Fisheries Committee on April 12th, 2016

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

I call the meeting to order.

I've sat in on many committee meetings in my five years in Parliament, but this is the first time I've had the honour to be the chair, so I'd ask you all to take it easy on me.

Thank you all and thanks to the witnesses. Today we are talking about the closure of the Comox MCTS Centre.

Point of order, Mrs. Jordan.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Before we get started on the actual agenda, there was a motion on the floor at the last meeting that was never voted on. I'd like to call for a vote on that, please.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

That is in order. We'll take the vote now.

Mrs. Jordan moved:

That the Committee invite the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, and departmental officials, to appear on April 19th for a two (2) hour meeting, to discuss his mandate letter and the Main Estimates 2016-17.

Mr. Strahl.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In deference to your previous instructions, I will note again that this wasn't what we agreed to. We want to hear from the witnesses today on this important study, so we won't belabour the point. We had hoped the minister would make himself available for two separate meetings. It's clear that is no longer going to happen.

That being said, we're prepared to allow the Liberals to use their majority to get their way. We'll go with that.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Mr. Donnelly.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I feel that we do want to respect the time of our witnesses, so obviously, I won't spend valuable committee time talking about this. I want to express our disappointment that we weren't able to get the minister for the two meetings to come and talk.

We're now going to have half that time in a compressed meeting and that's unfortunate. We've talked about that. We've let our intentions be known, clearly. Unfortunately, we're going to lose this vote.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Are there any other comments?

All in favour?

(Motion agreed to)

The motion is carried.

Our first witness is Mr. Allan Hughes, Coast Guard communications officer and president of Unifor, local 2182.

Thank you, Mr. Hughes, for appearing. I will ask you to speak for 10 minutes.

[Allan Hughes, President, Local 2182, Unifor]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and committee members for allowing me to appear before you today. My name is Allan Hughes, and I am the President of Unifor Local 2182 representing 295 marine communications officers across Canada. I'm pleased to appear before you today and explain why the closure of the Comox MCTS Centre is a dangerous decision.

Before I begin, I want to say that since the committee commenced its work on this review of the planned closure, the Coast Guard seems to have accelerated its plans, and in fact staff members have already been informed the station will close in less than a month, on May 10. When the deputy commissioner was asked why the Coast Guard was proceeding ahead of this committee's recommendation, he responded, “anything committee comes back with is just that, a recommendation, not binding“.

I'd like to provide you with a little information on my background. I grew up in Vancouver and I started my career with the Canadian Coast Guard in 1993 on the first and only ab initio course held at the Canadian Coast Guard College in Sydney, Nova Scotia. I began my career at Vancouver vessel traffic services centre and worked in the Tofino centre from 1994 to 2000. I have been at Comox ever since. I also have 18 months of experience working with the RCMP in their operations and communications centre on Vancouver Island.

Every year hundreds of thousands of boaters from the lower mainland, from the United States, and from around the world come to play in the vast cruising grounds of the inside passage. This traffic is in addition to the commercial fishing fleet, cruise ships, and other commercial vessels that support industry and tourism along the coast. It's an extremely busy waterway year around.

Closing the Comox MCTS centre is not only a bad business decision, it's a reckless one, without due consideration to the uniqueness of B.C.'s south coast. The risk is to commerce and the environment, and the danger is to the public we protect and the safety network we support. If Comox is closed, the 50 officers in Victoria would end up handling approximately 40% of all the marine search and rescue cases in Canada and regulating 40% of the shipping movements in Canada.

Not a single MCTS officer or manager with operational experience was consulted before the decision was made, and unfortunately this is becoming more evident at each phase of this four-year odyssey the Coast Guard has embarked upon.

Today I'd like to share the front-line perspective and explain why Comox should remain open. One of our main concerns, should Comox close, is that the workload shouldered by Victoria would be unmanageable and make it extremely difficult to certify officers in the future.

Currently out of the 6,000 search and rescue incidents that occur each year, approximately 1,000 of those are handled in Comox. Those calls will now move to Victoria. At the moment, Victoria monitors eight remote radio sites and 45 radio frequencies at a time. After the proposed changes, when Comox closes, they'll monitor 12 radio sites and 63 radio frequencies at once in the busiest search and rescue area in Canada.

Imagine the difficulty of picking up a weak distress call of a single kayaker from the din created by the volume of 63 channels on a busy summer long weekend.

I have some personal experience. Back when I started my career in Vancouver, the workload that existed there at the time was similar to what's being planned now in Victoria. Some say it worked before, but I was there and it didn't. A moment ago I referred to the course I took at the Canadian Coast Guard College, which was eight months of intensive classroom training. Then I began my field work at the centre in Vancouver.

