Evidence of meeting #33 for National Defence in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was fleet.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Noon
Liberal
Noon
Conservative
James Bezan Conservative Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB
Mr. Chair, before you start the clock, I just want to quickly revisit the point that I raised yesterday in the House. I'll be very brief. It's unfortunate that you didn't take the opportunity to apologize yesterday for the derogatory characterization that you used towards me. Regardless, I don't really care one way or the other, but I was looking around this room and knowing the history here.... During World War II, cabinet met here every morning to talk about the situation in Europe and the war and how to best organize the military people who fought for our democracy. As I said in the House yesterday, one of the responsibilities of the chair is to act in an even-tempered manner, in fairness, and you're to make sure that we have order. The one power that the committee has here is the issue of relevance, but at the same time, you're also there to ensure that our rights and privileges are respected. Although you may not respect me, I do request that you at least respect the institution and guarantee the rights of all members of Parliament who sit on this committee from time to time to freedom of speech, and to the ability to put questions, and sometimes difficult questions, to the appropriate witnesses. With that, I move on.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. I'm a prairie boy, and a lot of people don't realize that in Manitoba, there is Coast Guard on Lake Winnipeg at Gimli and on the Red River at Selkirk. I appreciate all the work that those brave sailors do in protecting and responding to crises that occur with our commercial boaters and transporters, as well as our commercial fishers in that area.
The one thing I think we're interested in, which we've been skating around a bit, is exactly how the Coast Guard does work with the Royal Canadian Navy, with the RCMP, and with the U.S. Coast Guard when you're dealing with some of those issues that are very much security matters.
When you're operating in the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and near the U.S. waterways of both the Atlantic coast and Pacific coast, how do you interact when you come across vessels out there on patrol that could be dealing in drugs, or doing human trafficking, or maybe transporting illegal firearms? How do you actually interact with the navy and use the Maritime Security Operations Centres—which are amazing when you get in and see how all that information is fed together, for those of us who have the opportunity to be in those centres? How does that all get coordinated, especially with our American counterparts?
12:05 p.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Strategy and Shipbuilding, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Maybe I'll start, and then Mario can pick up on some of the specifics.
I'll just give you a vignette essentially to help answer this. Imagine you're in Halifax. I'll choose Halifax because that's where I saw it happen. The MSOC and our MCTS folks are looking out on the ocean. They see something, and something isn't right about it. Maybe they have some background knowledge on that ship. Maybe it's a ship they have had questions about before. The information goes to the MSOC, and the RCMP say it is a ship they've been watching. The RCMP would normally allow a ship to come in. It's easier to do what you need to do alongside a wharf where, if you need to, you can bring real fire power. Boarding a ship at sea is never something you want to do if you don't have to. In this particular case, they know they have to stop it when it's still 10 miles out, so they'll load equipment on one of our ships, we'll take them out, and they'll make the interdiction that way.
To an earlier question, sometimes it's not just the RCMP. It can be immigration officers. It can be CBSA officers. It can be the combination of people we need to do the job when we get there.
A different way of doing it is through the combined efforts we have with the RCMP on security patrols. We carry their team or we can deliver an emergency response team, which is armed and boarding-capable, to where they need to be. From a security perspective, that's how it works day to day. You'll see the RCMP meet us at a port. The day I was down there, they met us at Lunenburg, and we picked them and their equipment up, and we went and stopped the ship that needed to be stopped.
With the Americans, Mario will be able to speak to the security perspective, but we have a superb relationship with the U.S. Coast Guard across a lot of fronts. We have joint co-operation for an environmental response. God forbid Deepwater Horizon should happen today, but we would deploy assets to help them. If it were to happen anywhere near our coastline, then they'd deploy assets to help us. It's a completely mutual arrangement for the environment and for search and rescue.
On the icebreaking side, that's where we make the bigger contribution.
The reason I make this point, I want to specify, is that there is a treaty that says you can't have military vessels on the Great Lakes, except in exceptional circumstances. That allows us to operate larger ships in the Great Lakes than the Americans can. Their icebreaking capacity tends to be smaller icebreaking tugs, and we have the real muscle, which they recognize. It's a contribution that they can't return in kind, because they're militarized and we're not. It's one of the restrictions on that.
For our security operations with them, Mario, maybe you want to speak to that.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr
I'm going to have to stop it there.
I'll give the floor over to Mr. Spengemann.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
To start out, I must say that I'm disappointed by the opening comments made by Mr. Bezan. Canadians expect much better, Mr. Chair.
