National Defence Committee on Dec. 8th, 2016

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

If there is a beacon installed in a fishing vessel, it would cut down the search time significantly.

[Mario Pelletier]

A beacon, and some voyage planning as well.... We encourage people before they leave, whether it's a fishing vessel or a pleasure craft, to leave a plan of their intended voyage. It's much easier for us to initiate the search in a certain area.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Are you aware of any provinces or territories in which the transport ministry requires fishing vessels to have a beacon installed?

[Mario Pelletier]

I'm not aware of that. Regulatory requirements to have those kinds of things come from Transport Canada at the federal level. I'm not aware of a provincial-specific requirement.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

In terms of your average fishing vessel, the Transport Canada requirements state that it has to have one on board.

[Mario Pelletier]

Depending on the size of the vessel and the type of voyages they make, that will differ.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

It would not only reduce the search time and save lives but would also save resources as well and potentially the lives of people working at the Coast Guard, if fishing vessels were required to have EPIRBs or some sort of beacon installed.

[Mario Pelletier]

Again, a lot of the search and rescue goes to prevention, and that's a very helpful prevention tool. It's much easier to locate people, whether it's a personal identification beacon or an EPIRB that is installed on a ship. All of this helps the system.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

How is the Coast Guard involved in operations dealing with human trafficking or migrants arriving in our waters without proper documentation? Does the Coast Guard ever become involved in those types of situations?

[Mario Pelletier]

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, our involvement is in support of the agencies that are responsible for this.

In the case of illegal migration, we would be approached and asked about the resources we have on the water that are ready to go out and do an interception. This is the kind of support we do.

It's the same thing with the RCMP. If they see something illegal going on, through the MSOCs, we will gather information and collect the proper data. They'll be able to conduct a risk assessment and will then determine whether they need to go out, and then we would look at an available platform for them.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

So when people are rescued, whether it's from a human trafficking vessel or it's just a boatload of people trying to get to Canada, and the Coast Guard takes them on board, what happens in terms of processing? What exactly is done?

[Mario Pelletier]

If we are going out to do a rescue operation and people are already on the boat, typically if the boat is safe—and it's the captain of the boat who will communicate with the captain of the Coast Guard vessel to determine that—the people will stay on board. If the people are in the water and they are rescued, we have procedures in place to treat the people and provide them with the proper support. If it is determined at that point that this is as a result of illegal activity, then we will notify the proper agency to come and support.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Do you have equipment on board to take identifiers, fingerprints, or anything like that, or do you just hand them over to the authorities?

[Mario Pelletier]

The authorities would do that. We are not equipped to do that.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Thank you.

Welcome, Ms. Blaney. You have the floor.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you so much for being here.

As the member who represents North Island-Powell River, I see your ships in my waterways quite frequently, and it always makes our communities feel safer, so thank you for the work you're doing.

Some of the questions I have are around fleet recapitalization. There have been a few reports that have emphasized the aging state of the Canadian Coast Guard fleet, and I quote, “A significant amount of the fleet is fully depreciated.”

A report written by analysts Bill Austin and Carl Hegge mentions that, in their opinion, the Coast Guard “has not been aggressive enough in making its case for better funding”.

Since the Liberal government has recognized the underfunding and has committed to a more incremental funding system, could you let us know what the pending various review exercises are, how long this process will take, and how much money is needed?

[Jeffery Hutchinson]

If only that were an easy question.

We have looked at the financial health of the Coast Guard as resting on three pillars, essentially. One is the comprehensive review that I referred to earlier, which does not include the fleet as part of the review. The second is the recently announced oceans protection plan, which gives us forward-looking capacity that we haven't had before. The third is fleet renewal or fleet recapitalization.

We have the plan in place with funding that will take us through the replacement of perhaps half of our large fleet. We operate 43 large vessels, and we have replaced some of them, the security vessels. They're already on the water.

Vancouver Shipyards are currently working on three offshore fishery science vessels. The next in line will be the offshore oceanographic vessel, and then they're going to do a couple for the military, and then they're going to do our flagship of the future, which is the Polar class.

After that, we have a class already funded that we refer to generically as the “new class”. We're going to take two old classes and combine them, and we're seeking to design perhaps one of the most capable Coast Guard vessels yet to be built in the non-military sense. We're looking at ships around the world that have the capacity to open up their hull and scoop oil out of the water directly into the hull of the ship, scrub it, and put cleaner water back. It won't be drinkable, but it will be cleaner than what they took out. It's probably the cutting edge of at-sea oil response at the moment.

We're looking at vessels that can provide not a lot but massive amounts of tow capacity. When you get into these largest container ships that are now passing our coasts but not coming into our ports, we'd be able to “button on”, as we say, and hold a large container ship until commercial rescue tugs could arrive. We don't want to eat the lunch of the commercial sector, but we have to have response capacity.

