Welcome to B.C., beautiful British Columbia.
My name is John Roe. I'm one of the founding members of the Veins of Life Watershed Society and the Dead Boats Disposal Society. We formed as an organization almost 30 years ago in the cleanup and the restoration of the Victoria Harbour and the Gorge Waterway here in Victoria.
Our partners have always been heavy industry. We work with a company called Ralmax Group of Companies. They are in partnership with the Songhees and Esquimalt first nations in a facility where they have the equipment, which we need and which we always dreamed about, for Salish Sea Industrial Services.
I have personally removed probably.... Let's back up a little bit here. I participated in the provincial and the federal programs where we removed over 253, but over my lifetime, we removed over 500 with our partners...well over 500 and hundreds of tonnes of garbage. Our forte is source control, so we try to stop stuff from going in. That includes boats, but it's also marine pollution and things like that. Beach cleanups, restoration...we've been involved in that.
We're active. We have been working with our cohorts on the ground. We have received funding from the federal government and the provincial government on this, for which we're grateful, but there need to be changes here to make it more efficient.
If I can have the time to talk about that, for me, it's pretty simple. We've been at this for a long time. Again, I listened to the last conversation, spouting off the number of 1,600 vessels. Well, it's double if not triple that. There's no indication of what's under the water. We deal with water in the tidal areas, with 60-foot up to 80-foot boats. We do surveys and drone work of the surface, air and underwater, and I'll tell you that there's a lot more there. Our organization works from Port Renfrew all the way to the top of the tip of Alaska.
We need a different plan; let's put it that way. We need to go in and survey these areas. We need to see what's in each one of these bays and inlets, and then we need to put it out to tender for removal. We have these programs—a fishnet program, a beach cleanup program and this program—and there's no integration of all this. The monies that we're spending are way beyond reason. The monies going out are just....
For instance, in 2017, before the federal government got involved with the derelict and abandoned boats program, we took out 14 boats from Cadboro Bay. I seized them under my own personal name before the Dead Boats Disposal Society was formed, and we took them off for $14,700. Today, the cost of those boats is about $14,700 each. Everybody got paid except for me. I'm just a volunteer in all this.
We need to take a hard look at what we're doing. We need to come up with a plan here, and we need to implement it. There are just so many issues to talk about. You touched on them before. Disposal—there is no real place to dispose of it in B.C. We have a lot of land transfer stations. They don't want it in their dumps, so we end up bringing it back to the capital regional districts with our partners. Then we have to go through a solid process of testing, which is added to the cost, and I understand that. However, what is showing up are heavy metals—mercury, zinc, copper, asbestos and all that—which we knew were present before, but the data helps to prove what we're saying, which is that you have to get them out of the ocean in the first place.
I'm open to questions. We've been at it, like I say, for 30 years, and we work everywhere. Thank you.