With respect, it's a major missing piece. The Canadian Maritime Law Association says that vessel registration is incomplete. Many ships in Canada cannot be linked to a specific owner. We had the ship-source oil pollution fund say, in a number of their annual reports, that in some situations involving abandoned and derelict vessels, the name of the shipowner is not readily available. They were only able to recover 2% of the funds they put out for dealing with abandoned vessel rescues because 25% of the owners were unfound or did not respond, not to mention that half of them are lacking financial assets.
Then the chief registrar of the Canadian Register of Vessels has no requirement to table an annual report and apparently has never reported on the bad state of the vessel registry.
I'm very concerned that the public not get overly invested in how great this legislation is going to be unless we have the confidence at the same time that the improvements to vessel registration, for pleasure craft as well as the larger boats, are happening in a parallel path. You're hearing that too. You must be.