Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise to address this issue as a member of Parliament who does not come from a coastal community, but nonetheless sees the importance of this motion and the impact it would have, not just on coastal communities but throughout the country.
We are dealing with a motion that I support because it moves in a positive direction. At the same time, a motion does not have the same authority as legislation. The motion seeks to set us in a direction on this issue. I will mention later a previous actual bill that was proposed by former MP John Weston. We need to see legislation as well as a motion as this will express the will of the House with respect to the direction we want to go. However, it is important that we move forward legislatively to address this important issue for reasons I will go into and for reasons I know many of my colleagues have discussed quite well.
Derelict and abandoned vessels was not an issue I heard about at the doors in Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. I heard about a lot of different issues. Having listened to the debate, having dug into this topic, it is very clear that this does have an impact on my constituents in a number of different ways. One way is the cost. Members have spoken about the cost implications of the large number of derelict and abandoned vessels, and the cost implications of not currently having an effective framework in place for responding to this problem.
There is the cost implication, which affects all taxpayers in all parts of the country. Even if the cost falls on provincial governments, on municipalities, there is obviously an interconnectedness in the transfer of resources between different levels of government. There is only one taxpayer at the end of the day. This is important for the impact it would have on my constituents as well as people in other parts of the country.
There is the environmental impact. All of us are invested in having and maintaining the vibrancy of our coastlines from an environmental perspective. These are places that my constituents visit on a regular basis and appreciate the opportunity to do so. They appreciate the benefits that come with tourism and environmental beauty in those places.
There is also the impact on commerce for my constituency, the importance of our coastlines, of our ports for imports and exports. This has a consequential impact for them as well, even for people who do not live in coastal communities.
That is why I am pleased to see this and to speak in favour of this and to encourage members of the House as well to consider the next steps that come out of the motion. Hopefully we will be able to move forward, even in this Parliament, with some kind of legislative response in the future.
Just by way of context, we have a situation right now where it is estimated that there are close to 400 abandoned vessels. Again, as somebody who does not come from a coastal community, this would seem surprising that people simply would abandon their property in the middle of nature. Certainly that would not happen with a truck or RV. Nobody would think that was a normal or acceptable thing to do, yet we have the issue of abandoned vessels that are causing problems along our coastline.
Right now, municipalities in many cases lack the means to do it, financial or otherwise, and the Coast Guard will only remove vessels if there is an assessment that there is some kind of imminent environmental risk in place.
This leaves us where we are, which is with this very large number of abandoned vessels. In cases where removal is required, there is a significant cost associated with it. My colleague from South Shore—St. Margarets, in her initial speech on this, referred to a vessel that cost $12 million to remove. The vessels name was the MV Miner. That is an enormous sum of money. If we can have a framework in place that deals with this proactively, it actually prevents the problem from existing and prevents the need to respond to it later. That is a lot of money saved. The costs for dealing with vessels will vary widely, depending on the size, the kind of vessel and these sorts of things, but costs can be up into the millions of dollars, as we have heard.
Clearly we have a reason as a House to try to address proactively to confront the problem of existing abandoned vessels, but also to try to put in place an effective framework that will prevent us from having to expend these kinds of dollars in the future. That is the context and that is what we are trying to confront today.
The motion has a number of different aspects to it.
It calls on the government to address the issue of existing abandoned vessels and it puts in place a timeline to do so, and that is important. It is valuable when we have motions in place to say by when and to define the process so it is not just a purely an aspirational statement.
It then calls for prohibition of abandonment and realistic penalties to put in place mechanisms to ensure people do not abandon vessels in the future.
Associated with that, we have the educational component. It is important, if we are to put in new place new rules, for those who own vessels and may be affected by this new framework to be aware of the framework and to be prepared to respond to it. The educational component goes with those new prohibitions and penalties.
The fourth important issue, which ties into this issue of effective enforcement, is improved vessel owner identification. Therefore, if there is an abandoned vessel, there is a good mechanism for ensuring that the person who is responsible for that abandonment can be identified, or at least the owner of the vessel can be, to start the process to ensure there is some real accountability in place.
Finally, there is a mechanism in place for government assistance to address this issue over the long term.
There are a number of different components to the motion, all of which have an important place as part of the discussion to say we have to address the issue of existing abandoned vessels, but also proactively. That proactive part not only is important for the environment. Dealing with the existing vessels addresses the current environmental challenges, but proactively in the future hopefully we can not only prevent the potential environmental problems, but also deal with the cost factor, preventing the taxpayer from being on the hook for some of these costs, whether it be municipal, provincial, or federal taxpayers.
Having spoken in favour of the motion, as much as possible, it is important for us to move forward with legislation, not just with motions. Motions express the will of the House, the aspirations, the opinions of the House, but they are not binding on the government. The government is not required to respond or to implement. Although the motion imagines a legislative framework and lays it out, legislation is needed to bind the actions of government and certainly of people outside of the government.
It is unfortunate but we do have cases where the House passes motions, but the government then chooses not to act on them, or the government in some way reinterprets them to say that the motion did not really mean this, that it meant something else. This is always the challenge when we have discussions of motions in the House.
As I mentioned, a former member of Parliament, John Weston from B.C., had Bill C-695, which did not contain all the different components in this motion. Perhaps one advantage of a motion is that we can, no pun intended, cast the net wider, but legislation has that added force.
Bill C-695 prohibited vessel abandonment and it introduced penalties to do so. It dealt with that proactive potential future abandonment of vessels issue, and that was good legislation. I would certainly support that legislation if it were brought back before the House. Maybe another member, or maybe even the government, will see fit to bring forward Bill C-695 from the previous Parliament and the great work done on that by Conservative member John Weston.
Overall, this is a positive motion. We like the direction in which it goes. It is a step in the right direction. It does not get us all the way to the finish line, but it is an important step. I congratulate the member for bringing it forward and I look forward to supporting it at second reading.