Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today in support of Bill C-638, An Act to amend the Canada Shipping Act, 2001 (wreck), introduced by the hon. member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.
This bill addresses three wreck-related issues. Canada is known as the country with the longest coastline. This is therefore a important issue for Canada.
First, wrecks compromise navigation safety. Second, when they are abandoned, they can cause environmental damage. Finally, they represent an economic challenge. When these wrecks are located near major tourist hot spots, they can detract from the scenery. I will get into the economic aspect a little later and propose a way we might use these wrecks to benefit the economy.
A boating association estimates that there are 4.3 million boats in Canada. What is more, in November 2012 alone, 240 boats were abandoned. There does not seem to be an accurate count of these wrecks or any monitoring of them. There is a lack of coordination and leadership. The federal government could play this role, since some of these wrecks may be in interprovincial waters or along the coastline. This would be an appropriate role for the federal government.
As has been mentioned, municipal authorities sometimes do not have the necessary resources or technical means to deal with wrecks. The federal government is well positioned to play this coordination and leadership role.
That is a problem, but there are solutions. For example, Washington State changed its system so that the vessel registration fee, whether it be for pleasure craft or other vessels, helps cover salvage costs. The state also made the Department of Natural Resources responsible for administering the program, which allowed it to salvage 500 wrecks. That is an interesting way of dealing with this problem. The federal government could learn from what is being done in the state of Washington.
I would now like to go back in history a little. I am originally from the Bois-Francs region, which was the first area of Quebec to have a recycling program in the 1970s. That was quite some time ago, and I learned the three Rs—reduce, reuse and recycle—very early on.
At the time, there was a visionary named Normand Maurice who said that there was gold in our garbage cans.
Members may be wondering where I am going with this, so I will talk right away about a course I took in agriculture and the environment to become an agronomist. The name of the course was waste resource management, and in our case, we were often talking about manure. These courses were really interesting. What we consider waste, scrap and wrecks are actually resources that are not in the right place. I think everyone can agree that those resources can be used and repurposed.
This bill talks about wrecks. My riding runs along the St. Lawrence River and so the issue of wrecks is very important to me and my constituents in LaSalle—Émard.
How could we salvage these wrecks and repurpose them in a safe, economical and environmentally friendly way? It must not be done in just any old way. We need to do it in an environmentally friendly manner. There is value in those wrecks because they contain metal and other materials that could be salvaged and repurposed.
This is also about job creation, given that 4.3 million currently registered vessels could be salvaged and repurposed, and there are many others. This could create jobs, especially local jobs, and stimulate our economy. This could be a great opportunity to take a wreck, repurpose it, salvage it, and at the same time, do so in an environmentally friendly and economical way. Let me give a couple of examples of these kinds of wrecks.
In the Montreal region, a boat that was more or less abandoned, that did not run, was transformed into a spa. A private company purchased the boat, which is in Montreal's Old Port, and turned it into a spa. Now that is innovative: to take a wreck and turn it into something useful that will not cause environmental problems, something more attractive that will not spoil the tourist landscape, for example. This challenge presents a unique opportunity to make the most of wrecks and take care of them.
As a final point, I would like to talk about a very interesting project. It is a project of the future, a business opportunity with incredible possibilities, because while ships become wrecks, there are also many planes at the end of their life cycles. There is a company called Aerocycle that specializes in dismantling aircraft at the end of their life cycles and recycling the parts. For instance, that company dismantled two Air Transat planes in Mirabel as part of a research project with École Polytechnique in Montreal and the Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Québec.
That is how a ship and an aircraft at the end of their life cycle were transformed. They were recycled in an environmentally friendly way, jobs and opportunities were created, and various parts were salvaged and repurposed. This is very worthwhile.
Let us move forward with something that could turn out to be extremely valuable by allowing for the salvage of wrecks and aircraft at the end of their life cycle.
