Fisheries Committee on March 29th, 2022

[Ben Boulton]

There is a huge amount of other debris. We are focusing our surveys on suspected Zim Kingston debris. We hope that the Coast Guard will bring to light and confirm whether we know which debris is from which spill, but that requires sharing of the manifest, and unfortunately the manifest doesn't sound very detailed. We have specific items—

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you. I have about 30 seconds left, I think, for a question for Mr. Reid.

You mentioned there is no salvage capability on the west coast. Would you like to elaborate on that?

[Stafford Reid]

Yes. Salvage is a very special requirement, and I include firefighting. For example, when the Zim Kingston was on fire, we were very lucky to have two offshore supply vessels right there in Victoria to provide a lot of firefighting capability. Well, that's part of salvage.

The other part of salvage is having emergency pumps that can pump bilge water. If the bilge pumps in the Zim Kingston had failed, you'd have needed to get some pumps in there before that vessel would sink, because you'd be pouring a lot of water into that vessel.

With the Zim Kingston, they knew they had to keep that hull cool, because heat stress could have cracked that entire vessel and it could have sunk. It was a good strategy to understand that you needed to put a little water in there, but salvage would have been able to provide some emergency temporary hull patching to mitigate any kind of structural failure.

None of the major salvage providers in the world reside here. There's no representation like SMIT, Ardent, Mammoet, or any of the other 50 major salvage companies worldwide. We don't have any storage depots for large salvage equipment that's required, which you can put on a vessel or helicopter.

The three critical interventions that must be done are emergency towing—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I'm sorry, Mr. Reid, but I have to cut you off there. You're about a minute and a half over the allotted time. If you could send in the remainder of your response to the committee, we would appreciate it.

We'll now go to Mr. Hardie for four minutes or less, please.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Boulton, your narrative is very similar to what we've heard before. Mr. Arnold referenced what we heard with the Fraser Valley flooding. There were so many groups and so many good-hearted generous people out to help, but the coordination was really a challenge. I would ask you to put in writing your recommendations as to how we can fix that for the purposes of helping us complete the report on this study for the government.

Mr. Reid, do we keep track of containers that have sunk? Are they mapped, and do we go back and check them to see what state they're in?

[Stafford Reid]

No, we don't. That's part of it. That's a salvage operation, again, and requires side scan sonars supported by remotely operated vehicles with cameras. There is only one guideline that's out there that talks about—

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Again, I'm very sorry but I have to intercede because our time for questioning is quite short.

The Queen of the North went down in 2006. My guess is that we're still seeing material from that, and we're still seeing material from the tsunami in Japan. These incidents have a very, very long tail on them. In planning, do we not have to plan for the fact that we're going to be dealing with the outcome of an accident or a disaster for years to come? Is that planning in place?

[Stafford Reid]

No, it's not; an example being that with containers when you have styrofoam and nurdles—those are little plastic pellets—they're much more insidious and have much more long-term impact than even oil. If you don't recover them, they get buried in sediments, and we don't have a long-term understanding of all the ecological impacts. So no, we do not.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Would that then speak to some kind of a longer-term funding mechanism to look after this—more of an insurance package, rather than letting an individual shipper off the hook in six years?

[Stafford Reid]

Well, that comes down to shipowners' limit of liability. They have the ability to reach a limit, a financial limit, and basically relinquish any kind of response in incident management. That limit of liability, how much money is actually available, is never, ever communicated, because once they reach [Technical difficulty—Editor] and that includes all the long-term monitoring, the recovering of the containers and everything. So we don't know what the limit of liability is. We don't know what the burden rate is. We don't know—

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Then we perhaps need a different structure if we're to take care of the long-term impacts.

[Stafford Reid]

That's correct, and the ship-source oil pollution fund is not the way to go.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Hardie.

We'll now go to Madam Gaudreau for four minutes or less, please.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all our witnesses. They have given us a lot of information to help us better understand the situation. Ultimately, they show that protecting our oceans is not a priority for Quebec and Canada. We will have to put this priority at the forefront so that it becomes a political will.

In the next few minutes, I'm going to ask the witnesses to give us some additional information that will help us do our work.

Mr. Reid, you said that there were few providers of rescue operations. I understand that this is not the case elsewhere in the world.

Can you give me an example of good practices with respect to equipment or rescue operations?

We could include this in our report and give the government free rein to implement this measure quickly. You can also send us more information in writing later, if you wish.

[Stafford Reid]

I've sent in a fairly substantive 11-page report that covers many of these issues here. It was provided a few days ago. The best practices for salvage are to actually have some salvage exercises, an analysis of who are the salvage—

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Mr. Reid, but unfortunately the interpretation isn't working. We have to make some checks.

[Stafford Reid]

I have provided a written submission that covers many of the topics, from limits of liability to a lot of the topics that have been raised in this meeting in the way of [Technical difficulty—Editor], in a strategic and meaningful way. My submission has been provided to you.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Reid.

Mr. Boulton, I've heard about the complexity and the lack of consultation and political will. What reassures me today is that the situation isn't due to a lack of interest or competence. What is missing is funding, or a decision by the committee that will go to the House of Commons. If protecting our oceans, our fisheries and what we eat is really important, it will come out in the coming days. That reassures me, and I wanted to mention it to you.

However, I would also like you to assure me that, in the report on debris, you've made all the recommendations we need to collect, demystify and better understand the origin of our debris.

[Ben Boulton]

This will require.... I will provide more in writing, as time is probably running out, on more resources to look at past spills so we can attribute different debris to different spills. What this comes down to is funding from the federal government and resource allocation, such that we can use it at the time of incident. It's not just removals but also data collection, focusing on data collection from day one so we can establish our baseline.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

In 30 seconds, do you think that, if the public was aware of this data—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Excuse me, but the time has gone way over. We did allow for the little interruption.

I'll now go to Ms. Barron for four minutes or less, please.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for all of their work to protect our coastlines and marine environments.

I want to ask Mr. Boulton a question.

It's nice to see you. Can you expand a bit on what you were discussing around the manifest?

A few pieces I'm hoping you can expand on are the lack of access to a detailed manifest of items that have spilled from the Zim Kingston, the work you're doing to establish a manifest and a bit more information on how many items you are discovering in the process of creating this manifest and what the items are.

[Ben Boulton]

To keep it brief—again, recommendations will be provided in writing—I have 67 suspected Zim Kingston items, which include different particulate matter from packaging, which degrades quite quickly. It is important to establish where this debris comes from, from day one.

Our database that we are producing, in partnership with other B.C. marine working group members, comes from the data collected from individuals who have been involved since our day one of response, from the engagement point. This includes a database of photos, high-quality images from different angles, noticeable markings, serial numbers and whatever we can find. We're tabulating that into this manifest.

I'm assuming with the manifest, when we talk about the helmets and the mats, the general category is probably a container full of sports equipment. That doesn't give us a lot of detail. This is something we could lobby the federal government to add into its regulations. We could ask for, from shipping containers coming into our ports, a detailed materials manifest so that we can actually attribute debris to each spill.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you very much.

My next question is for Mr. Reid.

You mentioned that you worked with the Haida Nation in 2019 to prepare a marine incident exercise. Could you speak a bit more to this exercise, and any push-back you might have received from the federal government during this process?