Despite having passed all that training, two-thirds of my classmates, eight of 12, could not cope with the workload and the complexity, and were washed out. They didn't continue to work at the Coast Guard. One went to Iqaluit and another went to Prince Rupert.

If Comox is closed, we'll be taking a giant step backwards, as this overwhelming workload and complexity will revert to the newly consolidated centre in Victoria.

When Vancouver MCTS closed in May of 2015, they had something called the regional marine information centre. This operating position was a collection, dissemination, and alerting point for pollution reports, such as the ones with the Marathassa. It notified Coast Guard environmental officers and Transport Canada with regards to defects with shipping and provided significant event notifications for government agencies and our senior Coast Guard officials.

These vital functions are now administered in Comox because the Coast Guard couldn't find anywhere else to put them last year. They tried to send them back to their original agencies such as Transport Canada.

Last week they announced they'll transfer these responsibilities to the regional operations centres, which are staffed by Coast Guard ship officers. They'll move that from a 12-hour operation to a 24-hour operation, and they'll have to hire more staff. That's going to increase the cost even further for this consolidation.

I'd like to address the flip side of the workload problem, which is of course staffing. Unifor predicts there will be a loss of approximately 20% to 30% of our current officers due to retirements and departures within the next two to three years in Victoria. The ability to train and qualify people to replace them takes up to two years. It will be nearly impossible, with the retirement bulge from now until 2021, to ever catch up, given that it takes two years to train them.

Year after year, MCTS officers work the highest number of overtime hours in the federal civil service. The closure of Comox will exacerbate an already tenuous staffing situation in the western region. Unifor estimates that this fiscal year there will be an overtime budget of approximately $2 million in Victoria, and in subsequent years $3 million. When this question was posed to Coast Guard regional management, the answer they provided was, “We'll just shut down operating positions.” What this means is that where five officers would normally staff a busy long weekend, there may be only two officers on duty to respond to distress calls.

Assistant Commissioner Girouard and his HR staff are attempting to solve the current staffing shortage, without success. There is no plan on how to replace the officers who will leave in the next five years. For those 20% to 30% who will leave in the next two to three years, they haven't even started the hiring process, and it takes two years to train them.

In addition to workload and staffing, we have grave concerns about the technical problems with the new communications system that has been installed in every station on the coast, except Comox. To give you some background, on February 9, Victoria MCTS modernized, along with the already consolidated Vancouver centre. According to the Coast Guard, the transition to the new system went well, but within days our officers were reporting echoes through both the speakers and the headsets used to monitor for distress calls and regulate shipping movements. As a result, there are cases of vessels not hearing MCTS centre transmissions, and officers not hearing vessels. It appears that early on the Victoria single-site testing, before they energized the whole system, was fine. As soon as they put it all together, they ended up with the problems, which you can see in the email I obtained through access to information.

A major problem with the consolidated centre, if Comox is closed, will be the noise generated on the distress channel, channel 16, and on our working channels. Remember, that's 63 separate channels. Currently, at peak times radio calls can be missed, as simultaneous transmissions from other boaters cover distress calls. That's how busy it is. As our officers are attempting to call the vessel in distress, calls are often overridden by other marine traffic, including B.C. ferries just making blind safety calls entering Active Pass.

There are limits to the number of radio communications, sites, and incidents an officer can safely and effectively manage with a positive outcome. Passing out search and rescue information is vital to the successful conclusion of saving lives and protecting the environment.

The area of responsibility covered by Victoria, should Comox close, would encompass 40 dedicated search and rescue vessels, the 442 Squadron search and rescue aircraft, and over a dozen police and fire department resources. This is how busy that area is.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

You have two minutes.

[Allan Hughes]

As I mentioned a moment ago, the audio problems continue to this day at Victoria, Prince Rupert, and Sarnia. During a visit to Sarnia in November, I personally witnessed officers, on nearly every radio call, use radio playback equipment to listen to recorded calls in an attempt to decipher what had been said, sometimes with success and sometimes without.

I'd like to refer you to the email, which is this one here, obtained through access to information and that was generated out of the Victoria MCTS centre with the new, modernized equipment. This also discounts the testimony previously provided by Coast Guard officials that the problems had been solved.

Our officers are fearful of what will happen after the May long weekend, which is the start of what we affectionately call the silly season due to the noise and the number of search and rescue cases in that centre.