We're looking at the towing and ER capacity, and we will take into consideration noise, speed, pollution from the ship itself, and those kinds of things.

That's the next class, and it's already funded, as I've now repeated. That takes our shipbuilding program into the mid-2020s. Then we'll be looking at the heavy icebreakers. You will have seen that we put a request for information on the street recently to lease some interim capacity until we get to the mid-2020s.

The reason for that is that our icebreakers are old, but they're not about to roll over and play dead. They're very capable ships. They were very well built when they were put in the water. The 1100s and the 1200s, our mediums and our heavies, are extremely well-built ships. We can invest in them to keep them going until the mid- to late-2020s. To do that, we have to take them out of the water for eight, nine, or 10 months at a time to do what you could think of as a major overhaul. When they're going through those major overhauls, we'll have this interim capacity.

Next year, 2017, we will be tabling the update of our fleet renewal plan. It's a 30-year plan updated every five years. That will form the basis of our next discussion with government on the future of fleet renewal. That will alert the government as to what the needs look like from now until 2025, and then what the shipbuilding program that follows the current program will look like at that point.

We're making good progress on the national shipbuilding strategy, and we foresee by 2025 having ships coming out of the yard at a nice steady pace, which will allow us to replace and maintain a relatively younger fleet.

[Mario Pelletier]

I would just like to add one more thing. When we talk about the next class of vessels that is funded, which Jeff described as being able to do emergency response, towing, etc., they're going to be icebreaking-capable, too, so they're going to replace some of our current icebreakers. They're also going to be able to deliver other Coast Guard programs such as aids to navigation, and so on.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you.

That's a great segue, because of course I was going to go into the icebreakers next.

In the report that you gave us today, you mentioned more than once the threats that exist in our Arctic. I just want a little bit of clarification from your perspective. What are those threats?

[Jeffery Hutchinson]

There are threats we can see and threats we can't see. I know you've discussed some of them with the navy.

With our focus on safety of life at sea and safety of the marine environment, when we're talking about threats, we're talking about an increase in adventure travel, from fibreglass sailboats trying to sail the Northwest Passage up to and including very large cruise ships, as we've already seen.

We also consider the increase in commercial traffic to be a threat. You all will have seen that China is being fairly open about its plan to send commercial traffic through the Northwest Passage. We see this sporadically at the moment. We all know that even small amounts of fuel from a shipper's perspective are intolerably large amounts of fuel from a citizen's perspective, from an individual Canadian's perspective.

We're talking about the possibility of oil in the water, whether it be diesel or bunker fuel. We're concerned about an increase in possible oil shipment through the Arctic, which at the moment is only at the scale of community resupply. But even that is a lot of product, again from an individual perspective.

We're looking at other threats. We're looking at threats to marine mammals that communities rely on. We're looking at threats such as commercial vessels going through sensitive or even sacred areas to indigenous communities that may rely on those areas for food supply or traditional activities. We see that as a threat to a Canadian way of life.

We are mindful of the fact that the number of submarines around the Pacific is increasing almost exponentially at the moment. We want to work with our naval counterparts in domain awareness, as we've said a couple of times. We don't have a role in those threats, except we generally have a good sense of when something doesn't look right, because we're watching all the time, and we want to feed that information into our security partners as quickly as we can.

At a high level, that's generally what we're talking about when we talk about threats in the Arctic. We're environmentalists at heart in our organization. We protect the environment every day, so of course we're also paying attention to climate change as it is occurring in the north. Almost counterintuitively, melting ice means more traffic. It means more icebreaking. That's the counterintuitive part. We will have to have as robust a presence as ever, from the icebreaking perspective, as the ice melts, because more and more ships will venture through those waters.

[Mario Pelletier]

Maybe just on this—

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm going to have to cut it short. We'll be able to circle back, but I have to yield the floor to Ms. Romanado.

Thank you.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank you for being here with us today, and for your service to our country.

No worries; I'll switch to English, but feel free to respond in either language.

Today we made an announcement to award a contract to purchase 16 C295W aircraft to replace our Buffalo and legacy Hercules aircraft in search and rescue capabilities.

Could you give us an idea of how this will impact the Canadian Coast Guard? Then I will have a follow-up question with regard to the very large procurement that seems to be needed for the Canadian Coast Guard. Perhaps you could talk a little about today's announcement and how that will assist you in your capabilities.

[Mario Pelletier]

I can start with that one.

It is great news for the Coast Guard.

As I mentioned, the Coast Guard is responsible for marine search and rescue, but it's quite often supported by the air asset as well. Obviously, air asset will move much faster and can locate.... There was a question earlier about locating a person in need or in distress. The air asset can get there faster and locate, so the marine asset can be dispatched and render assistance right away.

As I said, the rescue centres use both marine and air assets. It's very efficient. Better tools are good news for us.