With regard to the discretionary nature of the act, most of the powers of the minister and receivers of wreck under the act to deal with wrecked, abandoned, and dilapidated vessels are discretionary in nature, calling into question whether or not these decision-makers will actually take the necessary actions to address the backlog of wrecked, abandoned, and dilapidated vessels in Canadian waters.
For example, subclause 30(3) states that if an owner of a dilapidated vessel leaves it stranded, grounded, anchored, or moored for at least 60 days contrary to subclause 30(1), the minister may take measures or monitor the situation or order that measures be taken. I would recommend that these kinds of provisions be strengthened to require the minister and also the receivers of wreck to take action within a prescribed period of time or else to justify why action is not being taken.
Combined with this, my second recommendation is that, to the degree the discretion remains in the act, the bill include specific provisions that would allow any person to request ministers or a receiver of wreck to deal with abandoned, derelict, or wrecked vessels, or to authorize them to do so.
Some provisions to this degree do exist in the bill. For example, there's a requirement in subclause 58(1) to report a wreck. However, when I looked through the bill, I didn't see, with regard to many of the other provisions enabling ministers to take action with regard to these vessels, an ability for the public to explicitly request that it happen.
Of course, the public would always be able to make this request, but the reason you want to put it in legislation is that you want to pair it with the requirement that the minister or the receiver of wreck provide a public response to that request in order to retain a little public accountability.
I was going to talk about the registration of pleasure craft, but I think that topic has been amply covered.