Mr. Chairman, thank you for the invitation.
My name is John O'Connor and I'm the president of the Canadian Maritime Law Association, and I'm here to speak on behalf of the association. I'm accompanied by Dr. Sarah Forté, who is an environmental specialist, and who from time to time advises the association on the technical aspects of some of these issues that we don't necessarily understand as clearly as we should.
The Canadian Maritime Law Association, by the way, is part of a much wider network of maritime associations. The head outfit is called the CMI, or the Comité Maritime International, which was founded in the 1800s. Each country that is a participant has a national maritime law association. In Canada we have the Canadian Maritime Law Association, of which I'm the president this year. We have a committee that looks at environmental issues. The environmental issues include oil and HNS, hazardous and noxious substances.
Our committee has looked at Bill C-3, and we don't have a lot of comments. We would first like to say that we are only speaking to the marine aspects of the bill. There is an aviation aspect which the Canadian Maritime Law Association does not deal with, so we have no comments on that part.
We would also like to say that the convention that we call the 2010 HNS convention, the hazardous and noxious substances convention, is something our association has worked hard to promote. We were involved in different stages of the convention first adopted in 1996, and then amended by a protocol in 2010 to become the convention which is in the bill. Our association strongly supports the adoption of this convention by Canada. We hope the convention will be in force in the near future, and we hope Canada will be a party thereto.
We support the convention. We're certainly available to answer any questions anyone may have about any aspect of the HNS convention, but we basically recommend it be adopted, so we're happy to see it in the bill.
The bill, on the marine side other than the convention, amends the Marine Liability Act and the Canada Shipping Act for certain adjustments in both of these pieces of legislation. We have looked through the bill, and although we're willing to answer questions, we have no comments on the Canada Shipping Act portion of it. But we do have our main comment on the Marine Liability Act side.
That comment concerns liability, of course. As you will have appreciated, this bill is a bill about liability for mishaps with hazardous and noxious substances. It is not a bill about preparedness. In other words, it's not a bill that addresses how we are going to get ready to respond to a spill of some of these products. It's really a bill about liability; who is liable to pay for the cleanup or the removal, or any damages caused by a spill of these products.
We believe the sections of the Marine Liability Act this committee should look at very carefully are those sections of which there are six concerning the ship-source oil pollution fund, SOPF.
In Canada, unlike every other country in the world almost, we have a fund called the ship-source oil pollution fund which is an additional layer of protection for Canadians if ever there is a spill by oil. What the bill does is it expands the SOPF's role into the HNS convention, but only as it concerns oil. It does not expand the SOPF into the HNS world beyond oil. We certainly support the fact the SOPF would be available for oil spills under the HNS convention as it is right now, under the CLC, civil liability convention, but we have a suggestion to make.
The suggestion is we believe the ship-source oil pollution fund should be involved in HNS at large and not be limited just to oil. Why do we believe that? The SOPF is an additional layer of protection. It's not unlimited liability, but it's an additional amount of funding that is available should there be a mishap. It's already available for oil, and it will be available for the oil portion of the HNS convention, but in the act they have used terminology such as “as regards oil” or “concerning oil”.
In other words, they're limiting the SOPF's role to just oil under the HNS convention. We believe that those words should be removed. We believe that the SOPF should become Canada's additional protection, not only when oil is involved, but when any HNS cargo is involved. We believe that six sections of the act should be tweaked to that effect.
In case anyone is taking notes, those sections are 102(1), 103(1), 109(1), 117(1.1), 117(2.1), 117(2.2). These are actual section numbers, not clauses. I'm not going to read these sections to you, but I will say that in each of these sections there is wording such as “in relation to oil”, or “in respect of oil”. We would be willing to submit in writing a list of the exact wording, if you so desire.
All of those statements are made to allow the SOPF to get into HNS, but only with relation to oil. Our recommended change would be to remove that wording and to make the SOPF available for any HNS event, just as it's available for oil events already.
I had the pleasure last week of appearing before the expert panel on tanker safety. It's the second time I've appeared before them. They're doing a study with regard to oil, first, and now they're doing HNS. After the oil presentation, we had a good discussion with the committee. They brought out their first report. They recommend unlimited liability for oil on the SOPF, instead of limited, as it is now.
Frankly, in our association we're not big believers in unlimited liability. Although it looks attractive, it's virtually impossible to guarantee unlimited liability, for reasons which I can explain if anyone has questions. We feel that unlimited liability for the SOPF is probably not workable. To increase the limit of the SOPF, if that's the desire of Parliament, would be fine, but not unlimited.
At the second phase of the tanker safety expert panel, we made the same presentation as we're making now, that is, that we believe the SOPF should move into HNS at large. We had a debate about it. Mostly the debate was on how that will fit in with the preparedness that we're going to set up for HNS cargoes.
I believe we have a representative today from Western Canada Marine Response Corporation who may be able to give us some advice on this. Our view is simply that the SOPF should not be limited to oil. It should go across the board on all HNS cargoes.
With regard to preparedness, we believe that Canada has already adopted the oil preparedness and response convention. It will probably adopt the 2000 HNS protocol thereto and eventually come back to Parliament with another bill, this time about preparedness, about response organizations, such as that of the Western Canada Marine Response Corporation and what they can do to prepare for an HNS spill.
Our final point is that we believe a list of products that are shipped in or out of Canada in bulk should be made, and that list should be looked at with the response organizations. We're not talking about hundreds of products here; we're talking about a relatively short list of common products shipped in or out of Canada in bulk. We believe that the response organizations should tell us which ones they would be able to respond to.
Those are our comments, and thank you for the opportunity to present them.