Certainly. Thank you for the question.
I'm getting terrible feedback. Is the committee hearing that as well? No? All right.
When we found with the international oil spill regime that it was likely the international agreements didn't provide enough compensation to pay for the likely cost of spills and cleanup, Canada set about creating its own fund, a supplementary system to support cleanup efforts. They imposed a small levy on the volume of oil being transmitted through Canadian ports, and they created the oil spill pollution fund.
That's exactly the kind of approach we're recommending taking here. It has the benefit of spreading the risk that is currently borne by the ocean and by coastal communities and spreading it out over a vast number of players. The number of containers being shipped through our ports is huge. The levy would only need to be quite small in order to create a substantial fund that could then be used to fund and create a permanent joint spill response task force. When I say “joint”, I mean joint with the first nations on whose territory these spills occur, the federal government and the provincial government.
This has to be done co-operatively with all jurisdictions, because all jurisdictions are fully engaged in dealing with the sequela of a spill. Such a force would need to be tasked with creating geographic response plans, planning the response timelines, setting policy for response objectives, end-points of the cleanup, if you will. It needs to recruit, train, equip and drill a workforce that's capable of responding to spills quickly, and to develop the infrastructure that's needed to support that task force, because there is virtually no infrastructure in most of these remote areas that are impacted by the spills.
There's also work that needs to be done at the international level, and that is to modernize the shipping regime. It is unacceptable that it continues to provide virtually no liability. In the face of economic drivers that are creating larger ships that are less seaworthy, in the face of increasing Pacific storms, we absolutely need some intervention here to update that regime. It's going to take years and co-operation of trade partners, for sure, but Canada can play a leading role in that, and I believe we should. Work needs to be done at both the IMO and the United Nations Environment Programme where we could work on eliminating expanded polystyrene foam as a packing material, certainly in the case of anything being shipped by marine container.
Finally, we need response equipment that's commensurate with the size of the ships that are using our ports and the nature of the cargo. This is a point we made throughout the hearings into the pipelines that were scheduled for Vancouver and the central coast. We just don't have—