Evidence of meeting #127 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was vessels.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Hardie.
We'll now suspend for a moment to let our witnesses sign off or leave the room. If there's anyone online for the next session, we'll do a sound check to make sure everything is okay.
Thank you, everyone.
The meeting is suspended.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Welcome to the witnesses on our second panel.
We have, in the room, Joshua Charleson, executive director, Coastal Restoration Society; and from Québec Subaquatique, we have Marie-Christine Lessard, executive director, and Clément Drolet, diving instructor.
Thank you for taking time to appear today. You will each have five minutes or less for your opening statements.
I believe, Mr. Charleson, you're speaking on behalf of your group. You have five minutes or less, please.
Joshua Charleson Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
Good evening.
[Witness spoke in Hesquiaht]
[English]
My name is Joshua Charleson. I'm the executive director for the Coastal Restoration Society, and I live in Port Alberni, B.C.
I have four points on the current state of derelict vessels in Canada, as my team at Coastal Restoration see it, as well as a lot of the coastal first nations that we work with. Just let me know if I'm rambling on too long.
The first one is that it's very costly. A huge barrier to dealing with derelict vessels is the cost. It costs up to $60,000 per vessel to get rid of them. The costs include training a crew and include insurance, accommodations, logistics, vessels, crew, equipment, waste transport, heavy equipment, barge, staff and landfill fees. There are just so many costs to actually getting rid of a derelict vessel.
There's a lack of infrastructure, so there's a massive gap in infrastructure needs on Canadian coasts to deal with derelict vessels, which are causing environmental harm. Current infrastructure is not equipped to responsibly deal with end-of-life vessels, particularly the small vessels. Then there is the example of Union Bay. I'm not going to get into it because I only have so much time.
The return on investment isn't high enough for larger shipyards to dispose of pleasure crafts. There's a lack of incentives for vessel disposal, and that's contributing to the abandonment of vessels.
As for numbers, we have around 1,400 abandoned vessels or derelict vessels that have been recorded on the B.C. coast, and 700 of them are under 12 metres long, so they are considered a small vessel. An estimated 43,000 vessels require disposal annually across Canada, according to the Vard report in 2016. That's a lot of vessels that we have to deal with every single year. The longer we don't have the infrastructure to take care of it, the more they're just going to pile up and then just become somebody else's problem.
Around authority, there's always confusion over who is going to take ownership of it, going to authorize a vessel of concern or going to actually give the green light for a vessel to be removed. That needs to be settled because there are CCG, DFO, Transport Canada and provincial requirements, as well as first nations communities. You have to do the runaround to figure out who is actually going to do this.
This is the way we want to see Canada's derelict vessels dealt with in the future. The first one is that it's so costly. Building responsible infrastructure to deal with derelict vessels in Canadian waters will reduce harm to the environment and will reduce the cost of dismantling, landfilling and recycling derelict vessels substantially. Having dedicated facilities that reduce the need for field-based breakdown and extensive transportation can reduce disposal costs, if we actually had the infrastructure put into place.
As for responsible infrastructure, we're proposing to create a derelict vessel depot—there could probably be a better name for that—on the west coast of Vancouver Island that will be economically viable. It will provide full-time employment and training. It will reduce the cost to vessel owners and will provide a pathway for insurance agencies to fund the deconstruction of derelict vessels. It will provide closed-contained and environmentally safe shipwrecking, and it will provide space for innovation and technology in the recycling of derelict vessels in the future.
In terms of numbers, here is a little history. Since the 1950s, fibreglass boats have become very popular for commercial vessels as well as for recreational vessels. The problem with fibreglass is that the life expectancy is about 50 years, so now we're stuck with tens of thousands of these vessels that are near the end of their life expectancies. A vessel built in 1950 had an end of life in 2000, and it's just subsequent to that every single year.
The process we do to break down fibreglass vessels on the coast is to break them apart the best we can while trying not to release the fibres back into the environment. It's impossible to do if you're just doing it on the shore. Obviously, wind, water or any kind of little gust will bring up those particles and put them right back into the ocean. That's why we're talking about having an actual place to bring your vessel so that it's closed-contained, has the filters that are needed and nothing can escape. You have oil sumps, runoff catchment and everything like that in this.
