Evidence of meeting #140 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was pilots.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Bruce Burrows  President, Chamber of Marine Commerce
Robert Turner  Vice-President, Operations, Chamber of Marine Commerce
Robert Lewis-Manning  President, Chamber of Shipping of British Columbia
Michael Broad  President, Shipping Federation of Canada
Sean Griffiths  Chief Executive Officer, Atlantic Pilotage Authority
Simon Pelletier  President, Canadian Marine Pilots Association
Michael Burgess  Vice-President, Great Lakes Region, Canadian Marine Pilots' Association
Sonia Simard  Director, Legislative and Environmental Affairs, Shipping Federation of Canada

12:50 p.m.

President, Chamber of Marine Commerce

Bruce Burrows

I'll connect back to your earlier comment about autonomous vehicles and vessels. We're all familiar with the tremendous amount of research that's going on in this area. Navigating a vehicle in downtown Ottawa through the road system is probably, with very tight tolerances, even more difficult, I would suggest, than navigating vessels in water, yet we're going down this path.

In terms of this whole discussion, you were on a ship, presumably, so you saw that change in technology. Compared with 50 years ago, it's tremendous. We have electronic charting. We have GPS—global positioning systems. We have DIS, the draft information systems, and advanced radars, auto tracking and real-time positioning. All these things now are tremendous ways to better navigate and manage a ship in this autonomous world that we are moving towards.

We have potential advancements with onshore piloting down the road. This movement is happening. It will affect our industry. I believe that we will probably have fewer people on our vessels down the road. I suspect that we won't get a world in my lifetime where we have no people on our vessels, but we're clearly moving in a more autonomous direction with technology. It's the way to go.

12:50 p.m.

NDP

Robert Aubin NDP Trois-Rivières, QC

Thank you.

12:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro

Do committee members have any further questions? All right.

Thank you to our witnesses for being so efficient in your comments that you've answered all of the committee's questions.

I will suspend the meeting for a few minutes for everyone to leave. Then we will go into committee business.

[Proceedings continue in camera]