During the March 10 hearings Coast Guard management were asked if the new communication system had ever led to a safety incident. A few months ago, on February 2, there was a near miss incident involving a U.S. tug towing two barges with a deep-sea vessel. A collision almost occurred and this was during a prolonged communications outage at Mount Ozzard in Ucluelet. Officers in Prince Rupert sat helplessly and watched on radar and transponder as a collision nearly occurred and they could not intervene due to that outage. This highlights the dangers of consolidation.

I would also like to address the additional point that was made on March 10 by Assistant Commissioner Girouard when he appeared before this committee. At that time, he discounted the tsunami threat to that centre. I have a graphic here provided by Fisheries and Oceans showing the tsunami wave entering Juan de Fuca Strait and bombarding the area where Victoria MCTS centre is located and the four-metre risk zone.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that the Comox MCTS centre building is not closing. It's not being sold. In fact, it will remain in place along with the technicians that work there. The equipment that is modernizing Victoria is already located in Comox. This is the newest building that the Coast Guard has for MCTS. It was built in 1993 to post-disaster standards.

In conclusion, we believe that closing Comox and moving it to Victoria is not in the interest of public safety, fiscal prudence, or operational feasibility.

I have one more overhead for you to look at. This is a map of the Saanich Peninsula put out by their emergency planners. This area is where the Institute of Ocean Sciences is located and where the centre will be located, which is in the tsunami planning zone, four metres above sea level, which is an evacuation zone.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hughes, for a very comprehensive presentation.

On the phone, we're going to hear from Vancouver, British Columbia. Mr. Fred Moxey, you have 10 minutes.

[Fred Moxey, Retired Coast Guard Commander, As an Individual]

Thank you, sir.

I first want to give you a bit of my background. I've been working at sea for 40 years. I started at a very young age, attending the Prince of Wales Sea Training School in Dover, England, at the age of 15. I completed my marine training and went to sea at 16 years old in the merchant navy, working for the P&O line. I returned to Canada and joined the Canadian Coast Guard in 1972. I have worked in most Coast Guard stations on the west coast, and I've also opened four stations. I also sailed on offshore petroleum vessels. I was a superintendent of all Pacific Coast Guard stations and also superintendent of the office of boating safety.

I opened the Campbell River Coast Guard station, which is just north of Comox. Local knowledge is so important to have. When you open a station, you invite the public to an open house. You start to meet people. These people in your community are the ones who will quite often help you do your job in a more effective way. You get to know the mayor and the council, the police chief, the EHS, the fire department, and Customs, all of which are very important. You could get a call or get somebody reporting something on another side of the island, and you could probably phone a citizen and ask them to take a look out their window to see if there's anything going on. That kind of knowledge is vital in operating a station, and if you're not there, you're not going to get that rapport with the public anymore. It will be gone.

As for Campbell River, north of Comox, we used to call that “heaven or hell”. The two tides that meet from the north end of the island and come up from the south end of Vancouver Island meet right outside Comox. You can get 20-foot standing seas there and a 16-knot run in the narrows, and the narrows are only 700 metres wide. Captain George Vancouver once said that it was the most hazardous body of water he was ever in.

You have a million passengers going through that pass every year to Alaska, plus all the fishing vessels and all the public vessels. The American vessels come up here. This goes on year-round. I know that sometimes when I used to take people from Ottawa on a tour in February or December, they'd see all those vessels out in English Bay. That goes on all year. Nothing shuts down here in the winter.

I don't know how Victoria radio is going to handle all that marine traffic, particularly in the summer, when we have events like the Symphony of Fire, which is a big fireworks challenge. That brings 400,000 to 500,000 people to Vancouver, and a lot of them come in boats. We did a count in English Bay once, and there were 1,700 vessels. When it's all over with, they all decide to go home, and there are collisions and accidents, and maydays going off all over the place. Plus, now Victoria radio is going to have to look after Comox and Tofino. I really think they've gone too far with the cuts already.

I'd like to tell you what it's like at the other end of the microphone and being on the Coast Guard cutter. You have those engines running and you're trying to do your job at a mayday. I'd like to share an experience with you. I went out once in a terrible storm at night. It was blowing 60 knots and gusting to 80. We were out for about nine hours. I lost all my antennas, and we were starting to flood. We were down to one radio, a portable radio with low wattage. We called the Coast radio station and told them what our problem was. I had the crew members tell them that we would call every 15 minutes, and that if they didn't hear from us, they would know something was wrong. We need clear, precise communications, particularly in those kinds of conditions.

The other thing I'd like to share with you is that quite often when we go out, everyone's coming in. We go on a long search. We could more than likely be the on-scene commander, and that means you're in charge of fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, various surface vessels—up to 20 or 30 surface vessels—and you have to plot all those positions and log all the search areas that they're doing.

