Good afternoon, Madam Chair and committee members. It is my honour today, particularly on this Coast Guard and Navy Day, to thank you very much for the honour that you gave me.
I'm going to discuss the Coast Guard's role in supporting the government's commitment to creating a world-leading marine safety system. My remarks will focus on the Coast Guard's area of responsibility in monitoring vessels in and around Canadian waters, as well as our marine pollution response capabilities.
I shall start by pointing out that our marine pollution response and the monitoring of our waterways are both part of the Coast Guard's bread and butter. Assuring the safety of the longest coastline in the world is one of the pillars of our mandate. It's easy to measure safety in human lives saved—for us, 13 people are saved on average per day—but it also means ensuring that every one of our 243,000 kilometres of rugged coastline is protected from pollution events.
The Canadian Coast Guard monitors vessels navigating Canada's waters through its Marine Communications and Traffic Services network. On average, this means our MCTS radio officers are keeping an eye on 1,254 ship movements every day. We do this by providing our 12 MCTS centres across the country with cutting-edge maritime monitoring technology. On the west coast alone, we are implementing six new radar stations that will enhance our monitoring capabilities in the Vancouver Island Inside Passage area and throughout Seymour Narrows. Additionally, over the course of a six-year capital project that wrapped up in 2016, we've completely modernized our communications control systems, allowing for more effective monitoring of our waters.
We're proud of these accomplishments, but a big part of our agency's culture is the desire to always do more. That's why the oceans protection plan has invigorated the Coast Guard. The oceans protection plan solidifies the Coast Guard's role as the backbone of Canada's marine safety system, and the OPP is allowing us to beef up our MCTS network capabilities with the addition of 24 new members into those centres.
We've already begun to strengthen our 24-7 emergency response capacity by providing our members with the tools and resources they need to respond to marine emergencies and ensure a coordinated response that will better protect our waterways. Again made possible by the OPP, the operational network initiative aims to ensure full redundancy in our telecommunications network and provide contingency measures for enhanced business continuity. This way, if any kind of outage occurs, our services will remain online.
To keep our waterways, we must know who and what is on the water, but we also have to see what lurks beneath. Another component of the oceans protection plan is ensuring that hydrographic charting and navigation tools are helping to improve marine safety. To that end we've already surveyed four priority ports, including Vancouver anchorage, Prince Rupert, Port Alberni, and Stewart.
Also, and with the help of our partners, we've increased our eyes and ears on the water. One example is the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary, a Canada-wide network of hundreds of coastal communities whose 4,000-plus volunteer members contribute vital resources to Coast Guard-led marine pollution response efforts.
The oceans protection plan supports the Canadian Coast Guard's shift from being an agency that reacts to spills to one that can also help to prevent them before they even happen. One example of this is an increase in emergency towing capacity to rescue vessels in distress and avoid potential marine incidents. We're also installing towing kits on all major Coast Guard vessels and providing higher-level training for our crews to operate this new towing equipment. We're also leasing two offshore vessels capable of towing large ships in distress on the west coast.
Of course, the Coast Guard doesn't do this alone. We are currently engaging indigenous and coastal communities, industry, academia, and other key stakeholders to complete a needs assessment on emergency towing requirements on the west coast.
When a pollution event does occur, however, we are ready to respond. On average, Coast Guard personnel respond to three pollution incidents every day. If we take the west coast as an example, environmental response caches dot British Columbia's coast in 18 places, with three of them staffed in Richmond, Victoria, and Prince Rupert. When we receive word of a pollution event, we swiftly dispatch our resources to the incident.
As I stated off the top, the Canadian Coast Guard is on the front lines of supporting the government's commitment to creating a world-leading marine safety system and is expanding its marine pollution response and monitoring capabilities to meet this commitment.
Thank you, Madam Chairman and members of the committee, for this opportunity, and as with my colleague, I'd be happy to answer any of your questions.