Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries and Oceans
Issue 7 - Evidence - November 23, 2010
OTTAWA, Tuesday, November 23, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met this day at 5:11 p.m. to examine issues relating to the federal government's current and evolving policy framework for managing Canada's fisheries and oceans (topic: Canadian lighthouses).
Senator Bill Rompkey (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: For those who might be watching this committee at a later date, such as at 2 a.m., I am Senator Bill Rompkey and I am Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. I will invite the other members to introduce themselves. I will start on my right.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: Good day. I am Senator Losier-Cool from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Patterson: I am Dennis Patterson from Nunavut.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I am Nancy Ruth from downtown Toronto.
Senator Poirier: Rose-May Poirier, New Brunswick.
Senator Murray: Lowell Murray, Ontario.
Senator Raine: Nancy Greene Raine, British Columbia.
The Chair: We have a cross-section here.
We have just finished a trip to Newfoundland and Labrador and British Columbia. We spent a week in Newfoundland and Labrador, visiting lighthouses and meeting with interest groups, town councils, development associations, tourism officials and unions. We were then in British Columbia last week where we visited various places from Victoria to Prince Rupert, and back to Vancouver. I do not remember exactly how many lighthouses we visited. We did not see all that we wanted to, but I think we only missed two or three because of weather.
It was quite instructive. We met with lighthouse keepers and with other interested groups. One of those who was and is still very interested, and has been for some years now, is former Senator Pat Carney. I want to welcome her tonight. She is here as Chair of the Consultative Group on the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act of Parks Canada.
Ms. Carney, I cannot call you Senator Carney anymore.
Hon. Pat Carney, P.C., Former Senator, Chair, Consultative Group on Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act, Parks Canada: You could call me Pat.
The Chair: I could. That would be informal and casual, but our meetings have been informal and casual. Pat, could you introduce the other people you have with you?
Ms. Carney: We welcome the opportunity to appear before you. I have with me tonight Robert Square, Chair of the Cove Island Lightstation Heritage Association, who can respond to questions. He is not giving a presentation, but he is a member of the group. Later, you will hear from Richard Blagborne, President of the Saturna Island Heritage Committee, who is having technical problems with his presentation. I am hoping he will resolve it because it is an example of how we have restored lighthouse facilities.
I will speak on four points. I will give a brief overview on de-staffing because that, I know, is your priority; a review of the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act, HLPA, which grew out of the work of this committee; the problems that have been created by actions by DFO, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which has scuttled the act; and some simple conclusions for you to consider.
First, I would like to thank you for carrying out this important examination of Canada's lighthouses and the services they supply the coastal, maritime and aviation communities. In the mid-1990s, members of Parliament and myself, with the help of now-Minister John Duncan, who is the MP for Vancouver Island North, formed an ad hoc parliamentary committee, funded and staffed from our office budgets. We held public hearings in four B.C. coastal communities. This was when the first threat of de-staffing came up. We did it informally.
We produced this report, Lightstations: People Want People on the Lights. It is in English only because we were an ad hoc committee. It was tabled in the other place but, of course, it is not part of the record. Your trip and your hearings will be part of the public record, but I will ensure the clerk has a copy of this.
Basically, at that time, with the report and the opposition you have heard, the attempts to de-staff the lighthouses were put on hold and in B.C. the majority of light stations are still staffed. Now, we have the threat of de-staffing again.
The evidence you have heard here and also in the regions confirms two points or realities. The first is that the bureaucrats in Ottawa still are not in touch with the conditions in the real world of people who live and work on the coast. As a small example, you were told by the Canadian Coast Guard that the automated equipment can read sea state information, which is important for float planes and boats. In actual fact, that equipment is offshore. It is not in the harbours, where the float planes and the small boats require it. DFO still does not know what is happening on the water.
The second reality is that the opposition to de-staffing is unchanged for the same reasons we heard in the mid-1990s and since and that you heard on the trip, with one exception: There is much more interest in the ecological stewardship of lightkeepers than there was 15 years ago. Back then, there was not as much recreational boating, people were not clamouring onto the lights and removing the mussels. That is an expanding area.
