Transport Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2014

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I notice that you're having contractual arrangements with third parties. How often do you review those? How much of it is on the basis of a contractual relationship? How much of it is in a knowledge-based way, where you can deploy people or enter into a contract, as you mentioned earlier, within hours of needing their services? What is being done to ensure that you have, in addition to contractual arrangements, the potential to arrange for people in various situations?

[Michael Lowry]

That's a good question. Our full-time staff now is at around 50, so we do rely extensively on contractors, especially for larger spills. We don't have a system in place right now whereby we have a financial arrangement that guarantees they're available.

As for how we compensate for that, we train contractors on an annual basis. We train up to 200 contractors yearly. All those contractors, along with all of that training program, are captured in our oil spill response plan that is submitted to Transport Canada every three years. Those arrangements are documented in that plan.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

You have contractors who are being trained, but is there an additional cache of potential contractors you might engage who aren't involved in your specific training program?

[Michael Lowry]

No, they would all have to be part of our training program. We're looking at fishermen through what we call our FOSET program, marine contractors, and also first nations. We're working them through a training program on an annual basis.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I noted that you have warehouses located in strategic points with caches of various types of equipment. Does that get reviewed from time to time? What happens with respect to potentially new equipment, new technologies, that might be utilized?

[Michael Lowry]

All of our equipment goes through a regular maintenance program. There are chits on the actual equipment that people sign off on when it goes through the maintenance program. All of that is properly maintained. Similarly, with contractors, that equipment is captured in the oil spill response plan that is submitted to Transport Canada.

Every year we have a capital budget. This year it's about $6.4 million. Current Buster is one of the latest in terms of spill response equipment. We're getting some new ones on board, and those will be dispersed to our various locations.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I noted that in practice you talked about maybe having to deal with 20 small spills, I take it, maybe a year, if that's what you were referencing, but you haven't experienced any larger spills. How are you prepared for that? What type of technologies might be available to deal with something other than just small spills experienced 20 or so times a year?

[Michael Lowry]

Probably the largest ship-source spill that we responded to was the Queen of the North sinking. The other larger spill was the Inlet Drive spill in 2007 in Burnaby, where a backhoe ruptured a pipeline. That was around 100 tonnes.

How do we exercise or practise our capacity to handle larger spills? That is captured in the Canada Shipping Act requirements for a certification program. We do a tabletop exercise for 10,000 tonnes, where we're looking at all our assets and how they're deployed for that specific exercise. That's a two-day program that we run.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you for that.

Mr. Whitworth, you mentioned some of your concern relative to the regulations, where they were not necessarily audited or inspected like you thought they might be. There are third party classification societies whose responsibility it is to deal with certification and auditing, and they're designated to do so. What do you say about them? Are they inadequate in some fashion? They're not the same as Transport Canada itself boarding, as you said, RCMP vessels.

Could you comment on that?

[Jonathan Whitworth]

Yes. The international classification societies are put together to kind of fill in that gap and make sure that regulations around the world are complied with. They do a fantastic job. Some of our vessels are included in classification.

The reason I stress “some” is that the classification only applies to vessels of a certain size, horsepower, and weight. Our largest vessels are classed either by Lloyds out of London or ABS out of the United States, but the vast majority of our smaller vessels are not classed. Similar to the smaller vessels up the coast that are falling beneath the radar, they are actually not required to be classed. Therefore, the only regulatory body would be Transport Canada.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

All right. Now—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you. You're out of time.

We'll now move to Ms. Young for seven minutes.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

I would like thank everybody for their most interesting information, and to say hello to Mr. Jonathan Whitworth from Vancouver, as we all know where I'm from. Thank you for being here today and providing us with your information.

As a member of this committee, I was actually quite distressed to hear from your presentation that since 2011 there obviously has been no monitoring occurring for the smaller vessels. Could this have been an oversight, in the sense that you're not aware of any additional activity, or has there clearly been no activity?

[Jonathan Whitworth]

I can tell you that until about a year ago, and something may have very well occurred in the last 12 months, but I do know that in 2012and 2013, because I was informed by Transport Canada, they had not done more of these reviews and audits. There is a very good chance in the last 12 months—I have not spoken to Transport Canada about that—that this may have occurred. There is a bit of a drumbeat that goes up and down the coast, so I have to tell you that I would be pretty shocked if this had occurred and I hadn't heard about it, because when they did go out in November 2011, within the first 48 hours the whole coast knew what they were doing. It ricocheted up and down the coast. I haven't heard those types of comments so my gut would tell me that not only in 2012 and 2013 but my guess is that in 2014 it has not occurred.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Again, I'd like to thank you for bringing that forward to this committee, because we take that very seriously.

