Fisheries committee  I was hired by the Council of the Haida Nation to develop a marine exercise that represented something that needed to be done. There were high risks. It became quite obvious that it was the container vessel traffic in B.C. Because of its growth and the nature of container vessels, the high-drift rate requirements were very high and tug interventions could be needed, as well as places to refuge.

Fisheries committee  I have provided a written submission that covers many of the topics, from limits of liability to a lot of the topics that have been raised in this meeting in the way of [Technical difficulty—Editor], in a strategic and meaningful way. My submission has been provided to you.

Fisheries committee  No, we don't. That's part of it. That's a salvage operation, again, and requires side scan sonars supported by remotely operated vehicles with cameras. There is only one guideline that's out there that talks about—

Fisheries committee  No, it's not; an example being that with containers when you have styrofoam and nurdles—those are little plastic pellets—they're much more insidious and have much more long-term impact than even oil. If you don't recover them, they get buried in sediments, and we don't have a long-term understanding of all the ecological impacts.

Fisheries committee  Well, that comes down to shipowners' limit of liability. They have the ability to reach a limit, a financial limit, and basically relinquish any kind of response in incident management. That limit of liability, how much money is actually available, is never, ever communicated, because once they reach [Technical difficulty—Editor] and that includes all the long-term monitoring, the recovering of the containers and everything.

Fisheries committee  That's correct, and the ship-source oil pollution fund is not the way to go.

Fisheries committee  I've sent in a fairly substantive 11-page report that covers many of these issues here. It was provided a few days ago. The best practices for salvage are to actually have some salvage exercises, an analysis of who are the salvage—

Fisheries committee  Yes. Salvage is a very special requirement, and I include firefighting. For example, when the Zim Kingston was on fire, we were very lucky to have two offshore supply vessels right there in Victoria to provide a lot of firefighting capability. Well, that's part of salvage. The other part of salvage is having emergency pumps that can pump bilge water.

Fisheries committee  Hello and thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to this committee. I appreciate it. I'll give you a very quick introduction to me. I have had a career of about 48 years now in environmental emergency protection and management, for the last 30 years of which I have been engaged specifically in environmental emergency preparedness response.