Hello and thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to this committee. I appreciate it.
I'll give you a very quick introduction to me. I have had a career of about 48 years now in environmental emergency protection and management, for the last 30 years of which I have been engaged specifically in environmental emergency preparedness response. I have been running my own environmental emergency consulting firm for the last 15 years, and for the last eight years I've been working extensively with coastal first nations, mostly on the northern and central coast of British Columbia from Vancouver Island north and up, including Haida Gwaii, on all matters related to marine incidents.
This allows me to have a fairly good insight and to sort of look under the table on many aspects regarding the ability to manage a major container incident. I paid very close attention to the Zim Kingston incident. Basically, when you start to peel back the layers that we have in place in the way of regulations in safe shipping and incident management, we've come a long way. We have safe shipping, but you have to peel it back a little bit and realize that we are not really operationally prepared by the Government of Canada, the province or coastal first nations to deal with an actual container vessel for such things as identifying a safe place of refuge if that vessel needs to be brought in to shore for salvage operations. We don't have any salvage capability here on the coast, so there are really critical interventions that have to be worked on.
We have made some mileage on emergency towing for the interim with the Coast Guard leasing some very large tugs, recognizing that there is a limit on what they can handle in the way of emergency tug rescuing.
When we actually lose containers, there's really very little response to track the actual floating containers other than throwing some tracking buoys in the water. Finding and recovering the sunken ones is very difficult. It's a salvage operation. When it gets down to the point of actually removing the containers and recovering the debris from the shores, those are really complex processes that require shoreline cleanup assessment techniques and the ability to muster a workforce that is not only registered but screened, hired, supervised, equipped and paid. Being paid is a big thing. Building that workforce is really important.
We then have some institutional challenges with regard to incident management in the sense that under unified command there are jurisdictions for environmental emergencies that are allowed and entitled to be in unified command. That includes the stewards and trustees in the natural resources, those who have mandates, and those who are first nations with rights and titles. When you set unified command, those jurisdictions include things like the Canadian Coast Guard, maybe Transport Canada or the province with the Ministry of the Environment, local government and all first nations. You don't get to cherry-pick who comes in. Any first nations on whose territorial waters there are threats or actual impacts are entitled to be in unified command.
There's a little bit of work that needs to be done in that area.
That's my opening statement. This topic, when you start to peel back the layers, is mind-numbingly complex, and I could go on forever on any one of the topics I talked about. I'm open to questions now.