VTS was just above 50%, due to the complexity of this centre. Since the split of Vancouver traffic into what was Victoria, Vancouver, and Comox, the checkout rate rose considerably.
The next three slides are taken from the maritime search and rescue annual reports. Again, they are showing the high volume of incidents handled from Pacific or western region, with Pacific being on the left and the other four regions that have combined following that.
I want to draw your attention to this map. This shows the location of most of the incidents in western or Pacific region. As the high density of dots indicate, this is all of Comox's area right now. This was Vancouver's. This is all Victoria's area. Again, the highest concentration, a majority of the events, are all occurring in the three centres that are scheduled to be consolidated.
Now let's look at post-consolidation staffing levels. Victoria and Prince Rupert will be handling over 50% of the traffic movements and a majority of the maritime incidents, yet, after consolidation, they're expected to handle this workload with only two centres.
This disparity continues on with funding as well. This was taken from the Canadian Coast Guard integrated business and human resource plan of the total allocation of funding for 2014-15. This is still with Comox operating prior to consolidation. Western region, with a three-centre configuration, still delivers an efficient, cost-effective service to the maritime stakeholders and is handling a majority of the workload.
Now I'm going to switch to a program that will demonstrate the sites. The green circles represent all our remote sites. There have been a lot of questions about our transmitter towers and receivers. These are all the sites that send and receive data from our communications centres.
What are some of the advantages to keeping Comox open? We have a great opportunity to minimize the risks by keeping Comox MCTS open and redistributing the workload among the three centres.
During evidence heard by this committee—and it was restated here—a number of the issues of outages were linked to third party providers. Mr. Pelletier stated on February 23 that we rely on third party providers to bring the signal from a tower to the other more centralized centres. If I look at the majority of outages, it is due to the third parties.
There has been some discussion today about the cost of keeping Comox open, the cost of modernizing Comox, because, yes, the equipment we're using is outdated, but all the new communications equipment is installed at Comox centre. That is where it is sitting right now. It is already installed at each of the remote sites that are on that chart. The only portion of the modernization that is not in Comox right now is the consoles and the equipment that is sitting in Victoria.
Those two extra operating positions in Victoria could just as easily be installed in Comox. That is where the equipment resides. That is where it switches over to the third party provider and that data is sent from Comox down to Victoria, the same way the data that came to MCTS Tofino and Ucluelet is transmitted all the way from Ucluelet via a third party provider up to Prince Rupert.
Third party providers are used to carry all the digitized data—the voice, the AIS, and the radar—that's collected at Amphitrite Point, which is the former Tofino MCTS site, and send it all the way to Prince Rupert. The U.S. Coast Guard vessel traffic service at Seattle was extremely concerned with this risk, as it relies heavily on the ability of Tofino MCTS, now Prince Rupert, to manage the approaches to the Strait of Juan de Fuca as part of the co-operative vessel traffic services agreement.
Their concern was evident when they proposed a plan and purchased equipment, which is at the Tofino MCTS site, to install a microwave link that would carry the radar and communications data to the VTS operation in Seattle in the event the Prince Rupert MCTS lost the capability of providing VTS services in this area. This equipment has not yet been installed. This data could easily have been routed to Comox via microwave links to minimize third party networks and eliminate the risk of sending this data to Prince Rupert.
With respect to costs—