There are a lot of pieces there. We'll move quickly on them.
The first piece I'll tackle is what we are responsible for, or what we are in charge of. We are responsible to ensure that there is an appropriate cleanup. Sometimes that means that we take charge, and people follow the orders we issue. Sometimes it means that we monitor and make sure that what they are doing is appropriate. In Canada, as you know, the polluter pays, and the polluter is responsible for what they've put in the water. Some shipowners or captains are simply unable to pull that off, so to complement their ability and to ensure that the polluter pays, there are private response organizations, funded by the shipping industry. They are required to maintain a 10,000-tonne capability within a certain time frame. They need to be able to execute 10,000 tonnes of response. In some places, in some conditions, the response organizations are exceeding that, sometimes by a multiple, because in today's shipping world 10,000 tonnes is not that big. That regulation was probably set in the 1970s, so they maintain larger capacity than that. What they generally do is deploy a boom to contain the ship or the spill. They get skimmers on the water. They patrol with their boats to make sure they have that covered.
You asked about future technology. That is something we are very interested in. Except in ideal conditions, the recovery of oil off the water is extremely difficult to do. We were proud of our response to the Marathassa in the port of Vancouver. Although we are now in a day and age when any oil in the water is unacceptable, and that's our view as well, our cleanup there exceeded 50%, by some estimates 80%, and that's almost unheard of in oil recovery, as you may know.
In terms of what we face in specific situations, we respond to over 1,000 environmental response calls per year. They range from someone who has dumped a small amount of oil, maybe not off a 25-foot privately owned boat—those folks don't usually call—but a little bigger. It might be a charter boat that takes folks out to fish, that kind of thing. We get little fuel leaks like that, and we drop absorbent material in the water to try to soak that out of the water.
The next step up would be oil coming off a dock sometimes, or out of an industrial place. That isn't our first responsibility, but we often help with that.
Then, at the other end of the spectrum, are the things we've responded to recently that you would be aware of: the Bella Bella spill; the Marathassa, which I just mentioned; the ship in Montreal that's being cleaned up, called Kathryn Spirit; and a cleanup to come in Newfoundland.
That gives you the range. It's about 1,000 calls a year, and they run the gamut. Unfortunately, even tree shadows on water can look a lot like oil, so we respond to a few of those as well.