Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for sharing his time with me on this extremely important issue.
We wonder sometimes with what importance the government looks upon cases like this. This is an extremely important piece of legislation moving in a positive direction. That is why we support it because any positive move to make our borders more secure would have to be supported by everyone.
However, are we just looking at semantics? Are we looking at smoke and mirrors? Where is the substance? Where is the meat? Let me say to the parliamentary secretary who introduced the bill that we have in this country, on both coasts in particular, the worst protected sections of coastline in the world.
In many parts of Canada the only indicator of any presence of ocean traffic is our radar. Unfortunately, large chunks of the coastline are not covered by radar. What is even more concerning is the fact that cuts in recent years have been so great that many of the radar sites, which operate by way of towers in remote or isolated areas, have no maintenance being done them. All of this is on the public record, by the way, from witnesses who work in these very locations.
The cuts have been so deep that the people who operate in these remote sites are told that there is no regular maintenance until the service goes down. If the problem happens to be in a remote tower, getting to it depends mainly on weather because in quite a number of areas the only way of getting there is by way of helicopter. If the weather is inclement, people wait for days and sometimes weeks in order to service the towers that control the radar sites. If they happen to fly in and they do not have the right part to effect changes or repairs, then they have to wait for another opportunity to get back there again. That is one major concern simply because no money is available for regular maintenance.
A more important gap in the coverage is the fact that if we know and the people in the area involved along the coastlines know what is covered by radar and what is not, would the bad guys not know too? In the past, when we discovered drug shipments landing in remote areas or on occasion where we had boat loads of people being dropped off on our coast, why is it that this always happened just slightly outside of radar coverage? It is because these people know which areas are covered by radar and which are not.
They know where it is safe to land and drop off contraband whether it be material or people, and escape without being detected. It is only when we find people wandering around, or in some cases we would be lucky enough to discover a hiker or someone driving in a remote area, that we would know that these things happened. Suddenly, we would notice a lot of activity, trucks being loaded with bags full of what appeared to be hay and of course it was drugs. When we discover a few hit and miss situations, how much is going on that we know nothing about?
When we talk about this, the ministers involved say they have changed all of this. Any boats approaching our shores, regardless of where they were coming from, had to call ahead to give notice. They used to have to call ahead 24 hours in advance. When they were within 24 hours of our coastline on either side of the country, they would had to call the nearest site to report that they were coming so that the very people we are talking about, the Canada Revenue Agency people and any police that would be involved if there were any concerns, would be available to meet the boat to check it out.
However, they have extended that. Now, any boats coming toward our coast must call ahead 96 hours in advance to let us know, which gives us lots more time to prepare. For what? For the boats that we know are coming.