Good evening.

[Witness spoke in Hesquiaht]

[English]

My name is Joshua Charleson. I'm the executive director for the Coastal Restoration Society, and I live in Port Alberni, B.C.

I have four points on the current state of derelict vessels in Canada, as my team at Coastal Restoration see it, as well as a lot of the coastal first nations that we work with. Just let me know if I'm rambling on too long.

The first one is that it's very costly. A huge barrier to dealing with derelict vessels is the cost. It costs up to $60,000 per vessel to get rid of them. The costs include training a crew and include insurance, accommodations, logistics, vessels, crew, equipment, waste transport, heavy equipment, barge, staff and landfill fees. There are just so many costs to actually getting rid of a derelict vessel.

There's a lack of infrastructure, so there's a massive gap in infrastructure needs on Canadian coasts to deal with derelict vessels, which are causing environmental harm. Current infrastructure is not equipped to responsibly deal with end-of-life vessels, particularly the small vessels. Then there is the example of Union Bay. I'm not going to get into it because I only have so much time.

The return on investment isn't high enough for larger shipyards to dispose of pleasure crafts. There's a lack of incentives for vessel disposal, and that's contributing to the abandonment of vessels.

As for numbers, we have around 1,400 abandoned vessels or derelict vessels that have been recorded on the B.C. coast, and 700 of them are under 12 metres long, so they are considered a small vessel. An estimated 43,000 vessels require disposal annually across Canada, according to the Vard report in 2016. That's a lot of vessels that we have to deal with every single year. The longer we don't have the infrastructure to take care of it, the more they're just going to pile up and then just become somebody else's problem.

Around authority, there's always confusion over who is going to take ownership of it, going to authorize a vessel of concern or going to actually give the green light for a vessel to be removed. That needs to be settled because there are CCG, DFO, Transport Canada and provincial requirements, as well as first nations communities. You have to do the runaround to figure out who is actually going to do this.

This is the way we want to see Canada's derelict vessels dealt with in the future. The first one is that it's so costly. Building responsible infrastructure to deal with derelict vessels in Canadian waters will reduce harm to the environment and will reduce the cost of dismantling, landfilling and recycling derelict vessels substantially. Having dedicated facilities that reduce the need for field-based breakdown and extensive transportation can reduce disposal costs, if we actually had the infrastructure put into place.

As for responsible infrastructure, we're proposing to create a derelict vessel depot—there could probably be a better name for that—on the west coast of Vancouver Island that will be economically viable. It will provide full-time employment and training. It will reduce the cost to vessel owners and will provide a pathway for insurance agencies to fund the deconstruction of derelict vessels. It will provide closed-contained and environmentally safe shipwrecking, and it will provide space for innovation and technology in the recycling of derelict vessels in the future.

In terms of numbers, here is a little history. Since the 1950s, fibreglass boats have become very popular for commercial vessels as well as for recreational vessels. The problem with fibreglass is that the life expectancy is about 50 years, so now we're stuck with tens of thousands of these vessels that are near the end of their life expectancies. A vessel built in 1950 had an end of life in 2000, and it's just subsequent to that every single year.

The process we do to break down fibreglass vessels on the coast is to break them apart the best we can while trying not to release the fibres back into the environment. It's impossible to do if you're just doing it on the shore. Obviously, wind, water or any kind of little gust will bring up those particles and put them right back into the ocean. That's why we're talking about having an actual place to bring your vessel so that it's closed-contained, has the filters that are needed and nothing can escape. You have oil sumps, runoff catchment and everything like that in this.

I realized I'm missing a page somewhere, but we'll just continue.

As to how we're dealing with it on Vancouver Island—our waste management—I found this out only when we were doing derelict vessels out of Ladysmith. People know it as the “dogpatch”.

We were removing a bunch, and I called waste management, asking them why we have to break everything down to a metre. That's to fit it into their landfill bins. From Ladysmith, it goes to Nanaimo. From Nanaimo, it gets put on a barge and goes over to Delta. It gets put on a truck, then onto a tram, goes down to the States, gets put on another truck and then ends up in a landfill. For us to remove one footprint—one boat in Ladysmith—it goes through all of those stages.

We're leaving footprints all the way across the map just to get rid of one footprint on that beach. We need more responsibility.