Fisheries Committee on March 10th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

I call the meeting to order.

Committee members, colleagues, guests, thank you for coming. We are now at meeting number six, on March 10, of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), our study of the closure of the Comox MCTS station.

We have two hours to listen to witnesses. Our first hour is taken up with the department, and in particular with the Canadian Coast Guard.

From the Canadian Coast Guard, we have Gregory Lick, director general of operations; Roger Girouard, assistant commissioner; and Sam Ryan, director general of integrated technical services.

The way we normally do this is that each witness is entitled to 10 minutes for a presentation, followed by a round of questioning that we determined some time ago.

Will there be just one of you speaking, or would all three like to speak?

[Gregory Lick, Director General Operations, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

Mr. Chair, it will just be myself giving opening remarks, which will be fairly brief to allow the committee members to ask as many questions as they need to.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Lick, that's very generous of you. Thank you very much.

I will let you proceed with your opening remarks.

[Gregory Lick]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll be keeping my opening remarks very brief to allow you sufficient time to ask as many questions as you feel are necessary.

We've provided you with a PowerPoint presentation today, but I think you'd rather just listen to us. However, we may point to a few of those slides for reference during either our questioning or during opening remarks.

Nationally, the Coast Guard's marine communications and traffic services centres play a pivotal role in saving lives, protecting our waters, and ensuring the safe and efficient movement of vessels for the smooth functioning of Canada's maritime economy. I would like to spend a few moments speaking to you on what I know are the vital links in the MCTS system that ensure the safety of Canadian mariners and the waters that they ply, namely the communications equipment and infrastructure, together with our professional MCTS officers manning that equipment 24/7.

On the technology side, navigation and communications technologies have advanced significantly in the last decade. This evolution is not new for us. Look how quickly smart phones have become part of our daily lives. In the early 2000s, while much of the Coast Guard's MCTS equipment remained functional, it was quickly becoming antiquated and increasingly difficult to maintain. As such, in 2007, the Coast Guard made the decision to make significant investments to modernize its MCTS communications and data systems to bring our centres into the 21st century.

The implementation of this new technology provided us the opportunity to find efficiencies in our program delivery by reducing the number of MCTS centres from 22 to 12 without changes in the services to mariners. From day one, this project has been rooted in the principles that there would be no change in existing MCTS coverage and services and no disruption to those services as we transition to the new systems.

I would now like to dispel a number of myths that have appeared over the time of this project.

First, there is the myth of less coverage. I can confirm absolutely that coverage areas will remain exactly the same and that the number of radio towers and radar installations will not change.

Myth two has to do with insurmountable technical problems. Yes, we've seen some technical issues in the new systems, but this is not unexpected in a large project like this. Rigorous testing with our contractor and the MCTS officers has allowed us to find solutions to these issues as they have appeared. I and my colleagues have heard and seen these issues, and I can say with confidence that we have seen the successful implementation of solutions.

I can provide you with a quick example. We attended Prince Rupert MCTS last fall and actually heard the poor quality of the text-to-speech translation of the marine weather broadcast. Time spent by the contractor and Prince Rupert's officers to have the dictionary and translator functioning has produced a clear broadcast, one that will allow more time for the centre's officers to spend on distress and vessel traffic duties.

I am pleased to say that the Coast Guard has already successfully consolidated nine MCTS centres and transferred their operations to newly modernized state-of-the-art centres in strategic locations across the country. The consolidation of MCTS Comox into Victoria represents the final element in the Coast Guard's consolidation efforts and is currently on track for spring 2016.

Let's go to myth three, which is line of sight. The proximity of our centres to the coastlines they serve is not the principal factor for their location. The centres can literally be located anywhere in the country, given that our state-of-the-art equipment requires no reliance on line-of-sight monitoring. This is a good thing, since a line-of-sight requirement would significantly limit our ability to provide services at night and in heavy fog, which is common in coastal communities.

Let's move to our officers. There is a misconception that because of consolidation, some of our MCTS officers no longer have the local knowledge required to fulfill their duties.

This is simply untrue. Our officers represent the finest in their field. They complete a rigorous training and certification program at the Canadian Coast Guard College and study their geographical area of responsibility with intensive on-the-job training. Then they are fully checked out before assuming their responsibility for a particular area. To ensure the high levels of service that Canadians have learned to expect from the Coast Guard, we ensure that staffing levels and workload at the new centres are appropriate for the area they cover.

In addition, we have also built in surge capacity, something that the previous centres did not all have.

Now specifically on the issue of the closure of MCTS Comox, which is why we are here today, I can say with certainty that the consolidation of this centre is on track. We will be ready to ensure a seamless transition of operations into Victoria.

