It's a pleasure seeing you again. Thank you for having me, Madam Chair and committee members.
Good afternoon. My name is Tim Nohara, and I'm the president and CEO of Accipiter Radar, a Canadian high-tech company located right here in Niagara at the centre of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system.
The shipping system is a critical, green, binational marine superhighway that reaches throughout the Ontario-Quebec continent gateway and trade corridor. About 70% of our trade with our southern partner is done through here.
To maintain and grow vital trade assets requires investment from Ottawa, such as the $4 billion investment in the Gordie Howe bridge, but our competitiveness, job growth, resilience to climate change and terrorism, safety, and environmental protection depend on more than bricks and mortar. They require investment in smarter trade, and smarter trade is both greener and safer because it maintains operational fluidity. With a small investment, Canada can position itself to become the global leader in smart shipping right here where intermodal shipping logistics are optimized in real time.
This investment would be in the form of shared maritime domain awareness technology that would be distributed among ports, the Great Lakes, and the seaway throughout Ontario and Quebec, and accessible by all transportation stakeholders to provide decision support and system-wide collaborative decision-making.
We've all experienced traffic congestion on highways and bridges. We speed in segments where traffic is light, only to hit the brakes and crawl or stop for minutes or hours where there is congestion. We understand that our travel time would be considerably shorter if traffic was spaced out more evenly and if we reduced our speed by maybe 10% or 20%. In addition, we would emit a lot less greenhouse gas and accidents would be fewer.
The same thing happens on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system. A cargo ship or cruise ship may be transiting over 3,000 kilometres from Quebec City to Thunder Bay. En route, the vessel goes full steam, only to hit several slowdowns along the way, often caused by pleasure craft. This results in significant wastage of fuel, which is the number one cost for shipping. If the slowdowns could be predicted, ships would slow down during those segments, saving fuel and reducing greenhouse gases, but no one knows where the pleasure craft are.
Pleasure craft hugely outnumber ships on this marine superhighway, in the same way cars outnumber transport trucks on our paved highways. Pleasure craft are often responsible for these slowdowns as they unintentionally block shipping lanes and access to docks. If harbourmasters and vessel traffic managers knew where pleasure craft were causing obstructions, the authorities could be dispatched to disperse them in order to avoid the slowdowns.
Because there is considerable uncertainty around when a ship will arrive at its designated terminal or berth, the just-in-time arrival of logistics handlers who load and unload freight to and from ships to another transportation mode such as rail or truck is not possible today. If logistics personnel could better predict ship arrival times, they could coordinate intermodal transfers more efficiently. You see, smarter shipping requires a real-time shared understanding of what the traffic looks like, especially pleasure craft, so stakeholders can do their part to manage flow, individually as well as collaboratively, across the shipping system. Investment in shared maritime domain awareness technology is the way to fill this critical traffic awareness gap on the marine superhighway.
We are a pioneer and global leader in this technology, which combines radar information systems and big data analytics—AI—to provide decision support to stakeholders so they can be smarter about managing their shipping operations.
Accipiter is partnered with Canada's leading transportation logistics research institutes in Quebec and Ontario, with our shipping companies in all the major ports in Ontario and Quebec, with the Seaway, with the Council of the Great Lakes Region, and with others. This creates a shovel-ready technology project that could greatly leverage and enhance this Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system and the continental gateway, and propel Canada as a global leader in smarter shipping for the benefit of Canadians.
This project is also very well aligned with Minister Garneau's transportation 2030 plan, the oceans protection plan, and Minister McKenna's Great Lakes protection initiative.
I look forward to answering your questions.