Environment committee  Madam Chair, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today as you consider the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development's “Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change” audit findings, as they relate to Transport Canada. Impacts associated wi

Environment committee  Departments have generally not received additional resources to look internally at their activities to consider adaptation. As a department, we did choose to identify a very low level of resources to create a core group that was able to begin to do some research to understand the

Transport committee  Good afternoon. I'm Ellen Burack. I'm the director general of environmental policy at Transport Canada.

Transport committee  I'll give it a shot. With respect to the insurance, the insurance doesn't per se prevent the event. What it does is prevent challenges after the event when it comes to who pays for cleaning up and what have you. There's much in the legislation that does that, starting with the e

Transport committee  There will be under this legislation.

Transport committee  Were the legislation in place right now, we would be able to notify the owner that they need to do something, tell them what they need to do, and give them a timeline for that. Then if they didn't do that within that timeline, we would have the capacity to move to administrative

Transport committee  The minister was talking before about how it won't require regulation to put it into effect, and that's because the administrative penalties and other penalties are hard-wired right into the legislation itself. The day that the legislation is effective, the enforcement regime is

Transport committee  Minister Garneau mentioned this morning that this bill is one piece of a national strategy on abandoned and wrecked vessels, and improving vessel owner information is a key part of that strategy. When it comes to pleasure craft licensing, we have a couple of streams of activity

Transport committee  Absolutely. I think it's important that committee members understand that there are two separate systems. There is the pleasure craft licensing system in Canada, and a large vessel registry. With respect to the large vessel registry, I am not aware of as many problems as on the

Transport committee  What I will say is that sometimes with federal assets it's not the first sale but the second or third sale that results in an issue. We're aware of the issue and are looking at ways to address it.

Transport committee  We definitely do have quite a bit of information. We have done extensive research on what other countries are doing. In many countries this is not done at the national level, as it is in the U.S. It's a combination of national and state legislation and programs that create thei

Transport committee  Absolutely.

Transport committee  We've looked at what's happening in Europe, we've looked at what's happening south of the border, and we have modelled a lot of what's proposed to be done through the national strategy on Washington and Florida.

Transport committee  The legislation definitely makes provision for not finding “a” or “the” person responsible. There are a range of players— directors in companies, etc.—who are able to be pursued as we're dealing with these problem vessels.

Transport committee  The insurance requirements are only for larger vessels of 300 gross tonnes and above. I'll ask my colleague to comment on insurance availability.