MCTS Victoria has been fully modernized and we are continuing to work closely with the contractor to ensure that the centre is ready to accept the transfer, building on the lessons learned that we had from the other nine centres that we've already consolidated. The consolidation of MCTS Comox represents a key step in this long-standing project. We are modernizing and replacing what we had before: 30-year technology. Any delays in proceeding with the consolidation of MCTS Comox in the spring of this year would result in increased costs to Canadians and increased risks associated with the continued use of antiquated equipment there, which is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

As such, I and my colleagues here today, who are accountable for the success of this project, both at a regional level and a national technical level, and I at a national program level, are confident that we have not identified any operational or technical reasons that would merit a delay in proceeding with this plan.

Thank you. We'd be happy to take any questions you have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Lick. We appreciate your comments and your opening remarks.

For our first question, we go to the government side.

Mr. Hardie, you're first.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, and thank you all for being here.

I'm from the west coast. Some of my colleagues don't know it, but my first father-in-law was a fisherman out of Prince Rupert. I've spent some time out in the boats. We saw Queen of the North. It went down. People knew where they were, or were supposed to have known where they were, but there were still difficulties. It's a treacherous coast and it has some treacherous conditions, which is why this issue was flagged for me well over a year ago by some friends who are in the broadcast engineering business who had been monitoring the stations and the quality of the signals.

I have a number of questions that will help me clarify exactly what's going on here. Once Comox is closed or at least converted, will the network be entirely digital?

[Gregory Lick]

Certainly. Thank you very much for the question.

I'm going to ask Mr. Ryan, our technical expert, to answer that one.

[Sam Ryan, Director General, Integrated Technical Services, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

Thank you very much for your question.

From the network perspective, first, the communication from the ship to the shore is as it always has been. Once it's received by our remote radio sites, it is converted from analog to digital and then it is transferred to the MCTS centres. That's consistent coast to coast to coast.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

In terms of the messages going out to marine traffic, is that whole audio chain from microphone through to transmitter all digital?

[Sam Ryan]

We're talking about the safety communications, so it's the traditional channel 16, the transmission between the ship and shore. That is is still analog transmission, but after it's received by the radio and once it is received by the communication control system, the equipment that routes it from the remote site to the centre, it is converted from analog to digital.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I'm thinking more in terms of the broadcasts that go out from the centre. Does the microphone go from a digital board into digital audio processing equipment to a digital transmitter?

[Sam Ryan]

The transmitter itself is still an analog modulation.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

It's AM modulation, in other words.

[Sam Ryan]

I believe it's FM modulation.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

This means the line of sight is important.

[Sam Ryan]

The line of sight is from the remote radio sites out to the ships.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Let me submit something I have heard. When a broadcast is originated, particularly now under the new regime, multiple repeating stations pick it up and rebroadcast it two or perhaps three times in some cases. I'm not sure of the number of hops that are involved, but every time there's a continuous number of transitions from analog to digital and back to analog, the quality of the audio that comes out of that little box on a fishing boat somewhere with a great big diesel making all kinds of noise has been poor.

[Sam Ryan]

Sir, I think I can speak to that.

In the previous technology, the actual network itself was converting the analog voice to digital. Especially on the west coast, we make use of microwave links, so all of the microwave links are digital communications. For the actual voice—and this is even with the old technology—we converted the analog voice that was in the microphone at the centre to a digital version of the analog voice. That was then routed over the microwave links and was again converted from digital to analog and then transmitted, using FM over the VHF radio network.

That is how it was in the past with the old technology, and because, again, the front-line communication is still using channel 16, which is still an analog transmission, overall we're using the new technology in exactly the same way.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

The observation, though, is that there are frequent flips from analog to digital and that in each stage of that.... If the fellow in Prince Rupert speaks into a microphone, it's analog. It goes to digital. It's transmitted to one of the hops where—what?—it's converted back to analog and rebroadcast?

[Sam Ryan]

No, if you're looking strictly from an analog-to-digital conversion and to how many places along the chain it gets converted, it's converted, as you said, in the centres themselves, which again is not a change. That is how it's always been over the past, let's say, 20 years.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Right.

[Sam Ryan]

That's the first analog-to-digital conversion.

Then it goes over the network, and the network is all routed in a digital way. You can ask, isn't your microwave link an analog transmission? Getting into the details of the microwave communications, yes, that in itself is an analog transmission. However, the voice data has not been converted back to its analog baseband level. It's still a digital voice.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

But that analog broadcast, then, is subject to atmospherics and anything else that would be coming along.

[Sam Ryan]

Again, that's a difference between the actual—

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

But it still does speak to the overall quality that comes out of the box in the boat at the other end.

How many Coast Guard staff were involved in monitoring and communicating marine traffic information back when you had five stations originating information?