Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you for being here, Minister.
I was really pleased to hear you talk about the environment being an important objective of this bill. As I know you're aware, local stakeholders in Vancouver, such as the South Coast Ship Watch Alliance, have been very concerned about the environmental impacts of anchorage: light, noise and air pollution that affect local citizens and sound and other water pollution that affect the marine mammals. There are hundreds of species at risk in the Salish Sea that are affected.
Their view is that anchorage has a negative impact and that if ships arrived on time and on schedule thousands of anchor days per year could be prevented from being necessary. I'm very interested, given this, how the bill would improve the situation of anchorage. One last fact that they've put out is that anchorage growth has quadrupled while port tonnage grew by only one-quarter, so it's growing 16 times as fast as actual delivery of goods through the port. How does the bill help with that?