It's the collection of the data. The information the federal government is providing now is from a survey done in 2014 and published in 2016. I got it through an FOI request, but it wasn't actually open to the public until almost 2020. I went out in 2017 and looked for all those 1,700 boats. I found maybe 400 of them. The rest of them had either gone or disappeared. In the meantime, I found a lot more. One of the problems with the thing is a proper inventory.
This is where we non-profits can specialize. It's not so much in the disposal. I would like to leave that to heavy industry in a bidding process to break it up more equally and bring the costs down, but what we can do as a non-profit is go in and survey these bays and look for everything. We can look at stormwater. We can look at....
We need to rebuild our fisheries here in B.C. A lot of it stems from the estuaries, where the damage is. We have old, abandoned docks. We have lots of abandoned boats. Take a look from the tidal area all the way to 60-feet deep. Let's do a survey there and present it back to the federal government. The federal government will go and present it and put it out to tender. Pick a bay or an inlet or anything else—pick five of them.
The organization I work with is a big organization when it gets on the ground. It costs us about $20,000 a day to put our barges and cranes in the water. That's expensive, but it's not when you compare it to how much we can do in a day. We went out to a job site in Burgoyne Bay in the first application, and we took out 17 boats in four days. We lost 10 days due to bad weather because it was in the wrong time of year.
The most important things are what's out there and how do we train the public to identify what is an abandoned boat and what's not an abandoned boat. What you might think is an abandoned boat and what is an abandoned boat...after working through this process, a lot of the time, it's not. It's getting that information and getting it correct, and then governments step in and ask how much it's going to cost to do this. It's going to do it in July and August. Let the big companies bid on it.