In 2007, Seaspan committed to implementing and maintaining an environmental management system, an EMS, that conforms to the International Organization for Standardization for excellence in environmental management. Could you please describe to us and share with us what impact that has had on your organization?

[Jonathan Whitworth]

There are three layers of what we in the marine group and our shipyards—we both share this common desire.... There are three areas that are internationally regulated. There's a safety management system, an SMS, an environmental management system, an EMS, and also a quality management system, a QMS. It's basically a system that companies can keep updated. We're audited on a regular basis, either annually or biennially, to make sure that the systems we put in place are actually working.

With regard to environmental, a big part of it is whether you have policies and procedures to make sure the environment is kept safe and whether your crew members and your employees in the shipyards are aware of and following those. That's how we're audited every year. If you are not either creating policies or, God forbid, you have policies but you're actually not following them, you won't pass your audit. Again, those classification societies that were brought up by the previous speaker are actually the entities that control those systems: Lloyds, ABS, DNV, and others. We subscribe to that. I'm very pleased to say that we routinely meet or exceed those requirements as far as QMS, AMS, and SMS are concerned.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Coming from the west coast where we're sometimes maligned for the fact that people actually transport dangerous goods at all, would you say that as a company you are proud to stand up and say that you have implemented and obviously followed through with the best standards possible, in terms of the transportation of dangerous goods?

[Jonathan Whitworth]

Absolutely.

I'm asked that question quite frequently because of the experience and breadth of business we do in British Columbia. The things that I've highlighted so far are small operators operating primarily in the northen portion of our province. When I look at the safe transportation and the safety record that I mentioned earlier with 20,000 escorts through the port of Vancouver into the Second Narrows, through a gap that's 450 feet wide, we're constantly asked about it right now because we're doing support in the Kitimat and Douglas Channel area for LNG or possibly oil export. We are asked how we can ever safely escort vessels in the Douglas Channel. The narrowest point of the Douglas Channel is 5,000 feet. We've put 20,000 vessels safely in between a rail bridge that's 450 feet. That's a tenth of the distance of what you would see in Douglas Channel.

I'm an absolutely firm believer in things that were said earlier by WCMRC. I don't only see them outside my window. I do believe there is the capacity here to make sure that the port of Vancouver and the B.C. coast are safe.

Can we up our game by making sure some of the smaller players follow the same rules? Yes. But are we a safe port? I do believe what was said earlier, yes.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

I'm running out of time and I have a question for Michael Lowry as well. Very quickly, would you say that larger operators such as yourselves have the bulk of the business? What are we talking about in terms of percentages? Are we talking about the fact that larger operators that do have these safety management systems in place have 70% or 80% of the business? What can you share with us about that?

[Jonathan Whitworth]

In a nutshell, you're correct. If I look at the top five transporters here in British Columbia, my guess is they probably have 85% of the market.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Okay.

Mr. Lowry, it was fascinating to hear about how Western Canada Marine Response Corporation was dealing with the incident up in the Haida Gwaii. It is quite impressive that within hours, within the day, you guys put together a response plan.

Could you tell us a bit about your incident command system—it is something I don't know very much about—and its role in the command and control coordination of an emergency response? Can you detail that for us a bit more?

[Michael Lowry]

Yes, absolutely. I mentioned earlier that it is an international management system. It's entirely scalable, so you can go from a room of four or five people up to 400 or 500 people. The Vancouver Olympics used this system. It's used in earthquake response and any kind of disaster response. When we do our tabletop exercise, we're responsible not only for the equipment and manpower on the water, but also potentially for managing that entire system.

When we're dealing with a vessel like the Simushir, where they might not have people on the ground, we'd be able to staff an entire incident command system, build an ICP, and incident command post, and run that on behalf of the shipowner. For the larger players, some of the larger oil facilities, they'd be able to staff those incident command systems themselves.

When we do the tabletop exercise, people in our organization take certain roles. There are different departments: operations, logistics, and finance. There's a unified command. When we do our training, we're training not only for an on-water response, but also how to operate an incident command system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Ms. Young.

Mr. Mai, for five minutes.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses for joining us today. I will start with a question for Mr. Lowry.

We were wondering about the amount of oil that could be recovered from the St. Lawrence River in the event of a spill, considering that there are more and more tankers on the river. The answer was that only between 5% and 20% could be recovered. On the west coast, could you tell us what percentage could be recovered in the event of a spill?

[Michael Lowry]

No spill is the same and I would never want to put a number to that. There are numbers out there. The International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation has a number that is an average of 10% to 15%. That's for open sea recovery, which is vastly different from near shore. For the 2000 spill that I mentioned, our recovery rates were 95%. You need to look at where the spill is, what type of material it is, and how fast you are going to get there. Those are the factors that influence recovery rates.