There is evidence that you never made the comment you are alleged to have said. Mr. Bezan should apologize not only to this committee, but to the House of Commons. You are an extremely capable and fair chairperson, and I believe the committee can be very proud. The House of Commons can be very proud. With that, I'll move on.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for your service to the nation.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
James Bezan Conservative Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB
On a point of order, Mr. Chair, as I said in my statement in the House yesterday, if you listen to the tape, and it was confirmed—
12:05 p.m.
An hon. member
On a point of parliamentary privilege, Mr. Chair—
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Mr. Chair, can I assert a point of parliamentary privilege?
This is not a point of order. I'd like to have my time, please.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you.
Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Thank you for your service to the nation. More important, thank you for the service of the women and men who serve under your command in uniform each day.
I'd like to take you back briefly to Mr. Rioux's question on Elbit. Is Elbit a transponder-based system?
12:10 p.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Operations, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
I'm sorry, I don't have all the technicality around it, but it's not a transmitter. They are responsible to report, and there is some transmission, as well.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
What sort of vessels would not be captured by Elbit? Would it be size-dependent? Would it be trajectory-dependent? Would it be communications-equipment-dependent?
12:10 p.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Operations, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
It's size-dependent, and I'm sorry, you're absolutely right, it's a transmitter.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you very much for that.
I'd like to take you briefly to environmental response questions. They were raised by my colleague Ms. Blaney. Could you outline for the committee the kinds of scenarios you would face? I'm thinking particularly of the west coast with respect to environmental response. You can just hypothetically think about offshore tankers. There are inshore scenarios. There are pipeline scenarios. What kinds of scenarios do you face? What kinds of response capacity do you have? What kinds of technological advances are in the pipeline? Most important, how do you intersect with private sector response cleanup obligations? What are you in charge of? What are you responsible for? What, for example, is an oil company responsible for?
12:10 p.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Strategy and Shipbuilding, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
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.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you very much.
Mr. Chair, I think that's my time.
12:10 p.m.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I just want to pick up on that a bit. Right now, a lot of Canadians have serious concerns about the Bella Bella spill. We've witnessed a lot of things that were the realities of our ocean as well. That's what happens in the water. Canadians need to know, especially with the approval of Kinder Morgan, whether you are going to be re-evaluating your response capacity. What risk assessment has been done, and how are you preparing yourselves for the reality of a higher volume of tanker traffic?
12:15 p.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Strategy and Shipbuilding, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
There have been some studies done, particularly around the drift rate of a tanker through the Juan de Fuca Strait, so if a tanker were to lose power for any reason, how long you would have until it would hit something that would cause a problem.
Another drift rate study is ongoing, and we're waiting to see those two studies together. Without meaning to sound like an apologist for anyone, I note that the Kinder Morgan proposal adds fairly significant tug and towing capacity to that area. Those tanker ships in particular will be escorted or actually tied on to a tug until they are in the open water at Buoy Juliet.
We're looking at their placement of assets and their response times, and then we're looking at our own. Specifically with regard to the southern part of Vancouver Island, we have a request for information on the street. Part of that is to get towing capacity. I referred to this in my comments about long-term fleet renewal. We see emergency tow capacity as a function of the Coast Guard that needs to be rebuilt. That's the direction in which we're going.
Along all three coasts we'll be making fairly significant enhancements through the ocean protection plan. These include renewing equipment for the Coast Guard, adding new capacity inside the Coast Guard in the form of things like primary environmental response teams—think of a SWAT team for the ocean—but also by leveraging coastal communities, particularly indigenous communities and northern communities. We'll be engaging a range of volunteers, like a volunteer fire department, so that we can get people with some training and equipment to the scene as quickly as possible, empowering them and enabling them to hold the line until the big assets can arrive.
We're looking at the studies; we're placing new assets in capability; and we're working with more partners to achieve a stronger response.
12:15 p.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Operations, Canadian Coast Guard, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Part of that work with the new partners is what we call the regional response plan. It involves sitting everybody around a table to look at the actual risk and to look at the actual equipment and decide whether it is sufficient or not. We're developing those plans as well.
We're also looking at alternate response measures, such as the use of dispersants. Right now, that is against some of the acts. We're looking at the net environmental benefit of using that and equipping the people with the right tools to make that decision as to whether it is more beneficial to use dispersants right now or to wait and try to contain it.
These are the tools that are going to be available to make sure that better decisions are made more promptly.
Finally, we're also looking at more modern equipment. We have caches across the country that are well-equipped. We need to renew that equipment and make sure we have the proper high-tech equipment available to enable people to respond.