However, the people in the light stations are still needed for public and maritime safety, including accurate reports on weather and sea state, search and rescue efforts, unreliability of the automatic aids to navigation, environmental protection, maintenance of heritage values, and collection of scientific information and all the other things you heard about on your trip.
For those of you who were aboard the Coast Guard helicopter, which aborted the visits to the West Coast light stations because you could not land because of weather — could not land on Saturna Island, where Richard and I were waving at you, because of a 40-knot tailwind while the sun was shining — it did show you first-hand why automatic aids to navigation are not reliable substitutes. If you cannot land in sunshine with the seals in the water and a mere 40-knot tailwind, which is quite normal, you can see that the automatic equipment can remain unserviced for days during the winter months until the crews can get in to get them. Therefore, people at sea or travelling by air are at risk.
One obvious solution to these vital services is also unchanged from our work over the last 15 years, and that is to use the staffed light stations, which are situated at the most strategic real estate on the coast, for multiple purposes, whether it is monitoring drug smuggling or human trafficking or other criminal activities, as well as the things we described above. That was true 15 years ago and you heard on your trip that it is still true today. Some of us would argue that the Canadian Coast Guard has the flexibility to expand the mandate of the light station staff to do that.
The committee's terms of reference includes the role of lighthouses in economic activities. For instance, in B.C., heritage tourism is the fastest growing branch of tourism. You will hear from Richard Blagborne about a project on our home island of Saturna, which meets those terms of reference.
In 2008, with the active assistance of members of this committee, including Senator Rompkey, who chaired the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, Senator Murray, who seconded the bill, and others, the Senate passed the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act, which was subsequently — and this is important — unanimously passed in the other place. There was no opposition to it. This has had the support of two houses of parliament.
The act — I will call it the heritage preservation act, rather than the tongue-tied title — because law six months ago, on May 29, 2010. The prime motivation for this legislation, you will remember, was to replace DFO's traditional demolition of surplus facilities with more constructive uses by communities and to preserve our maritime heritage.
However, the effectiveness of this new initiative has been undermined by DFO's plans to off-load most of these sites, including active navigational aids. This is what I want to stress with you. These are active aids and DFO is trying to unload them without regard to the public interest and the legitimate national security concerns. This is a security issue.
I will not read the whole thing. You will get copies of this. I just want to highlight the major points. The act provides for the selection and designation of heritage lighthouses — and our group has been involved in that criteria — prevents the unauthorized alteration or disposition of heritage lighthouses; requires that heritage lighthouses be reasonably maintained; and facilitates sales or transfers.
It also provides a petition process, which some of you may remember, about how the public must nominate the lighthouses they want designated as heritage. They need 25 signatures. There is one in the library in Prince Rupert, as we speak. It has 20 signatures and we hope to get the other 5. They must go to the minister.
The key point in this slide is that there is only an 18-month window left for people to get their petitions in. There is only the time between when the act was proclaimed on May 29, 2010 and May 29, 2012. That is only 18 months, which is not much to get communities motivated to apply for the lights. You will ask why, and we said because we wanted to get this thing moving before lighthouses were demolished. We did not anticipate to be, as I say, torpedoed by DFO.
The act does contain provisions to enable DFO to identify lighthouses that are declared surplus to its needs, and to make them available to other agencies and groups. This was an existing program. DFO had this program; it was called divestiture of surplus facilities.
The problem is that in having the new act, which allows them to designate surplus lighthouses, DFO has used it as a trash can. Instead of the few lights that we thought they identified as surplus — inactive lights — they have dumped nearly 1,000 light stations into this act and said they are surplus. I will show you that that really removes them from heritage designation and causes all sorts of problems for the maritime public.
This action was never contemplated in the drafting of the act that was unanimously passed by Parliament. Our colleague, Barry MacDonald, who is on our group, had identified five or six inactive lights as maybe surplus at the time that we were working on this bill in Nova Scotia; Mr. Square has the names.
In B.C., on October 19, 2009, I met with Susan Steele, who is known to this committee, and other people in DFO and asked them specifically: were there any inactive surplus lights in British Columbia? I was told "no." Six months later, DFO produced a list of 11, all of them active lights, which they now see as surplus.
