Good morning.
Thank you very much for your very kind invitation to appear before this committee on what I think is a very important topic.
For some background, I'm a lawyer, a partner with McInnes Cooper here in Halifax. My practice focuses entirely on privacy and technology law, with 15 years of experience in dealing with disruptive new technologies.
I have had the opportunity to provide advice to UAV operators and legal advice to companies that look to use UAVs in their operations, but I need to be clear that this morning I'm speaking in my own personal capacity—not on behalf of my firm, not on behalf of its clients, not on behalf of any associations.
Perhaps what informs my view the most is that I am a recreational UAV operator and have been for more than a year now. My interest stems not from the aviation side but from being an avid amateur photographer and videographer. We live in a beautiful country, and it's even more amazingly beautiful when viewed from the air.
I had a photography teacher who told me that 99% of photographs are taken from eye level and suggested going up or going down to get a different perspective. I can tell you, and I'm sure the pilots in the room can tell you, that from 100 or 200 feet, this is an absolutely amazing country, and I enjoy recording it from that perspective.
For these remarks, then, I'm mostly talking from the perspective of a recreational user whose UAV weighs under two kilograms. It's a very small UAV.
I don't think there's any doubt that UAVs are a disruptive new technology spawning an entire new industry that is creating a whole host of new opportunities, both industrial and economic. I'm sure you'll hear from industry experts about the amazing work that UAVs enable, particularly in industries such as agriculture, in areas of forestry, in areas related to transportation of goods, etc.
I hope you'll also hear from some of the many small operators I've heard a lot from, people who have spent the last number of years putting together businesses based on this technology and who have a bit of unease about the next couple of years ahead from the regulatory standpoint. As often happens, this new disruptive technology has been accompanied by something that's often characterized as a bit of a technopanic.
As a privacy lawyer, I hear about privacy concerns all the time. Most of these concerns are actually misplaced, since most of the drones or UAVs that you find in the airspace have wide-angle lenses and aren't useful for surveillance.
There's also, of course, been a lot of concern and discussion about safety. In any time of technopanic, I often espouse taking a step back to take a deep breath and try to deal with facts rather than feelings and fears.
If you do a search in news sites for “drone” and “collision” or “near miss”, you'll see an example of what I perceive to be a level of technopanic. Many of the reports—and I've seen many of them registered in the Canadian airspace—don't bear a whole lot of scrutiny, at least in terms of the sort of UAV drone technology that one is concerned about being sold at Best Buy or appearing under Christmas trees.
The most recent incident is an interesting case in point. It occurred off the Toronto Islands airport and is currently being investigated. The encounter occurred at 9,000 feet over Lake Ontario near the U.S. border. That border is 28 kilometres from the airport and in fact 28 kilometres from land. That's simply beyond the capability of a drone that anybody would purchase at Best Buy. Unless the operator was in a boat, it simply would have been beyond the range and capabilities of most UAVs. Initial reports simply said it was an unidentified object, which could have been a floating bag or something else like that, but the media ran with using the exciting word “drone” in all the headlines, and that's what grabs the attention.
I'm of the view that any approach to regulating drones should prioritize the encouragement of growth and development of this industry in Canada—this industry is here, and it's here to stay—and also, of course, focus on mitigating risks in a realistic way.
If you want a good model to follow, I think we should adopt the very same system as in the U.S. It is very simple. This new approach for drones under 55 pounds is straightforward and much simpler than the proposed Transport Canada regulations. The aircraft has to be marked with a registration number; I can advocate for that. It must make no flights higher than 400 feet, and I can get on board with that. All of it has to be, of course, within visual line of sight, and flights within controlled airspace have to be done with notice to the relevant air traffic control. They've actually implemented a relatively simple system to give that notice.
We should be following this lead; otherwise the U.S. and Europe will dominate this industry, and Canadians will be left behind.
We already have a sensible approach to regulating the use of our waterways. I'm a pleasure craft operator with a small boat that I enjoy using along the harbours and coastlines of beautiful Nova Scotia. In order to operate my boat, I needed to have passed a test and obtained a pleasure craft operator card. The test covered the rules of the road, the international collision regulations, safety rules, and how to operate safely. I also had to register my boat and put its register number on the hull, and I have insurance.
Pleasure crafts coexist with working boats in a lot of ways, and I think UAVs can coexist, and will have to, with existing users of the skies in the same way.
I do also advocate for one of the provisions that I believe Transport Canada is going along with. Those who use model aircraft or small drones within the auspices of a recognized association, under their safety rules and with the benefit of their insurance, should be able to operate within that sphere rather than in a more complicated regulatory environment. However, if you take it outside of that strip, then of course all the rules come to bear.
We need to be sensible, proportional, and consistent in the manner in which UAV activities are regulated, and it needs to have a nuanced view of all the risks involved.
We also have to be mindful—this was alluded to in some ways by the previous speakers—that the technology is moving very quickly in this area. Within five years, I expect that we will have very good sense-and-avoid technologies. We'll have very good fail-safes on these devices and we'll likely have relatively inexpensive transponders that will be able to alert air traffic control and other users of the airspace of the presence of UAV activities, which will enable smarter, intelligent, sense-and-avoid capabilities.
We already have laws related to privacy, trespass, nuisance, and other things like that, so I'm not sure we necessarily need to be coming up with new laws related to any particular technology. Those laws of general application work.
If you regulate from the point of view of technopanic, we would be doing Canada a disservice and baking in regressive rules that will be hard to fix in the future.
I do believe that we should follow the four points that were advocated that relate directly to what the FAA is doing in the United States with a very sensible, straightforward approach. If you're out of the ambit of the 55-pound rule or if you want to go above 400 feet, then you'd be subject to a much more stringent regulatory structure because, obviously, that introduces a different degree of risk.
I very much look forward to this discussion and speaking with you further about this.
Thank you.