I realized I'm missing a page somewhere, but we'll just continue.
As to how we're dealing with it on Vancouver Island—our waste management—I found this out only when we were doing derelict vessels out of Ladysmith. People know it as the “dogpatch”.
We were removing a bunch, and I called waste management, asking them why we have to break everything down to a metre. That's to fit it into their landfill bins. From Ladysmith, it goes to Nanaimo. From Nanaimo, it gets put on a barge and goes over to Delta. It gets put on a truck, then onto a tram, goes down to the States, gets put on another truck and then ends up in a landfill. For us to remove one footprint—one boat in Ladysmith—it goes through all of those stages.
We're leaving footprints all the way across the map just to get rid of one footprint on that beach. We need more responsibility.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Charleson. We've gone a bit over time.
I want to go now to Ms. Lessard for five minutes or less, please.
Marie-Christine Lessard Executive Director, Québec Subaquatique
Good evening. My name is Marie‑Christine Lessard, and I'm the executive director of Québec Subaquatique.
Québec Subaquatique is a non-profit organization that helps divers dive safely in Quebec waters. Most of our work has to do with scuba diving regulations within Quebec, but we also have a diving base in Les Escoumins, where some 800 divers a year come to dive in the St. Lawrence. The Les Escoumins diving base is in a Parks Canada site, the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park. As such, we have lots of data about the health of that part of the St. Lawrence. We also have a large database that covers all possible dive sites in Quebec.
That said, we have about 199 sites in Quebec waters, 31 of which have shipwrecks or artificial reefs and some of which are in lakes. One of our largest wrecks is still the Empress of Ireland, which is in the St. Lawrence.
I'll turn things over to Mr. Drolet now.
Clément Drolet Diving Instructor, Québec Subaquatique
My name is Clément Drolet, and I'm a diving instructor.
I've been diving for quite a while. I've visited lots of wrecks all over Quebec, Ontario and the south, of course.
I do technical diving training. I love marine life. Every now and then, we discover things, but we also observe things.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you.
We'll now go with our rounds of questioning.
We'll go to Mr. Perkins for six minutes or less, please.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
That's great. Those were the most efficient statements yet, so far. Thank you.
Mr. Charleson, it's nice to see you again. It feels like we're old friends since we met in the cafeteria this morning, thanks to MP Johns.
I want to give you an opportunity to talk about some of the things that you didn't get a chance to talk about. You mentioned something about Union Bay. Being an east coaster, I don't know what that's about. Could you tell us?
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
They're doing massive ship-breaking out of Union Bay. It's been all over the news on the west coast of Canada for causing environmental damage. There are different standards in how B.C. regulates copper effluent or zinc effluent. It's different from the standards that ECCC has. When ECCC goes in and does the testing, they don't see a problem with it, but the province has stricter guidelines on what you can actually release into the environment.
That's where there is that confusion between agencies. If it's provincial or federal, what actually are the regulations that are to be abided by when you're doing ship-breaking?
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Is that one of the few places that can actually do this work?
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
I'm not too sure, to be honest, on the actual designated areas of doing ship-breaking. It's kind of just done as funding is available—
November 6th, 2024 / 5:50 p.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
We're talking only about mainly smaller recreational things.
On the east coast, our abandoned vessel issue is primarily but not exclusively old navy ships and old scallop draggers and that kind of thing, although we do have the odd sailboat that sinks and is a hazard. Is it generally in the volume of recreational boats where this is happening out in B.C.?
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
Yes. It's just the sheer volume and not having anywhere to really bring them. For the bigger shipyards, it's not worth it for them to take on a 21-foot vessel.
Oftentimes, as I think Lee was talking about earlier, you find them on logging routes. People buy the trailer because it's still a good trailer. They tie the boat to a tree and then just take off with the trailer. We see it all the time, because there's nowhere to take them. You can't just bring a boat to a landfill. You need to break it down to the metre chunks to be able to actually get rid of it. Even just throwing it away, you need to have heavy equipment.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
That costs money.