This is a simple point, because we say it is an active light and there is a twinkly beacon on the top, it is not surplus. They dumped 1,000 of these — everything but staffed lighthouses. Remember, the staffed lighthouses are in B.C. and Newfoundland. That means all the lighthouses in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec, et cetera, are now considered surplus. It is ridiculous; it cannot work.
Half of the lighthouses in DFO's surplus list, or 480 lights, not the 5 or 6, are active lighthouses that contain aids to navigation and must remain operational. DFO says they are surplus. We will show you some of them, and I would like to see how. They have not explained what happens to these vital aids if they are not maintained, as DFO is mandated to do.
One of the things we will ask you to do in the conclusion, if it is an active navigation aid, is to take it off the surplus list. DFO is supposed to maintain active navigation aids. If it is up there and it is a navigation aid and it is on their list and sending out flashing signals, it is not surplus; take it off the list.
One of the existing problems is there is a conflict between the timeline for making a lighthouse surplus and designating it as heritage. In this slide, the top bar is the one that is important. In the second bar, the act came into force. By 2012, there is a deadline for petition submissions; and May 29, 2015, is the last date for the minister to designate heritage lighthouses.
That is the last date for heritage designation, but if you look at the Treasury Board rules for getting rid of a surplus light, they only allow three years. Basically, Treasury Board says if a light is deemed surplus — and 1,000 of them were deemed surplus on May 29, 2010, on the surplus list, the clock is ticking — they have to be disposed of in three years under Treasury Board rules, so they will not be in the federal inventory in 2015 and they cannot be declared heritage. It is a point we can elaborate on, but you cannot designate a lighthouse as heritage that is not in the federal inventory; if it is supposed to be disposed of by 2013, and it is not in the federal inventory, it cannot be a heritage light in 2015. That means it is hard for a lot of groups to designate them.
I will show you a series of lights that are active, operational lights that have been declared surplus. We will go through these fast. Race Rocks is a light on a tower; that is an iconic light, an Imperial light before Confederation — surplus, says DFO. Point Atkinson — Captain Vancouver charted that coastline. It is at the entrance to Burrard Inlet. It is an operational light, deemed surplus.
We will run through the other ones. In Nova Scotia there is Cape Sable Lighthouse, an active lighthouse, deemed surplus; Louisbourg, an active lighthouse, deemed surplus; Low Point Lighthouse, deemed surplus; Sambro Island Lighthouse, which I believe is the oldest light in North America — certainly historic — deemed surplus and under the DFO action, it will not be available for heritage light status. There is then Peggy's Cove, surplus.
This is more arcane, but there are problems with tenures of the light. Senator MacDonald indicated he was aware of that. Some of these lights are not on federal land or they are deemed to be on federal land only if they are used as a lighthouse. I will not elaborate, but if you change the designation as "lighthouse," they are on a provincial Crown grant. We had this problem in Saturna. The question will be how those lands can be delivered to Sutton Realty, the realty company which appeared before the committee and which is interested in developing some real estate venture, which is good for them.
The following are lights on provincial land: Lucy Island, which you visited and Sisters Islets in Georgia Strait. Sisters Islets has also been allowed to become almost "demolished by neglect;" the buildings have fallen down. That may not be available.
There are problems for groups. Some of the lights are aids to navigation and need to be maintained by DFO. Some are too isolated to be acquired and operated by community groups. Sisters Islets might be in that group.
Senators Rompkey and Murray will remember the preamble to the heritage act and the problem of access to maintain wharves. We fought to put wharves in the preamble so that whoever owned the light station, whether it was Parks Canada, DFO or Sutton Realty, had to be responsible for the wharves. We put it in the preamble to indicate how important it was that the government maintain the wharves.
Other sites have Aboriginal claims on them, which make them difficult to deliver to anybody. These have all been made worse by DFO's actions.
Many community groups tell us that they do not know if it is a surplus light and whether they can even acquire it; they do not know what other claims are on it. My colleague, Mr. Square, says, in terms of cost, a community may be able to deal with a small, single structure. Tomorrow we will be reviewing some of them. They can maintain that. However, his group, Cove Island, would involve acquiring and maintaining almost 30 acres and 10 buildings. I think Cove Island is pretty small but I do not think the population of Cove Island and the adjacent community can possibly maintain 30 acres and 10 buildings; that was not the intent of the act. I asked him here to talk about that.
