Fisheries Committee on April 7th, 2022

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

Thank you, Chair.

My question is for Mr. Hall.

Mr. Hall, Rugged Coast Research Society is one of our former witnesses. They spoke about the process of trying to do their best to accumulate a manifest of items that are washing ashore from the Zim Kingston, because there was no manifest provided and there isn't enough information being provided ahead of time.

I'm wondering if you can share your thoughts around what you think might be helpful to ensure that a manifest is shared with organizations when spills like this occur and what that might look like.

[Christopher Hall]

Thanks for the question. That is interesting. Certainly all cargo on a ship is very highly documented through a ship's manifest, so I can't answer the question specifically as to why it was not shared or why it took a while to obtain that information. However, that information certainly would have been in the hands of certain Canadian agencies, namely the Canada Border Services Agency. It would have that information, as would the shipper itself.

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

Perhaps you could expand a bit on this manifest you're speaking of. How detailed is the manifest you've seen? What level of detail do we see on that manifest?

[Christopher Hall]

It depends on the commodity, but they are relatively detailed. If it's a hazardous good, it would indicate the UN number, what the quantity is, its point of origin—those types of details. It's the basic information you would expect on a product being shipped.

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

If the product is not hazardous, is there a different level of information available on the manifest?

[Christopher Hall]

The information regarding dangerous goods would not be there, obviously, if it's not a dangerous good, but quantities, volumes, mass or dimensions—those types of things—should be available.

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

Okay. I guess I'm thinking out loud now. One of the barriers that I've been hearing about over and over again is that the manifest is not detailed enough, even if it were to be provided to coastal organizations. These organizations—first nations and those on the ground—are trying their best to create their own manifest to understand the items that are washing ashore. It makes it challenging as well for polluter responsibility without that manifest being made available to organizations, so I'm trying to understand that.

I think my two and a half minutes are over, so I will stop talking, but I hope we can dig further into that. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron.

We'll now go to Mr. Small for five minutes or less.

Go ahead, please.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for giving me the opportunity to ask the witnesses some questions here today. I'm really excited to have Mr. Hall here, a true expert in this field.

Mr. Hall, we know there's increasing commercial pressure on these container ships and masters to meet very rigorous schedules given the increased demand in the shipping of goods and the supply chain and all of that. Do you think any of that came into play in the case of the Zim Kingston here?

[Christopher Hall]

I'm sorry but I can't actually answer that. I wouldn't have that type of knowledge on that situation.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

That's all right.

I want to talk to you about something that you definitely do have knowledge on. There are some pretty inexpensive EPIRBs available out there now on the market. I was just looking at one for $450, and the rate on a container from Asia or Europe is about $25,000 a day now.

Is it possible that we could simply fit some of the containers that have volatile contents and styrofoam and whatnot with an EPIRB, so that we could locate them rapidly and extract them from the ocean?

[Christopher Hall]

I would not profess to be an expert on fitting of EPIRBs to containers, but I'm sure, as I mentioned earlier, that technical solutions do exist for tracking, and I think solutions could be found by the right people.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

EPIRBs are in all of the life rafts and lifeboats, and you can even have one on your life vest if you want. I was just thinking that it might be something we could incorporate.

Are there ways to retrieve these containers from the ocean floor using big electromagnets or something? We could make this process really fast, because the ultimate goal here is to mitigate the damaging effects of those containers as soon as possible. Wouldn't you think?

[Christopher Hall]

I would agree that the ultimate goal is to mitigate the damage, of course, but I would again go back to my initial remarks that the focus should also be on preventing the incident from occurring in the first place. Let's prevent the containers from going overboard first and then, as a fallback option, if they do go over, then we clean them up.

In terms of recovering them from the sea floor, that can be a complex operation. The depth is a big determining factor, but technology does exist in the industry to recover objects of difficult shapes and sizes at depth. That it can be done.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

In your opinion, what would be the number one way in which we could cut down on container spills moving forward?

[Christopher Hall]

Respectfully, I would suggest looking at chapter 3 of the tanker expert panel's recommendations.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Oh, I haven't had a chance to read up on those. If you could give us 30 seconds on those, it would be great.

[Christopher Hall]

That's the section of the report that I mentioned earlier, which deals with certain countries implementing what's called a secretary of state's representative for salvage and intervention. That is a single authority, a single person, whose jurisdiction overrides that of all other national entities and whose sole mandate is to take early action, to make early decisions to prevent a marine occurrence and to prevent pollutants from ending up in the water in the first place. That shifts the situation away from being one of a cleanup and gets out of that reactive mentality and into a more proactive mentality, one of preventing the goods from going over or the ship from sinking instead of waiting to react.

Thank you.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

That's awesome. Thank you, Mr. Hall.

That's it for my questioning, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Small.

We'll now go to Mr. Hanley for five minutes or less.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you to the three of you for very interesting testimony.

I'm going to continue Mr. Small's prevention theme and dig a bit.

First, Madame Langlois, you gave very interesting testimony on the effects...and had a number of recommendations, but I wonder if you can comment further. Overall, we're seeing high safety records with container traffic—it's incredibly safe—and a low proportion of container spills. On the other hand, we see rising container traffic and a rising number of containers per ship.

I wonder, given your experience, if you can comment on the forgivability of container ship spills. Our oceans are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Our coastlines are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Is there or should there be a target for the number or proportion of forgivable spills? I think Mr. Zimmer mentioned there was a 0.001% crash rate, but if we compare that with the rate in civil aviation, I think that's still a few zeros behind our forgivability for civil aviation, commercial aviation at least, in terms of fatal crash rates.

I would be very interested in your perspective on that forgivable rate of container spills.

[Dr. Valérie Langlois]

If I understand you well, we are kind of stuck with the impact. When we work with oil spills, we know what we are dealing with, so we can plan for it. We know the substance. We know how it works in the water. We can do all those modifications. However, when we are dealing with unknowns, it's more difficult to plan or to answer your questions very well. Perhaps the proportion of loss is not high, but then it's always a question of what we lost.

I appreciate that private companies are trying to find ways to make sure that we won't be losing any of those containers, but sometimes perhaps we want to lose some. Think about waste and recycling stuff. It would be very interesting to know the statistics about what we lost. I'm not saying that we should do that on purpose, but perhaps sometimes it could help to be losing some of those containers.

For example, in the St. Lawrence River, if we are dropping some containers that have toxic substances.... Obviously, the belugas are in decline. The St. Lawrence River is very important for Quebec and the economy of Canada as well. Obviously, the risk factors will depend on where the loss happens.

The last thing I would like to point out is regarding this fast coordination. I've been working on oil toxicity for quite some time now with OPP, and I know that in Canada we have a very well-organized, strong response to oil spills in cases of accidents. It already occurs between the federal government and the province. It's well organized already. Perhaps we can just add one task. It could be dealing with a potential loss of containers. This system of coordination is already in place, to my best understanding.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

To Mr. Hall, on the same theme, were containers designed to be dropped overboard?

[Christopher Hall]

I would say no, they were not designed to be dropped overboard. They are designed, though, to an ISO standard. That's what makes them work around the world. There are very rigid design standards. There would certainly be all kinds of load testing they would need to be subject to, and all kinds of structural limitations that would be put upon then, but in terms of that specific item, I'm not sure.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, but what I meant, really, was how much of the testing to withstand the depths and the possibility of spills was there.

Moving on to some of the recommendations—