Transport Committee on Feb. 12th, 2018

[Frank Mauro]

I'll let Mr. Winn take that.

[Ian Winn]

Thank you Mr. Fraser.

One of the penalties in that clause 90 is $5,000 for an individual. I think that could be perceived as being the cost of doing business for some individuals.

The question of who has responsibility for that vessel and who the owner is always comes up. If there's a way the owners can make it an individual owner as opposed to a corporation or a business, which would incur a larger fine, then they're going to find a way to make it a smaller fine that the individual has to pay, and in that case it would be $5,000, which might be acceptable as the cost of business.

[Frank Mauro]

May I add something to that?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Certainly.

[Frank Mauro]

With regard to an individual fine, there are individually owned boats that are in the area of 100 feet and 120 feet. These are extremely large boats and difficult to remove, so a $5,000 fine to an owner is a very small portion of what it would take to fill the tanks of that particular boat. It's a matter of perspective, I guess.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Now we'll go on to Ms. Malcolmson.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

It's good to see some allies in the room here. I see John Weston, the only Conservative to support my predecessor Jean Crowder's version of this bill. Thank you for that.

I also see Frank Mauro; at local government, we've been lobbying the province and federal government a bunch of times over the years, when I was elected locally, so it's great to have your voice here.

Also John Weston endorsed my bill, C-352, which unfortunately was stopped in its tracks back in the fall.

It's so rich that we've got the Washington State program here, and I hope the other members will shoot as many questions their way as we can, because these guys have been doing it for all this time. I'm going to focus my questions on you. I'll just let you know that last week, when we had the Minister of Transport here, he was saying one of the programs that the federal government here has been looking at is Washington State's, so you're coming in with some good credibility.

One of the pieces in my bill that wasn't able to advance and is missing from the government's bill is the vessel turn-in program that you described as your prevention program, so here are my questions to you. Do you wish that you'd waited to bring that in? To what extent was it an integral and vital part of your overall abandoned vessel program? Also, tell us a little bit more about the results that accrue when the government decides to legislate and fund a vessel's end of life.

[Kyle Murphy]

The vessel turn-in program was created two or three years ago in one of the many pieces of legislation that have been focused on our program in the last 15 years. I think with the success that we've seen in the program over those past years, as Troy mentioned, we get close to 100 vessels turned in voluntarily to us biennium, every two years. I think it would have been very helpful to have that as an option, as a tool, early on in the life of the program, although it's hard to say how much participation we would have had early on in the program.

Over the course of those 15 years, the program has become more widely known, and we work closely with all of our marinas, port facilities, cities, and county governments, so the message has gotten out. When they see a boat that's a problem and they have a vessel owner who's willing, they know they can bring it to us.

It would have been good to have it as part of the program early on. Over these past three years, it has become quite an integral part of our program.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

I'm going to ask you another question about another element of your program. You also have penalties in place for the failure to register a vessel, and we're very concerned that this program in Bill C-64 might fail if we can't actually send fines and penalties to the actual boat because the vessel registration system has kind of fallen into disrepair. That was also part of my legislation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the benefits of having fines for failing to register?

[Kyle Murphy]

For us, the biggest benefit is that it encourages registration. One of the witnesses earlier stated that it's important to know who owns the boat in order to determine who to go after, and that's exactly what we have found. A big part of our program isn't necessarily the fines that come from not registering; it's our ability to seek reimbursement from a vessel owner for the cost of removing the vessel. That becomes much more of a cost and, I think, more of a deterrent than a fine would be.

Some of our vessel removals cost upwards of a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Our statute allows us to seek reimbursement from the owner for that entire cost. We've gone through our court system to get things like liens put on property in order to recover some of those costs.

While the fines are important, mainly it's from the standpoint of making sure the vessels stay registered, so we know that when we find an abandoned vessel, there is a registration system we can go to in order to determine who the owner is at the time the vessel was abandoned.

[Troy Wood]

It's important for us to have the owner's information. When we first get a report on a vessel, we try to contact the owner to encourage responsible actions on their part.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Another important part of your program in Washington State, which I tried to model in my legislation, is the dedicated fee. When people pay to register their vessel, that money goes into a pool that is available to respond. Again, it gets the cost off taxpayers.

Can you talk more about the importance of that?

[Kyle Murphy]

When you register your vessel in Washington, as you're required to, you pay a fee. I'm not sure what the overall fee is, but that money goes into several different pots that pay for things like building boat launches and pump-out facilities and encouraging boater education programs.