Similar concerns are being expressed by groups on the West Coast, including Sheringham Point lighthouse where they have raised money and developed trails and a plan for the lighthouse. However, the Aboriginal chief next door says "no." It might be available as a lease, but it is not available for sale because they might want it for land claims; it is an ancestral home for their people. Sheringham Point's volunteers are wondering how they can meet the time frame and proceed with this.
The other issue in terms of cost is that Treasury Board guidelines for the disposal of real property surplus to federal needs are complex but they use market pricing. Treasury Board says if it is surplus real estate property, it must be market pricing. For instance, I like Discovery Island light station, which you visited, because it was the site of the first woman lightkeeper in Canada. She was adored by the rum-runners, who literally financed her pension. She charged them when they went by Discovery for their illegal activities, showing women are good entrepreneurs.
The site next to Discovery is up for sale for $1.3 million. You cannot ask a community group to match that pricing.
On Saturna, we have a $1-a-year lease for 30 years with Parks Canada, which you can also do under Treasury Board. You do not have to apply the sale principle. However, Treasury Board regulations are very complex. I was the President of the Treasury Board, as you know. I maintain that DFO could not have followed Treasury Board principles in declaring these lights surplus because there is just too much consultation, too many stakeholders and too many things that they were supposed to do, which I doubt they did.
Finally, my own concerns include national security issues and location, location, location. Lighthouses are strategically located on our main national and international waterways, which transport our exports, energy and food. They should never be allowed to fall into the hands of agencies or groups who serve alien interests. There is little protection under the existing guidelines under DFO to divest surplus lighthouses from that.
It is called a strategic disposal by any application of the criteria, which I will not read into the record. However, if you read the security criteria for keeping federal property, lighthouses, which include the ability to be self-sustaining with their own water and systems; i.e. can you can grow drugs in it, can you build a nuclear device in it. Yes, you can do that in a lighthouse because most of them are self-supporting.
For national security concerns, take them off the list.
These are my four fast conclusions for you: We say DFO's use of our Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act to dispose of its responsibilities and distort the heritage purposes was never contemplated. Long-term solutions are not easy, but you could do these things. Active light stations, which provide operational navigation services, should be off the surplus list and remain as DFO's responsibility to maintain and operate. If they are off the surplus list, you can easily proceed under the act with the heritage designation. The process is spelled out.
Surplus light stations, which leave the federal inventory for whatever reason, should be protected by heritage easement or covenant. That is what they do in the United States, and the Heritage Canada Foundation has mentioned that. DFO should restore and reasonably maintain all other surplus light stations until they are disposed of through the HLPA or surplus process. DFO should be mandated to enter into partnerships with other agencies and community groups to do what Parks Canada has done on Saturna, which is $1 a year for 30 years. They have partnered and helped us.
The last one is that security criteria must apply. Any light station that is deemed to fail the public safety concerns set out in Treasury Board rules should be removed from the surplus list.
Mr. Chair, that is our short presentation. You will get a translated text later. I will take questions and then we will go to Mr. Blagborne.
Senator Poy: Thank you very much. Nice to see you, Pat, and welcome back to the Senate. I have one question regarding the security criteria. Are you implying that right now there are no rules regarding who can buy the lighthouses not needed by DFO? Is that what you are implying?
Ms. Carney: I am implying that the way DFO has done the surplus list, they have not met that criteria. They could not have done the things you have to do in order to make it surplus. If they had done it, they would not be on the surplus list.
For instance, for security, there is ordinary, routine disposal and then there is a strategic one. Under the security, it says questions to ask: Is the real property in any way fortified; i.e. reinforced walls and/or entrances barred or no windows. A lighthouse meets that criterion because there are a limited number of entrances.
Is the real property wholly underground or is a significant part underground? Parts of some lighthouses are; Prospect Point, which is on the surplus list, always had an underground component.
Is the real property, in whole or in part, self-contained with independent life support systems, such as air filtration systems, generators and water supply? All those isolated lights that you saw on the screen, if they are on the surplus list, they all should not be on that list.
I love this one: Is the physical structure of the real property such that forced entry by police would be extremely difficult? I think most of the lighthouses on the surplus list, like Sheringham Point and others, would be a little difficult for the police to force entry. Every lighthouse in B.C., except Point Atkinson, is on an island. It is either on Vancouver Island, Sisters Islets, Saturna Island or another island, and Sheringham Point is outside of Sooke.
