Okay. Thank you very much.
I will go on to Islands Trust Council chair Peter Luckham, whom I worked with as vice-chair for six years, and now he's in the chair seat, the position I used to occupy.
We did a lot of work on this issue, and honestly, Islands Trust Council was one of the first local governments that brought the Union of British Columbia Municipalities and the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities repeated resolutions every year, which we are still pushing for. The government has said it is going to do some of these things, but they are not embedded in the legislation. They're on the website and part of its programming, but a lot of us have such an appetite for action on this that we would be more comforted if it were embedded in legislation.
Some of those pieces would be fixing the vessel registry, creating a fee to help cover the cost of vessel disposal, and especially addressing the backlog of what we hear from Transport Canada are thousands of abandoned vessels across the country.
I'm seeing you nod. Those are the elements of a lot of those local government resolutions.
Can you talk in more detail about the imperative of dealing with the backlog and also some of the concerns that I think you heard the Sunshine Coast Regional District Board talk about on the previous panel? Although there is a program in the interim to work with local governments to remove some of the existing backlog of abandoned vessels, we heard from the minister last week that there have only been seven applications across the whole country so far.
What are the barriers to local governments participating in that program? Did Islands Trust Council make any applications for removal?