Three dollars of the annual fee that you as a boat owner pay goes directly to the Department of Natural Resources to administer the derelict vessel removal program, so it's a dedicated fee. I think it started out as a dollar originally, but it's been bumped up to three dollars for the past several years. That's extremely important for our program, because it's our funding source. That's our major funding source. We get a bit more money from a separate funding source to help defer our costs, but without that fee, I believe the three dollars—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Excuse me, sir; sorry, but our time is up. We have to move on to the next questioner.

Go ahead, Mr. Badawey.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, all of you, for being here this afternoon.

I hear a lot of comments being made about past bills and efforts to deal with this issue, and I appreciate those efforts. Here we are today, taking it to the next level, and in fact getting it done.

With that said, I'm very much interested in both the process and in mitigating the financial implications to the taxpayer. I want to go to those who are experienced, those who are actually in the thick of it right now in terms of adding the substance to the effort, adding the guts to ensuring that this is dealt with.

To the folks from Washington, I want go to some of the comments you made earlier to get more specific. My question is on orphan vessels. These are vessels for which we don't have the luxury of going after somebody to pay the bill or enter into a process to deal with these vessels. I have two questions.

One, what method would you recommend to ensure that orphan vessels don't exist, and that we actually get to the folks beforehand? That way, when a vessel is abandoned, we can—whether through a VIN number that's attached to the vessel itself, as with a car, or by some other means—identify those people so we can go after them directly and mitigate the negative financial implications to the taxpayer.

Second, with respect to some of the funding programs available to you, you have fees that are paid by recreational vessel registrations, visitor permit fees, and fees to certain commercial vessels. Which of these three fees contributes the most to the derelict vessel removal account? How was it determined that these three sources of funding should be used for the derelict vessel removal account, and how has it been accepted by the boating community?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[Kyle Murphy]

Sure.

On the registration, when you register your vessel in Washington State, you get a registration sticker that you're required to put on the bow of your vessel or on the window of your vessel. Through that system, which is administered by the Washington State Department of Licensing, we're able to go back and look at owner history. If we do find an orphaned boat or an abandoned boat that hasn't been registered for many years, we can go back in that system to determine who was the last registered owner. Our statute allows us to go after that last registered owner. Even if the vessel hasn't been registered for five years, we can go back to the last person who registered it and try to work our way forward. We ask if that person sold it and if they have documentation of who they sold it to. It's a bit of an investigative process to determine who the owners are. It's all tied to the state-wide registration system that lets us know who the last registered owner was.

In terms of the funding, the biggest source of funding of those three sources is the $3 recreational fee, which gives us almost $700,000 per biennium on average. The visitor fee is a very small part of it. The fee on commercial vessels is about a quarter of a million dollars per biennium.

I believe the fee really came about as a recommendation from the boating community. Before the program was in place, there was this problem with derelict vessels—frankly, there still is—being abandoned in marinas and at port facilities, so it was an issue that was affecting the boating community. They really supported a way for that problem to be addressed. They also really supported the money that they pay into their registration going to a program that supports their community and their use of the environment. They've been very supportive all along. Even when we bumped it from a dollar up to three dollars, they were still supportive and didn't oppose that increase in the registration. The key is that they see it as a program that directly affects their boating lifestyle and their boating enjoyment.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

I want to go a bit deeper on the registration of the boats.

Let's say the sticker has been removed or the identification of the registration has been removed from the vessel itself, and it might be sitting there, perhaps half-burned. What would identify that vessel's owner 10 or 15 years after it was abandoned?

[Troy Wood]

In the United States when a vessel is imported to or created in the United States, it has to have a hull ID number. That hull ID number is stamped somewhere on the hull once or twice, in a couple of different places. That allows us to identify the history of that vessel and find that vessel. The hull ID number is also used by our coast guard to register and document documented vessels as well, so we can go from one state to another and still use that hull ID number to identify not only the owners but the history of the vessel itself.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

It would be similar to a VIN number.

[Troy Wood]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Wood.

We'll move on to Mr. Hardie.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

One issue that came up when we were looking at the challenge of dealing with the boats that are being cleaned up was what to do with them once they've been taken away from wherever they're parked. Is there any kind of recycling program in Washington State, especially for things like fibreglass?

[Kyle Murphy]

Over the past year we've worked with a company that is interested in pursuing that type of approach. They recycle fibreglass and many things. We're continuing to work with them to try to find a feasible solution for them to recycle fibreglass vessels.

We try to salvage any usable parts off the vessels and then sell them through our state surplus system. These are things like cleats and brass and things like that. A large portion of the boats are just ground up, broken up, and put into a landfill, unfortunately.

[Troy Wood]

The hardest part is finding a use for the materials in post-consumer use form. Once you create a demand for it, you'll be able to create an industry. One company was creating new products from grinding up old wooden vessels as well as fibreglass vessels. It's a small start-up, and they haven't quite made the pipeline all the way to the consumer yet. There isn't quite the demand.