Thank you.
Some of the things that I'm seeing first-hand—and I'm sure the Canadian Coast Guard is seeing these first-hand—are the impacts on food security, the surrounding marine ecosystem, the wildlife and foods. There are endless implications to this.
I'm just going to ask some more questions specific to what you're referencing here.
There are a couple of things. From the stats I have, we know that from 2016 to 2023, across Canada, for every three vessels added to the registry, there was only one removed. We know that in British Columbia, there have been five vessels for every one, so that number is much higher.
I have all these different charts and numbers that show in various regions how many are being cleaned up, how many are being added and how many are unknown. There are all these different stats we can look at, but one trend that we can see is that the number of vessels being abandoned by far outnumbers the number of vessels that are being cleaned up.
Despite the work of so many people who are out on the water—doing their best, to be clear—clearly there's a gap somewhere. I'm wondering what you see as some of the gaps and why we're not able to keep up with the vessels that are being abandoned.
For the next question, I would like to know about the prevention side of it, but perhaps we could focus on this first.