Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I'd like to thank Mr. Hughes and Mr. Moxey for your years of service and dedication to the Coast Guard and to our country, and definitely for your testimony here today at our committee. I do agree it is alarming that you're hearing the words from management saying we're going to accelerate this program while it's being studied by this parliamentary committee.
In my short time I wanted to focus on workload and training, some of the issues you brought up. I have a map that shows part of the area. You brought to the committee's attention that this area we're looking at takes over 40% of the nation's traffic on the water. That's a huge amount of traffic, over half of British Columbia's traffic in this area.
You have mentioned workload issues. We've talked about technical issues. We've heard those problems in past testimony. We're going from five stations in terms of this modernization and consolidation down to two. The concern here for public safety is with that one closure. That's what we're down to, closing one centre. What you're saying I think in a very reasonable and modest way is going to two is too much. We've heard from Mr. Moxey who has said the Comox station is like a lifeboat.
I want to come back to your comment about training. It takes two years. What we've heard from this committee is management has said they can be ready for the transition now. Can you comment on that? We also heard in the past about echoey transmissions. The question was why couldn't we have heard more recent submissions on these echoey transmissions? Why so far back?
Could you comment on those two things?