That's a very interesting question, because you're talking to a biologist and not a lawyer, but I'm learning a lot, quickly...or over 20 years perhaps.
There's a process called escheatment, and it's usually provincial legislation. It's almost equivalent in British Columbia to as it is in Nova Scotia. If a company has an asset, whether it's property or otherwise, and if that company fails somehow, then that asset escheats to the provincial Crown.
In the case of British Columbia, the ship-source oil pollution fund, with the Coast Guard as a partner, pursued the Province of British Columbia to enforce this law of escheatment and to have it assume ownership of vessels in that situation. The province lost. It was appealed, and the province lost.
I'm sure if you look into the province's budgets these days, it has a budget for the disposal of abandoned vessels. In Nova Scotia, it didn't pursue that route.