Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. I have to say thanks to all of you for serving on this committee and taking the time to listen to all the areas of Canada that are affected by the abandoned and derelict boat phenomenon, as I call it.

My name is Leonard Lee, and I turned 76 years old yesterday. I was born and raised in Pender Harbour, as were my mother and father. Pender Harbour is on the Sunshine Coast and approximately 60 kilometres north of Vancouver. I'm one of those guys who grew up on the water, as boats were the only means of transportation when I was young. Plus, my father was a commercial fisherman. I have lots of concerns about the health of our environment.

I logged and fished after high school, saved some money, went to vocational school, worked in telecommunications for Telus for 30 years and retired at 55. I've been full time on the Sunshine Coast since retiring. I've always been here. I'm active in many not-for-profit organizations, such as the chamber, the Living Heritage Society museum, the residents association and the Harbour Authority of Pender Harbour. I was strong-armed into running for the SCRD director by those I now call my “so-called friends”, and I've been at it for six years, the last two as chair of the regional district.

I'm very proud of the Sunshine Coast. It's a friendly place, isolated from Vancouver by ferry service, which runs periodically during the day. We're effectively an island, even though we are connected to the mainland.

The reason I mentioned Pender Harbour is that it's a very nice harbour. It has multiple bays and coves, and it stretches inland for five kilometres. It has over 60 kilometres of shoreline, 300 private docks and a very active boating community. It's popular with summer boating tourists. We also have a lot of derelict and abandoned boats.

Derelict and abandoned boats are a relatively new phenomenon and with many different causes. A main cause is that there's no longer anything called cheap moorage in our harbour. Increased regulations—including for limited dock size and construction standards—and the high cost of purchasing and owning waterfront property have pretty much eliminated any category called “cheap moorage”. Once you don't have cheap moorage, people can't afford to tie up the cheaper boats. The less affluent owners become guardians of those cheaper boats, and they resort to anchoring them in our protected bay. There are hundreds of them around the Sunshine Coast, the vast majority not insured or registered.

There are probably a hundred of them right now in Pender Harbour and Egmont, and there's a cross-section of boats. There are several large ex-commercial vessels owned by individuals. They're derelict. They were bought by guys who were going to make their fortune. Of course, that didn't happen. They're floating still, but who knows why they're floating. The owners don't have any money left to do anything with them. They're eventually going to rust out and sink.

We have a whole bunch of boats that are at legal mooring buoys and not a problem. They're generally in front of the owners' residences and maintained. However, the vast bulk of boats are almost-good, cheap boats. They're first anchored by owners who thought they were going to use them for recreation, but they're not in front of the owners' properties. They're only randomly used due to the difficulty in accessing them. Inevitably, a canvas will break or a boat battery will die, and the boat will fill with water and become immovable. If the owner can't afford to fix it, it's a derelict boat sitting at anchor, and it will eventually sink since the owners can't get to it.

The problem boats are now the ones that are illegally at permanent anchor. There are way too many boats in too small a space in many bays. The anchor is not a secure moorage, and it's prone to drag under heavy winds, scouring the sea bottom, damaging eelgrass beds and bouncing off other boats that are tied to wharves. Some end up on the beach. Most often, a local will rescue them and return them to anchor.

There are no mooring lights or anchor lights, which is a hazard for navigation. Boats have been known to collide with them, trying to drive through them at night. Near misses are common. A few of them are live-aboards with no liquid waste holding tanks. People simply dump their garbage over the side at night. Some are fixer-uppers, with owners trying to fix them up and make them livable and self-propelled, but all they do is end up selling them to someone who lives aboard them. Then they end up abandoned and eventually sink.

The problem we have now is that we wait until they sink and then do something with them. That's way too late. We should have some way of avoiding that in the first place and making sure they don't end up sinking. I have lots of ideas on how that could happen, but I think I'm pretty much out of time.