Thank you for your question, and thank you for your motion M-40, which I think has been very important input to all of this.
Yes, there are hundreds of existing wrecks, and our legislation aims to make sure that we don't add to that in the future. We are putting in place measures that will create liabilities for the owners and more solid ways of identifying ownership, as well as a number of other measures.
In the meantime, what we have done is provide two sources of funds. One is called the abandoned boats program, which is run by Transport Canada. This fund is focused on working with communities that have wrecks in their local waters, to work with them on a cost-shared basis to find and to actually remove some of those wrecks. There is also a Fisheries and Oceans small craft harbours program specifically for small craft harbours. It is to do the same thing, essentially, where there are abandoned vessels or wrecked vessels.
Is that going to be enough? No, it's not going to be enough to cover the hundreds that we're talking about. We have taken some specific measures in special cases. Your own experience is in Shelburne, with the Farley Mowat. There is a larger program called the Kathryn Spirit in Lac Saint-Louis in Montreal. The MV Miner is another example, and sometimes the provinces have stepped into it. The Manolis L is another example; there has been removal of leaking oil, but there will be a contract let this summer for bulk removal.
However, there will be a requirement to have more money to deal with these many wrecks. One of the things we're exploring—and I talked about it in my presentation—is much the same as the ship-source oil pollution fund for shipping, which all shipping lines have to contribute to in the case of shipping spill. We may explore the possibility of having a fund that people who own vessels have to contribute into, a fund that is there to take care of incidents when we can no longer trace the original owner and we may have to access something like that. We're looking at ways we can build the funding that's necessary to take care of the existing wrecks that are out there.