Thank you, Madam Chair.
I thank the committee for inviting me to speak today regarding the amendments to the Canada Shipping Act and the Marine Liability Act proposed in Bill C-86. I'm a lawyer with Ecojustice Canada.
Ecojustice is Canada's largest environmental law organization, supported by approximately 20,000 individual donors throughout the country. With offices on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts, Ecojustice is dedicated to ensuring legal protection of Canada's oceans. Through my practice, I largely focus on marine conservation issues. I'll make my short submission on the proposed changes to the Shipping Act.
The proposed amendments reflect our expanding understanding of the environmental impact associated with shipping, including ship-source pollution, physical disturbance and noise pollution.
Significant expansion of already busy port facilities on the west coast is proposed or already under way. Our Shipping Act must be able to respond to increasing threats that will accompany this expansion. Current gaps in the regulatory system must be filled before further expansion occurs.
The Salish Sea, for example, is a nationally significant marine ecosystem, home to a diversity of plant, fish and marine mammal species relied on traditionally by indigenous peoples and more recently by settler communities, and it is also home to Canada's busiest port. The Salish Sea has been degraded and many marine species in the Salish Sea are struggling, including the endangered southern resident killer whale whose population has declined over the summer to just 74 animals. Pollution and disturbance from marine vessels, along with reduced prey availability, are identified as key causes of decline and as barriers to recovery for these whales. Shipping also affects beluga whales in the St. Lawrence and the North Atlantic right whale on the Atlantic coast, each in a slightly different way.
To survive, killer whales need an acoustic environment that allows them to hear the subtle clicks of echolocation and the distinct calls of family members, and ship noise interferes with both of these things. Despite knowing for nearly 20 years that physical and acoustic disturbance from vessels threaten killer whales, little action has been taken to address the threat. This is in part because the Shipping Act does not explicitly allow for the regulation of ocean noise, nor does it clearly enable Transport Canada or DFO to order the kinds of mitigation required to address ocean noise such as speed reductions, route changes and most importantly, noise caps, vessel design and retrofitting. These were the kinds of tools only used to address marine safety issues and not protection of the marine environment. As a result of the legislative gap, limited action has been taken to address physical and acoustic disturbance from vessels and that limited action has been through voluntary initiatives. Unfortunately, this voluntary approach has failed to limit the whales' decline.
Clear and enforced rules work to regulate conduct. As a result of mandatory, enforced vessel slowdowns for marine safety purposes put in place under the Shipping Act on the Atlantic coast to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales, no whales were killed this year by vessel strikes, and we need similarly strong, legally binding rules to protect southern residents and other marine features from ships and ship noise.
The proposed amendments to the Shipping Act fill a gap, providing clear rule-making power for protection of the marine environment and additionally propose interim order provisions that provide a useful tool that allows for nimble response to new and emerging issues, such as shipping noise and other emerging issues and emergencies. It can take years to develop regulation; an interim order allows for quick, targeted action to address a problem while creating space for the development of a more comprehensive and permanent regulation.
Our recommendation would be to extend the period of the interim order to reflect what we understand to be a realistic time to develop regulation, which would be closer to two or three years from the existing one year. Experience shows that progress was made in pollution reduction for both airplane noise and tailpipe emissions for vehicles following the imposition of regulation, and we need to take this same successful approach with the environmental impacts of shipping.
Thank you.