Evidence of meeting #35 for National Defence in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was ships.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Thank you.
I was also interested in your comments regarding the charting, that 20% of the waters are charted and only 10% of those are actually good charts. Is anything being done to update the charting, to get better information for future passenger ships?
Capt Christopher Hearn
It's not a comment, sir, on the Canadian Hydrographic Service, and I don't want to draw any bad light on them. They've got quite a mighty coastline to take care of and limited resources to do it. The charts are good, but they're very old. The real issue is that you sail, as we say, over a lot of white paper. What I mean by that is there are not enough soundings. You will actually follow along one line of soundings for as long as you can. It's a little-known fact that parts of the archipelago in the Arctic itself are quite shallow and you literally sail with the tides. When the tide lifts up, the ice separates a little bit and then you wiggle through as much as you can, but you're very aware that around you on the chart there are no soundings whatsoever and you don't know the sub-sea structures, what's there, the reefs, the rocks, the shoals. And that's only because when they were doing the original surveys they couldn't do soundings along there. You can't run a ship continuously and do an entire area. The ice coverage prevented that in the past.
I'm sure the Canadian Hydrographic Service has heard from multiple people that this is a continuous issue. You also have to look at the aids to navigation, the buoys, the markers, those kinds of factors. The coast guard endeavours to do a good job of placing these out and maintaining them, but it's a full-time job, along with also trying to do search and rescue, along with also trying to do icebreaking services. They're tasked to do many things. I think it might be an opportunity to develop technology to provide these services--I mean navigational markers and buoyage, things of that nature--electronically, through an e-navigation strategy whereby beacons are used on land masses or underwater to provide this information to the ships. That's a whole other comment or a whole other question, but I'm sure the Canadian Hydrographic Service is attempting to do the best it can. As I say, I don't want to put bad light on them. They're overworked as it is. It's just the expanse of the area and the fact that there are areas of the Arctic that were not open before that are open now, and there aren't sufficient soundings or sufficient charting to be able to navigate safely.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
In terms of that navigation, can any of this charting be done through satellite?
Capt Christopher Hearn
I can't comment as to that. I know that there is limited capability. They use it for ice forecasting and things of that nature. It's a combination of aerial ship reports and satellite imagery along with aerial reconnaissance, as I said, but in order to provide accurate soundings and imagery in hydrographic data it requires ships to be there to deploy equipment and to gather that kind of information. I don't know if there is satellite ability to do that right now. There possibly could be. I don't know.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Maxime Bernier
Thank you.
Thank you, Captain, very much for your presentation today.
Thank you for making the trip to meet us.
That will be the end of our session number 35
of the Standing Committee on National Defence.
The meeting is adjourned.