Madam Chair, members of the committee, I'm very humbly here representing Captain Paul Bender, merchant navy, retired, who unfortunately two weeks ago had a fall. He will be 91 this year, and he's in the hospital right now recovering. I take no credit for any work that he has done—the research—for the past five years.
He has been the total lead of this, with the exception of two persons who were on the bench with him, as opposed to being in the bleachers. That was me, and Parliamentary Secretary Karen McCrimmon, who kindly gave us some time to look into this project.
In the spring of 2013, he initiated this project on the premise that if you go to Halifax or to London and you look at the memorials there, they say, for sailors, “tombs unknown” or “graves unknown”. His position is that this is not true. We know where they are. We know exactly where these ships are. Not only do we know where the ships are, but we know how many people went down with those ships.
Again on his own, in 2013-14, the first place he went was the ship that went down with the most people on board, the Athabaskan, off the coast of France. There were 128 sailors on board. He dealt directly with France through the embassy here and he got France to include the two Canadian warships within French territorial waters under the French heritage code. That means there are now punitive consequences for somebody who goes on those wrecks. International laws of the seas do not provide punitive consequences. They just provide jurisdiction.
His next step was to go to the U.K., where we have three corvettes that sank in British territorial waters. Again on his own, he went through the high consulate here to submit the request to have those three vessels placed under a special act that they have in the U.K., called the Protection of Military Remains Act. That is strictly to add punitive consequences to the international laws of the seas for the vessels that are sunk there.
He went there on his own. Interestingly, the U.K. looked at that and said it was coming from a single person and asked whether it was possible to get that from a higher level of authority. He went to the Naval Association of Canada. Of course, he has the support of all those people, but the U.K. insisted on having a Canadian position on that.
Therefore, we went through Global Affairs Canada, trying to get a request with the British delegation here, waiting for that request so they could staff it through England, and they were ready to do it. Unfortunately, Global Affairs Canada looked at that position and said this request could serve to undermine the current laws under which these vessels are protected. Well, they are not protected. Interestingly enough, the Germans have U-boats protected under that British law, but we can't get our Canadian warships that are sunk there protected under that same law.
The next steps for him are to get a political champion so that he can bring this project to fruition, and we believe that this committee has the power to possibly create that. We also need to have all those wrecks with sailors on board—and like I said we know where they are—legally designated as ocean war graves.
This is the title of this project, ocean war graves. The responsibility could be passed on to the Canadian agency, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, to which Canada subscribes a significant amount of money every year.
Global Affairs Canada needs to review its position as to the jurisdiction versus jurisdiction enforcement, which does not exist right now. Once we do that, we can go back to the U.K. The U.K. is waiting to include those three Canadian warships into its protection law.
After that, we will come to Canada. Here in Canada alone, we have nine warships within Canadian territorial waters, and 10 merchant ships that were sunk due to enemy action. All those vessels are known. Their positions are known. The number of people on board are known. It's just a matter of putting a law into place, whether it's something similar to what the U.K. has to protect the wrecks, to protect the war remains, or having our own law here.
For the merchant ships, it's an issue of changing or amending the Canada Shipping Act. It could very well easily do that to provide those merchant ships and warships the same level of protection that all our cemeteries have across the world for soldiers and airmen who actually fell.
This is all he is looking for, to give those sailors down in their graves at the bottom of the sea that same level of protection that is not available to them now, but that can be put into place.
Thank you very much.