In my part of the world, as we heard from witnesses last week, we have a couple of famous vessels. Mr. Welsford talked about the ones in Bridgewater earlier, and there was the Farley Mowat. Part of the challenge has become where to scrap these vessels. We had a facility for that in my riding—it no longer exists—down in Shelburne County, where the Farley Mowat went. There was a facility in Cape Breton too. I don't know if it exists anymore.
Where to take these vessels seems to be a problem on all coasts, because if you don't deal with removing the vessels, there's no business case to scrap them. Is that the chicken-and-egg scenario we're in?
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
Yes, pretty well. It's because of fibreglass. Europe is working on solutions for how to recycle fibreglass, from conversations I've had with different organizations in B.C., but the problem with their process, from what I've heard, is that it's costly. For a kilogram of fibreglass, it costs one euro, and once you do the recycling, it could cost five to 10 times that.
That's what I've read and read into. They are developing the technology to start recycling so we can have a circular economy, but the science and innovation aren't quite there yet to make it economically feasible.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
One thing you talked about—I think it was number three—was incentives for people to dispose of vessels rather than dropping them off in the woods or doing other things. What are you thinking there, tax credits or...?
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
It's hard to jump right to incentives because there's no infrastructure to take a boat somewhere. How would we even create incentives for a boat owner to get rid of their boat when there's nowhere to bring it in the first place? I think we have to start off with that.
One thing we're starting to look into as a society is creating a derelict vessel depot in Port Alberni, because it has a deepwater harbour and we have an area where we can build a lift and create the infrastructure. We can make it economically viable by adding a shipyard that will subsidize our depot, and people can bring vessels in, bringing costs way down. Instead of dealing with a 45-foot fishing vessel that will cost us $50,000 or $60,000, we're hoping that having this infrastructure and building this depot will bring the cost down to $10,000 or $12,000.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
That presumes you can figure out who the owners are and whether a vessel was abandoned in the water, causing a hazard at a wharf, or was abandoned and towed away somewhere. Do you have any thoughts on that issue?
In the work that many of the witnesses have done, dealing with establishing ownership seems to be a barrier to doing anything, as Mr. Welsford was mentioning earlier.
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
That's probably one of the first steps that need to happen. You need to make sure that people are registering boats, but there's nobody checking. Nobody checks on the B.C. coast. I haven't seen anybody check anybody's boats—Transport Canada, the Coast Guard, DFO. There's nobody out there, so you can do whatever you want.
I have a boat. I don't have to register it, but I do. That's my decision. I'm not forced to. There are no laws or penalties—there's nothing. If I wanted to buy 10 boats, I could just leave them unregistered and put them on the beach. You'd never know they were mine. I'm not going to do that, but it's possible.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Perkins.
We'll now go to Mr. Cormier for six minutes or less, please.
Liberal
Serge Cormier Liberal Acadie—Bathurst, NB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Just quickly, I'll go back to Mr. Charleson. My colleague Mr. Perkins already asked some questions on this, but just to make sure, did you say the derelict vessel depot already exists in your area, or is it something you want to build or create?
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
This is something we want to create. We're reaching out to partners and looking at funding agencies to support our vision of creating this depot so that it can be used as a framework in the coming years for putting it in major ports, like over on the east side of Vancouver Island, in Prince Rupert and in Nova Scotia. It's about creating a model of responsible infrastructure to take care of derelict vessels into the future and bringing the cost down for owners so that vessels don't get derelict in the first place.
Liberal
Serge Cormier Liberal Acadie—Bathurst, NB
Then no such infrastructure exists in your area in B.C. I'm not sure if you're from B.C.—sorry—but I think you're from B.C. You're saying no infrastructure of that type exists.
Executive Director, Coastal Restoration Society
No, not on the scale that we're thinking. I don't know of any. There are lots of smaller organizations that do salvage, but we're talking about the 43,000 vessels annually—that has been reported—that Canada has to deal with. We 100% do not have the infrastructure to take care of that number of vessels.
I think that's why we're doing the study now. We all have to put our heads together and figure out where to start, where we're going and what the future is going to look like to make sure that owners will be responsible with their boats going forward.
