Evidence of meeting #7 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 victoria.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
So actually overall, then, the number of people who are actually engaged in monitoring traffic or broadcasting to the ocean are maybe a few less than before the consolidation.
4 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
True. However, the ability for those officers to be able to pick out a distress call, due to those 63 channels coming through one speaker, is going to be greatly diminished.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Did they use the signal strength of the individual towers to triangulate the location of vessels?
4 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
There are a number of direction-finding sites located on the coast. There are three in the Victoria area. Comox didn't have it because of the placement of the radio towers, and Prince Rupert used to have a significant network of them. They've slowly diminished over the years, so again, the direction finder is only good as long as you have a strong signal and a continuous signal that can lock on the position, because in the summertime in Victoria you may have 30 transmissions going out on distress and call-in channel 16 at any given time.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Let's talk then about the radio system itself. It has been described as 21st century and I gather that this could conceivably apply to some of it but not all of it.
4:05 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
The technology they've instituted, we had touch screens in Vancouver and Victoria. It's just an updated touch screen to select the channel and the ability to be able to take the signals, say, from Tofino and move them to Prince Rupert using data compression. I don't want to get into too many technical details, but they're susceptible to land line failures. If a telephone pole goes down they can sever everything else off downstream.
Really, this consolidation project is a leveraged technology that was unproven, certainly in our domain, to the extent that it's being implemented, and was rolled out before being fully tested, as my colleague Scott Hodge testified before about the issues that happened up in Iqaluit. The audio issues continue to this day in Prince Rupert and Victoria, in Sarnia—
4:05 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
It's like an echo, and because you hit numerous radio sites it may come in on the recording device. Somebody may come in and play it and it will sound fine, but if you're sitting in the room and there are six speakers feeding everything in, there's a time delay, and it almost sounds like you're talking in a garbage can. There have been search and rescue cases where we didn't even know they were trying to call us, and I witnessed that in Sarnia. A search and rescue aircraft was flying over Lake Winnipeg, and of course at altitude they hit numerous sites, and I said to the officer, “What the bleep was that?” and he said, “I have no idea.” He hit his call check recorder and it was an aircraft dropping flares over Lake Winnipeg.
So I've witnessed those. Those challenges are still there for our officers, and there seems to be a real disconnect between the regional Coast Guard and Ottawa with regard to addressing those issues.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Robert Sopuck
Thank you. Time's up. Exactly seven minutes. Congratulations to both of you.
Mr. Strahl.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Thank you, Mr. Hughes and Mr. Moxey, for your testimony. I find it interesting that Mr. Moxey closed with it. Of course, as the Conservative member I find it amusing that the new government has wholeheartedly rejected the advice of the Coast Guard to close down the Kits Coast Guard station and has wholeheartedly embraced the closure of the Comox MCTS station with the same advice from the same people, as Mr. Moxey said.
We're here to talk about that second part, the closure of Comox. In previous testimony, in a meeting quite some time ago now, on March 10—this question is for Mr. Hughes—Mr. Lick, director general of operations of the Canadian Coast Guard, said that they estimated closing Comox would save $500,000 to $700,000 a year. Unifor countered, saying that it would cost up to $1 million to $2.2 million per year in extra overtime charges for the new centres.
Then a response to a question I asked to Mr. Hodge, your colleague, indicated that Unifor wasn't opposed to consolidation, but just to doing it this way, and he talked about Unifor's recommendation as being to move Vancouver to Victoria, Tofino to Comox, and make no change at Prince Rupert.
That was Unifor's recommendation. He indicated to me, after the meeting when he looked at some preliminary data, that he thought it would actually be cheaper to maintain those three stations than to consolidate, as is now planned. I'm wondering whether you have had a chance to reflect on that idea. Do you concur with it?
Obviously this consolidation was done. There are 22 stations going to 11; there's an attempt to save the government money—or at least that used to be a priority with the Conservative government. But perhaps you can talk about whether there will be any cost savings and, if not, why not.
4:05 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
The Coast Guard has embarked on many studies over the years—it could be concerning light stations—and certainly they have looked at MCTS in earnest ever since our last consolidation, which was our union members' initiative—to go from 44 to 22 back in the 1990s to save about $14.7 million a year. We're not opposed to consolidation, but it has to make sense.
The Coast Guard did a study in the early 2000s. They called it the least cost analysis—LCA, we called it. It was studied. They went to their integrated business management unit at the time, and the response came back that three centres was the least cost solution, and it was just what you suggested. Vancouver obviously had a high least cost, at $800,000 for that building at Harbour Centre and least cost as well on the roof for the antennas. Closing that and moving it to Victoria obviously financially made sense.
Prince Rupert is a problem, because nobody wants to live there. We hire officers, and as soon as they get in, they try to get out as fast as they can. If they're not successful in the MCTS world, they leave. When we talk about least cost, we have to factor in everything. It costs $100,000 to train one of our officers, over the course of about eight months. When you have 40 officers go through that centre in a period of 12 years and the staffing complement is only 30, you have a retention issue, and it's because of where it's located.
We wouldn't want to expand or exacerbate that staffing situation up there. The simple operation would be to put a microwave link in to send Tofino over to Comox. Through access to information I obtained information that part of the decision-making process was that the assistant commissioner at the time didn't feel there was adequate space for one more desk in Comox. That centre was built for expansion; this was always something that they studied. Then in the early 1990s they knew something was going to come to consolidate things.
There's plenty of room in that centre for another desk. It's a desk with some monitors.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
Unifor, then, maintains still that this is going to be an additional cost to the government, to the tune of half a million to one and a half million dollars per year.
