Fisheries committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members. I'll pause for a moment and thank you for the very warm welcome earlier this morning and tell you that it is an honour to be in this position. To what the minister has said, I would simply add the point that the work to move that

National Defence committee  There have been some studies done, particularly around the drift rate of a tanker through the Juan de Fuca Strait, so if a tanker were to lose power for any reason, how long you would have until it would hit something that would cause a problem. Another drift rate study is ongoi

National Defence committee  There are a lot of pieces there. We'll move quickly on them. The first piece I'll tackle is what we are responsible for, or what we are in charge of. We are responsible to ensure that there is an appropriate cleanup. Sometimes that means that we take charge, and people follow th

National Defence committee  Maybe I'll start, and then Mario can pick up on some of the specifics. I'll just give you a vignette essentially to help answer this. Imagine you're in Halifax. I'll choose Halifax because that's where I saw it happen. The MSOC and our MCTS folks are looking out on the ocean. Th

National Defence committee  We're losing ship days because we have vessels out of service, and that makes ship maintenance a high priority. I'm afraid I have to give you more than one, because I can't.... We miss ship days at sea because we don't have enough trained personnel, and I have to say that to my

National Defence committee  To my left, we have a former captain who has spent a lot of time in the Arctic and has seen this first-hand. Mario.

National Defence committee  Certainly. Again, that's a very broad question. The bottom line, in terms of keeping the ships operating, is this. We refer to ship maintenance in three categories. There is regulatory maintenance, the things we have to do for Transport Canada to approve our ships for sailing. Th

National Defence committee  There are threats we can see and threats we can't see. I know you've discussed some of them with the navy. With our focus on safety of life at sea and safety of the marine environment, when we're talking about threats, we're talking about an increase in adventure travel, from fi

National Defence committee  If only that were an easy question. We have looked at the financial health of the Coast Guard as resting on three pillars, essentially. One is the comprehensive review that I referred to earlier, which does not include the fleet as part of the review. The second is the recently

National Defence committee  I've been in the Coast Guard for three years and we haven't had any kind of extensive discussion on that analysis while I've been there. Mario, I'll turn to you to answer.

National Defence committee  It's not exactly correct. While the Coast Guard in the U.S. is a military organization, it's part of the national Homeland Security department. Its funding comes through NHS, rather than through the military.

National Defence committee  That's correct.

National Defence committee  It doesn't to the extent that we do. It's not involved in a direct way.

National Defence committee  With respect to goods coming in and out of Canada, its presence has more to do with security concerns that may be related to a specific vessel.

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question. It won't surprise you to hear that it's a question we are asked from time to time. I was recently asked by a professor whether the navy should maybe just get out of the Arctic and we should do the job up there. My answer may sound a little bit cute,