Does the real property on the surplus list, or when you are analyzing it for surplus, include equipment that could be easily adapted by terrorist or criminal organizations for hydroponic growing of drugs, the creation of clandestine laboratories, the manufacture of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, or other significant criminal activity? If you applied Treasury Board criteria, none of those lighthouses should be on the surplus list. That is the rationale for why we are asking you in your report to say take them off.
The Chair: We have about 20 minutes and we have other guests coming tonight, so we must govern ourselves accordingly.
Ms. Carney: We were told we would each have 45 minutes.
The Chair: We cannot do that. We have other guests coming at 7 p.m. Let us use the 20 minutes we have to good advantage.
Ms. Carney: Then we have to —
The Chair: If we want to use it that way, we can. Are there any other questions? If not, we can go to the next presentation.
Ms. Carney: Can you give us a little more time? We did not start until ten after five, and we were told we would have an hour-and-a-half. Are there any more questions?
Senator Poy: I want to thank Ms. Carney for the answer.
Ms. Carney: Thank you. Hopefully, you will ask other questions because we were told we would have an hour-and-a-half.
The Chair: Maybe I misunderstood. We do have more time for the next witness. Please go ahead.
Ms. Carney: You do not want any more questions of me on this?
The Chair: Not that I do not want any, but I do not see any.
Ms. Carney: I did not realize I did such a good sales job.
The Chair: You did, absolutely. Besides that, we have been through several weeks of —
Ms. Carney: It is the surplus list, which is so important to us. It has not been thought through; it is not consistent with Treasury Board; and it is a threat to national security and negates the heritage act.
Richard Blagborne, Chairman, Saturna Island Heritage Committee: Senators, I must say I am delighted to be here. When I came, I felt I was supposed to be a happy story to follow on Ms. Carney's stern admonition that you pay some attention to these serious manners.
My name is Richard Blagborne. I am an architect who lives on a tiny little island in British Columbia called Saturna Island. It is between Vancouver and Victoria, and is the southernmost island of the Gulf Islands, right up against the U.S. border.
I had prepared a colourful presentation to replace the presentation the honourable senators would have received if they had been able to land on East Point on Saturna Island, where we were all standing expectantly waiting for their august presences to come out of the sky. Then we would have presented to them on the equipment in our rehabilitated little lighthouse facility which we, as a community group, have managed to acquire, rehabilitate, restore and make into a very useful asset in our community. We wanted you to actually experience what it can do for a community.
First, let me say that Saturna Island is a typical tiny rural community. That is a factor you must take into consideration. I know that your terms of reference, which Ms. Carney kindly gave me a copy of, in references F, G and H, you will have to understand more about the local interest that community groups have in these buildings, and how we can preserve some of these buildings, perhaps in concert with the communities, and what roles these rehabilitated buildings might play in terms of tourism and other economic activities, and in terms of community life in general.
Those are the phrases in your terms of reference. I looked at them and have tried to provide you with some insights. I wish I could do it in full colour, but the gremlins have decided you will have to have it painted by an architect who is speaking, rather than presenting. The French version disappeared, so I only have an English version; therefore, we cannot present it.
Ms. Carney: Senator, under those circumstances, could we present the English, since the French one has vanished?
The Chair: You can read in whatever language you want, but any document that you present must be in two languages.
Ms. Carney: What about pictures?
Mr. Blagborne: We tried to translate the two, so you will have to bear with me.
The Chair: We have had the pictures, so please continue.
Mr. Blagborne: You have to imagine a tiny community of 340 people, by the official census, but like many of these small communities, there are many retirement people who disappear in the winter and many summer people who come in the summer. Therefore, the available resources, in terms of volunteers and staff to put their time into rehabilitation on these buildings in small rural communities, is often already quite challenged.
We often, as small communities, suffer from the fact that we do not qualify for a lot of the services that people in the city have. For example, if we want a fire department, we have to build our own fire hall and have a volunteer fire department and run it ourselves. If we need a new recreation centre, we must raise the money and do it ourselves.