4:10 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
If you're just looking at absolute fixed costs—salaries, number of people—sure there might be, on the books, savings of half a million dollars, because you're saving an officer in charge, and they cut six supervisory positions. Those are among the safety positions they eliminated that they thought they could get away with because the weather information was being automated.
At the end of the day, however, if you're going from a $400,000 overtime budget in Victoria to something that exceeds $2 million every year and will for the next six years, what's the haste in closing the centre? You're going to lose 200 years of experience when that centre closes in less than a month. These are people who are not just going to retire. These are people who are literally putting themselves out on the street without work. They're fearful of the situation that's developing in Victoria with the concentration of noise and the complexity and what's going to transpire down there.
Flight service went through a very similar situation a number of years ago. The former commissioner was part of that project with NavCan. They consolidated too far. They've looked, and they have to expand it again.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Strahl Conservative Chilliwack—Hope, BC
The final question is on the study. Obviously it's time sensitive. There was agreement from this side of the table and one of the members on the other side to move ahead to study this as well.
To say that it's just a recommendation and essentially the members of Parliament don't matter in this case, and that they will proceed without the recommendation of this committee I think is contrary to what we heard in the House, and what the spirit of the motion is so it may not meet the criterion for contempt of Parliament but it certainly is contemptuous to have heard the things we have heard. Since this study started there has been an acceleration of this move to consolidate.
Maybe you could talk briefly about that.
4:10 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
Our regional management in Victoria was very clear even as far back as December when the minister came out to visit the Coast Guard base at Huron Street to meet staff and see the new helicopters.
Speaking with them informally, because we're all colleagues, we talked about the closure. And I went into one of the manager's offices, and in October 2016, he had a date up there for the Comox closure.
We don't want to rush this closure. We want to make sure the equipment works properly, and that our staffing situation is sustainable.
This came out of the blue. We really thought the time for this committee to study this closure would give us some breathing room to take us over a second look at the closure, and why the uniqueness of the B.C. south coast warrants the situation.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Robert Sopuck
I'm afraid time's up. Thank you very much.
Mr. Donnelly, you have seven minutes.
4:10 p.m.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
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?
4:15 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
Certainly.
Unifor has filed lots of access to information requests. For anybody who's gone through that process, they're not always timely in their arrival. I was hoping to have some recordings of that equipment for you today. I could certainly walk out onto the operations room floor in any of those centres with my cellphone and record something, but that's not accessing it through the proper channels. Those communications are privileged, and certainly they have to be screened before they're released for public consumption.
With regard to the training, and then the staffing plan for Victoria, Coast Guard management doesn't even know how many people are actually coming from Victoria. They handed out to our officers two weeks ago letters that had a reporting date of last year. We don't even really have a firm date of when we're supposed to report. Nothing's been told to those officers.
The bottom line is that they need 50 officers to make that run on a 1960 staffing standard. It doesn't take into account anything like maternity leave, paternity leave, care and nurturing leave, or any of those extra provisions that have been granted to working people over the last 40 years. The staffing factor of 5.5 per operating position is out the window. It should be up around seven. This committee heard testimony with regard to that in the early 2000s, saying it should be increased to seven.
So running short...we have a lot of part-time staff who work in Victoria. To train people up to be ready to go, it takes two years at that centre. We have officers who are 20-year veterans and have never worked at Vancouver harbour. They haven't even started their training, and it takes months just for that sector in Vancouver harbour because of the complexity and what's involved in actually making sure those tankers get through, and get through safely, without incident.
4:15 p.m.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
If they haven't started the training, and it takes up to two years, and we're less than two months away from closing the station, how is it that management can say that we can safely do this and still keep the safety on the waters?
4:15 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
They're going to do it with massive amounts of overtime and reducing the number of people who are on each watch.
4:15 p.m.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Okay.
On the echoey transmissions, I know that my colleague Nathan Cullen, the MP from Skeena—Bulkley Valley, was up in Prince Rupert over the two weeks we were at home in our ridings. He visited the station, and he heard the echoey transmissions happening while he was there. I don't know if you can provide any comment on what he heard. I know there was also a team that was flown in to be with him at that time.
Do you have any comments about that?
4:20 p.m.
President, Local 2182, Unifor
A search and rescue case unfolded that day in Prince Rupert, during that visit, and the distress call that came in was garbled. It was unintelligible. It was only through quick acting by our officer that we were able to play back and actually get the position of that vessel. The lifeboat communications out of Tofino were terrible.
It's one thing to pull a recording up on a piece of recording equipment that's sitting somewhere else and listen to one radio site, but our officers aren't listening to one radio site. They're listening in Prince Rupert to 22 on over 80 separate channels. When it hits multiple sites on the same channel, it comes in as garbled.
That's the issue we have that has not been addressed. There have been some other minor technical issues. I don't know why they haven't been addressed. There seems to be a disconnect between what our officers are reporting to management and what's being done to actually correct the problem.
Will they correct the problem? Even if the contractor doesn't do that, I have full confidence in our technical staff, who are amazing, to eventually address that. But the fact that it was rolled out, putting mariners' safety at risk, before it was fully operationalized? It's dangerous.
4:20 p.m.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
In the half a minute I have left, it seems like the workload, and also the amount of noise you'll have with more desks and monitors, will be intense for this Victoria station once Comox to Vancouver is consolidated in this one area.
Just as a final comment, Mr. Moxey, you mentioned that the Comox station is like a lifeboat. I'm wondering if you could elaborate in a couple of sentences on why the Comox station is so important.