Through the chair, thank you.
The fixed buoy program, where it can actually be licensed and put in correctly, holds a boat in place and does work quite well when there is a landowner who can keep an eye on the boat and look after it. Making a more elaborate program under federal navigation to authorize and license buoys is a good thing to do if you're going to anchor.
The other thing is to not allow anybody to anchor over a couple of days in any one place and to find a way of policing that. There are examples of where that does work—False Creek and Nanaimo Harbour—where there is a body that can monitor it, get people to move on when they stay too long and take care of boats that are basically abandoned at anchor illegally. That involves having an organization that will do it and also giving them the authority to do it, which doesn't happen in the rural areas where most of this stuff is occurring. It would require some changes in regulation if you went that way.
The only other way that would work would be to increase monitoring by the existing official bodies like the Coast Guard and start enforcing those regulations.
I have to say that, when the boat is sunk, we can then do something about it, because the local people will identify where it is. They'll start all the paperwork. At that point, we do pick it up and crunch it up. The problem is solved as long as the boat is small enough that we can handle it.
Our greatest fear right now is if our Pacific Challenger goes down. It's a 160-foot steel boat. The Coast Guard has removed most of the pollutants, but when something like that goes down to the bottom of the ocean, it causes a lot of damage when it hits. You can't find a spot deep enough in a little harbour where it doesn't become a natural reef, let's call it. In fact, it becomes a hazard to navigation. We need to find a way of looking after those bigger boats as well, because the community and our existing program just can't handle that part of it. It has to be a multijurisdictional effort to get together and figure out solutions.