Saturna Island is astounding in what we accomplish, but any new project we took on had to be thought about very carefully in terms of what it meant for the resources we actually had to be able to deal with what was in front of us.
The situation was that we have a beautiful light station called East Point, which is at the east end of Saturna Island. It is an old station; it was first created in 1886. It was there because of the importance of getting coal from Nanaimo out and into the market. There is a terrible reef that is swept by the tides, and it had a number of accidents on it in those early days.
They built this lighthouse in 1886. For us, that is very old. I know for some of you people from the East Coast, that does not seem old, but to us that is one of the earliest lights on the West Coast.
That original building was inhabited by the first lightkeeper with his paraffin lamp. His name, coincidentally, was Mr. Wick. They lighted the lamp in 1886 and it has operated ever since.
In 1968, they changed the original lighthouse, the clapboard building, to a steel tower, but they kept some of the other buildings. On the island, when we heard that the Coast Guard was going to decommission this light — which they did in 1997 — we tried hard to make an arrangement with the Capital Regional District.
Ms. Carney: It is not decommissioned; the light operates.
Mr. Blagborne: The light operates, but a lot of the buildings were no longer going to be used. We tried, because we wanted this beautiful point as a community park, but at the same time, Parks Canada was creating a new federal park in the Gulf Islands — now called the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve.
It is a very interesting park. It was one of the last ecological types they did not have a park for, and they purchased almost three-fifths of our island. They are a big neighbour now on Saturna Island, and one of the pieces they acquired was East Point. Suddenly, we found that what we had wanted to have as a community park was now a federal park, and there was some resentment in the community.
We wanted to have a presence there. You have to understand that the light was built at the same time the first settlers came. We grew up together; we intermarried and their kids went to school in our school, so it was both a social and a heritage connection as much as it was a functioning, useful light. To have it disappear was a disappointment to us, so we wanted to save a piece of it.
The difficulty was that, when Parks Canada acquired the property, they immediately began to demolish the buildings. Theirs was an ecological interest in the site; they wanted to restore the site to its ecologically pristine state and they started demolishing the buildings. There was one very interesting small building, which was smaller than this room, on the outer end of the point — it was the fog alarm. It had been built in 1937 and was a very simple, elegant white building with a red roof. It had been empty since the early 1990s; they used it for storage. It was probably the most photographed little building in all of the Gulf Islands simply because of its situation and look of being a pristine white building on a beautiful point.
We decided to try and save that building and make it a community asset we could use. The first problem was to stop the demolition. That is why we needed help at that time. We had a certain strong-minded senator who enabled us to identify which politicians and people we should approach. We did. They asked Parks Canada to give us time.
The reason for the time is key, and it is something you need to think about in this process when you will be working with communities. We did not know what we could do with it and we did not know what our resources were. We had to invent and envision something we could do with that building that we could afford and which would make it an attraction.
We got the time and we managed to find $1,500 to make a document that would explain this in elegant terms. Saturna is a community of a lot of retired people, and there is a lot of interesting history in those people, as well as a lot of talent. We were able to create a very handsome document that was very clear.
With that document in hand, we could quietly go around and present it to people we knew would be important in the new Gulf Islands park management. We also did so in the Capital Regional District because one thing we understood for sure was that, because of the Treasury Board rules, it is difficult for Parks Canada, for example, to give a licence of occupancy to a little rag-tag group of people on a tiny little island.
Ms. Carney: Speak for yourself.
Mr. Blagborne: We knew that that would be hard to consummate. We asked if the capital regional district, our local governing area, could take on the responsibility from Parks Canada and then pass it on to their commissioners on our island, because we had a small commission that dealt with parks and recreation. Then, could they give it to us, the Saturna Heritage Committee, to be the stewards, do the restoration, to operate it and take on the responsibility for maintaining it?
That worked and it worked very well because Parks Canada understood that it was easy for them to give to another governmental body. That governmental body already had a history of working with us on the island through their parks commission. They knew what we were capable of and they trusted us.
That accomplished many things for us: First, we did not need to have liability insurance because the capital regional district had it already; second, we could give tax receipts for people who wanted to make major donations because they could do that through the capital regional district.