Then we do what we call a sitrep, a situation report that goes through Vancouver Coast Guard radio, or Victoria Coast Guard radio now. And all that information is vital to get to the rescue centre so they can start doing drift plots. Coast radio station is my lifeline. If I am in trouble, we'll be calling them just like I did when I almost lost the cutter.

Comox, as far as I am concerned, is a lifeboat, a ship's lifeboat. If we lose one of the radio stations or if we lose two of the radio stations on the flood plain they are on, we're going to be down to nothing. We need Comox in there as a backup. As Allan said, it's been seismically upgraded and would withstand a major event.

The other thing is if we lose communications after a disaster, the Coast Guard's responsible for reopening the traffic lanes, repositioning buoys, the signs on the water, and to get the commerce going and to get the help in that is vital to do our job. Without communications, you have nothing.

I believe I've said just about what I really wanted to share with you on how it was for us at the other end of the line. I guess it all depends on how much risk the government is willing to take, and the thing that concerns me is that the very people who are making this decision are the very people who advised the former government to shut down Kitsilano Coast Guard base, the busiest Coast Guard station in Canada. Then we had that oil spill, and there was no response. Those are the people who are making decisions now. I briefed the Prime Minister of Canada, and he reopened Kitsilano.

I hope this can be turned around, and thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to all of you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Robert Sopuck]

Thank you, Mr. Moxey. You're three minutes under the limit. We really appreciate that.

Now we'll turn the floor to questions, and the first questioner is Mr. Hardie from the Liberal Party, and you have seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Hughes and Mr. Moxey.

There seemed to be a number of layered issues here.

One is the quality of audio that's reaching the sea and the quality of audio that's being returned to the centres that are monitoring what's going on at sea.

The second is the number of ears actually listening to that audio. And I want to start there. Before the cuts started taking place...and I believe the Vancouver centre which was on the Guinness Tower, as I recall, monitoring Burrard Inlet, was the first to close. Then a number of others have since. If we look at post-closure of Comox versus what we had before the closure started, do we essentially, though, have still the same number of ears listening to marine traffic on the west coast?

Mr. Hughes.

[Allan Hughes]

First of all, the Vancouver MCTS centre was originally located at Kap 100, at the north end of the First Narrows Bridge, Lions Gate Bridge. During the consolidation during the nineties, it was moved to the Sears Tower, Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver. The reason that was done was to basically monitor their harbour because there's a lot of blind areas with radar for that area.

With regard to the number of ears, before consolidation we had five safety desks. We had one in Vancouver; two in Comox, which included one that was staffed with a supervisor; and two in Victoria. That's five operational desks to handle the search and rescue load for that area from basically the north end of Vancouver by the inside pass, past Victoria.

Post-consolidation, it could go down as low as two, and that's being driven basically by the number of staff who are going to be available to work at that centre. They have five desks, but one is going to be dedicated to something that was supposed to be automated, which is recording the weather onto the continuous marine broadcast. That's actually more labour intensive now, and they're still having to manually record that weather. It was supposed to have all the time savings involved when they modernized their centres across Canada. There's also a need for those officers to have a relief break during their watch so they can take care of personal needs and also eat a meal or two because they're there for 12 hours, and at that time the positions would again drop down because we provide our own breaks.

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

So in terms of the number of years then—and let's include Prince Rupert in this— what number of officers would actually be involved in monitoring marine traffic, before and after?

[Allan Hughes]

I'm only speaking to the safety, the search and rescue marine incident side of the house.

In Victoria there's an addition to that. There are four vessel traffic monitoring positions. There's one that will be coming from Comox, one that came from Vancouver, and two that were already in Victoria.

In Prince Rupert, they've actually reduced the number of officers monitoring that marine traffic, actually to the point where the monitors, the contact is wider than the marine waterway on the graphic chart. We had a situation where a fishing vessel went aground. The officer couldn't even tell, and it had stopped there. It never called us. For an hour it sat there and took on water and never called us. We couldn't detect it because the waterway is that narrow on the chart, because they've reduced—again, by one person—the number of people who are monitoring that marine traffic and regulating the movements.

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

I was looking for a number—

[Allan Hughes]

Yes.

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

Obviously you don't have that at hand.

[Allan Hughes]

I do. The Prince Rupert centre has one less person monitoring traffic and one less person monitoring radio.

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

And for the metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island?

[Allan Hughes]

It will be one less.

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

One less.

[Allan Hughes]

Because they have one person dedicated to manipulating the weather, putting on the continuous marine broadcast.