Thank you very much, and thank you for this invitation to appear before you on unceded Algonquin territory.
My name is Anna Johnston. I'm a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law.
West Coast has been a non-profit for 40 years now, helping British Columbians protect their environment through law. We work with coastal communities, local governments, and first nations to strengthen environmental laws protecting their lands and waters, and I am truly honoured to be before you today.
I'd like to commend this government for taking action on the issue of wrecked, abandoned, dilapidated vessels, and for all of you, it's really been great to see the parties come together to move this bill forward and strengthen it together.
Abandoned vessels cause significant environmental, safety, economic, and aesthetic concern to coastal communities in British Columbia. I believe the same 2014 inventory that my friend here just referred to identified 245 vessels of concern in British Columbia, and those are only the ones that were reported by local governments. Of these, 165 were pleasure craft or sailboats, so the majority of the problem that is faced in British Columbia is not from large commercial vessels. They tend to be smaller pleasure craft spilling fuel and decaying in local harbours and waters.
Bill C-64 is a good start toward helping with this issue. I have a few suggestions that, if implemented, I believe will help strengthen the bill and allow it to fulfill the government's goal of more effectively dealing with derelict, abandoned, and wrecked vessels.
My first suggestion is to better ensure that the goal of dealing with these vessels is met by strengthening the discretionary nature of the act and actually requiring ministers and receivers of wreck to take action.
The second recommendation I have is related to the first. To the degree that discretion remains under the act, in my experience, when the government doesn't take action on an issue, the public wants to see why. Therefore, I would recommend that there be an amendment to explicitly enable the public to request ministers or receivers of wreck to deal with, or authorize them to deal with, abandoned, derelict, and wrecked vessels, and to combine that ability to request with a mandatory response that is made publicly available within a prescribed period of time.
My third recommendation is to better enable the tracking down of vessel owners, as has been mentioned here before, by requiring registration of pleasure craft.
Do I have a couple of minutes? Can I elaborate on those points?