Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the hon. member from St. John's for his comments tonight. I wanted to draw to his attention our MCTS centres, the marine communications and traffic services centres, that are watching the traffic flow up and down the coast. I know the hon. member was with us when the committee visited these centres.
I wonder if he would comment on the problems we have with the ab initio training program. That is training for officers. I believe we have the best and well trained officers manning our posts, but they are getting older and many of them are nearing retirement. The training to replace these officers, which takes quite a bit of time, simply has not been done, especially from the west coast.
We visited the Canadian Coast Guard College in Sydney, Nova Scotia, an excellent facility. It is actually quite busy training officers from other countries who are coming here to receive the benefits of our knowledge. It seems tragic to me that we are not training our own officers to replace our hard-working people on the coasts.
In addition to that, I wonder if he would comment on what we saw in terms of notices of suspension shipping services that are not going out. The coast is not being watched at times and hundreds of miles of coastline are just simply not being watched at all.