Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for the invitation to appear before this committee.
As noted, I'm Vice-President, Operations, for Vard Marine's Ottawa office. Vard is a Canadian company that designs ships. We also undertake a range of consulting activities to do with marine issues for private and public sector clients. Our clients range from oil majors to environmental NGOs. We take that as an endorsement of our ability to provide objective advice to whoever our client may be.
On a personal level, I'm myself a keen boater, particularly for sail and human-powered craft; and I am a lake steward for a small lake outside Ottawa. I have a keen, personal interest in all issues associated with water quality and water safety. I will try to maintain a difference between my corporate and my personal opinions.
In 2015, Vard undertook a project on behalf of Transport Canada, which was referenced, I noted, by the previous witnesses. We were supposed to be analyzing ship breaking and recycling capacity in Canada, but it actually became a much broader project, looking at advice on vessels of concern. What causes them? What are the potential means of dealing with them? This brought home to us the general legislative uncertainty surrounding the disposal of wrecked and abandoned vessels of various sizes, and best and worst practices in Canada and around the world for handling this.
Canada certainly needs a better framework to handle this problem. We consider that Bill C-64 is a valuable part of this. We do have some concerns with the bill because it's trying to address a very broad range of issues in a single package. While you may be able to gloss over this in the act itself, it will make it difficult, in our opinion, to formulate effective regulations for all the types of vessels that are under consideration. We're already seeing some signs of this in a recent DFO/PSPC request for information, which I'll talk a little more about in a minute.
The summary of the act refers explicitly to the Nairobi Convention and to requirements that will be imposed on vessels of 300 gross tonnes and above, but the general coverage of the act is to all Canadian vessels that are registered, listed, recorded, or licensed under the Canada Shipping Act.
There are only 1,500 Canadian vessels that are over the 300-gross-tonne limit. A thousand of those are barges and 200 are owned by the federal government, provincial governments, and crown corporations. On the other hand, there are roughly 40,000 vessels that are registered and several million that are either licensed or are supposed to be licensed. We followed in our work the NMMA study from 2012, which put the number of recreational vessels in Canada as 4.3 million.
Licensing applies to all vessels with more than 7.5 kilowatts, 10 horsepower, of engine power. That's a fairly low threshold. Bill C-64 lowers this still more by applying to all vessels other than unpowered vessels below 5.5 metres in length. Finally, I've been caught, because my 14-foot sailboat actually has an electric trolling motor. I'm not sure what the interpretation of the act will be in a condition like this.
As the coverage expands, the quality of the databases available for monitoring and enforcement drops rapidly. There are three different databases for Canadian-registered vessels, and they are by no means current or accurate. We're doing a study of that at the moment on another project for Transport Canada, and the registry is full of errors. We don't have access to the record for licensed vessels, but our experience suggests that the records are incomplete and highly inaccurate, and the process of licensing is poorly understood even by some of the more reputable boaters. Licences have to be renewed every 10 years, but most recreational boaters are not aware of that. We strongly suspect the licensing database is sadly out of date and would be of very little use in tracking down owners in many cases.
Enforcement of the requirements is very inconsistent. I'm not aware of any fines having been levied recently on people who didn't have a licence but were supposed to.
Applying the act to large vessels should be relatively simple and uncontroversial, except in the case of orphaned vessels. There, hard cases make bad law. But generally the large vessels are few in number, highly visible, and relatively well documented.
For smaller craft, there's certainly the potential to create a new, costly, and intrusive bureaucracy and considerable potential for mischievous or malicious application.
It appears to us to be possible to designate many vessels as abandoned, dilapidated, or derelict at quite a low threshold of proof, and if intrusive neighbours consider a boat to be an eyesore, they can initiate a process for removal that may be difficult or costly to stop.
This Friday, I'm going to an information session on the DFO initiative to create a risk assessment methodology and inventory management system for vessels of concern. This appears to envisage a very complex, multi-phased system that will deal with many abandoned and derelict vessels actually very slowly and with a maximum amount of paperwork. We're all in favour of the government creating lots of opportunities for consultants, but we are also taxpayers and boat owners. We trust regulation standards and internal processes developed to support the act will focus on actual problems and not create new ones.
I'd be happy to answer any questions either on our report or on any of our statements.
Thank you.