We were still left with doing the bull work. We still had to reroof the building, replace the shingles, fix the building and do everything we had to do. However, we could do that far more efficiently and cheaper than Parks Canada could because they were constricted by their need to contract all that out with the normal policies that Parks Canada uses for their work. I can tell you that makes everything cost about four times what we as a group of volunteers could do it for.
What was happening was very interesting. In the beginning, Parks Canada was somewhat timid and reluctant because they did not know what they were getting into, and what kind of an operation they would have in their park that they would then have to be responsible for. They were very timid.
As the project came to life, and it has come to life, and as they saw we were doing all these wonderful things out there, they now realized that this is solving a problem for them. It is a very useful tool for them. The problem they have is that this park is not a park like some of the ones in northern Canada, where the only people there are Parks Canada staff.
This new Gulf Islands National Park Reserve has been imposed on a whole series of existing communities. They have a lot of boundaries and I do not mean just physical boundaries; they have all these cultural boundaries with all of these communities. They have to resolve everything with us — how we fight fires together and how we walk our dogs in their park as locals. Everything has to be discussed with us.
Therefore, they need to demonstrate that they are open and capable of this kind of community cooperation. Our little project has become a kind of poster child for a successful project where a community is working within the park and doing something very creative and interesting.
What are we doing? We knew that this building was too small to be a museum, and also that we, as a tiny community, which in the wintertime probably only has a couple hundred people, did not have the money or the resources to really deal with a lot of artifacts. Therefore, we could not be a museum. However, we have a lot of stories and we are interested in stories. We have a lot of writers, artists, filmmakers and people like that. We said let us be a story telling centre and we can tell stories about the heritage of Saturna Island, the people on Saturna Island and their history.
We have changed this little empty building into a display area and a space for interpreters. We have lots of wall panels where we have created graphic stories of interesting stories that relate to the island. For example, we have a theme about Spanish exploration — the early exploration on the island. Why would we do that? Saturna Island gets its name from a tiny little Spanish schooner called the Santa Saturnina, which is a fascinating vessel because it was purchased in pieces in Macao, China; shipped to the northwest coast on an English fur-trading boat; captured from the English by the Spanish, who sent it to Mexico. The Spanish took it from the English and sent it back to the northwest coast and it was built in Nootka Sound. It was the second vessel ever to be built on the northwest coast.
It is a great story, and a controversial story amongst historians. What did we do? We had a symposium on our island and we invited these historians. We did some research with all these people to find out what it was exactly like. We have now the most definitive description of this vessel. We built a model and it is an iconic display in the fog alarm building.
That is an example and one theme. We went on to do themes about the boundary story, the famous Pig War between the United States and Britain about where the boundary would be. The boundary is only a quarter mile from East Point. You can see the buoys. How did it get there? We tell that story, which is full of great stories about this whole crazy 13-year problem between the U.S. and Britain over that boundary.
Then we went on to early pioneers, because one of the earliest pioneers who came to the island in Victorian times happened to be a great photographer. We have found a great cache of Victorian photographs of all our early pioneers. By taking those photographs and stories, we have created another wonderful exhibit.
We have another exhibit and this one is very important. The other exhibit we have is about whales. East Point happens to be the very best place if you want to watch orcas — killer whales — from the land. There is no place better in all of the Gulf Islands, or in all of Canada, I do not think. They come by regularly during the season, sometimes two or three times a week, and they do so right by the beach. They are right in the kelp right below you. It is quite spectacular. It has been known to be this place for a long time. Parks Canada will take advantage of that and they are putting boards and things out there.
We discovered that the first killer whale ever to be captured in 1964 — Senator Raine may remember this — was captured at East Point, right outside our building. This whale was harpooned by the Vancouver Aquarium. In those days, they were considered pests. Nobody knew anything about them and they were totally misunderstood.
They harpooned this whale, but it did not die. They dragged it to Vancouver and put it in a dry dock and took out the harpoon and tried to figure out what to do with it. That first whale, which the local radio stations named Moby Doll — it turned out to be Moby Dick — was the first killer whale in captivity. It was a tipping point in many ways. We learned we could keep them in captivity, which started the catching and exhibiting of killer whales in various aquariums around the world.
The other thing it did was that it started the science. They started to learn about these whales and understand them better. Now, of course, the very idea that we would harpoon one is unheard of, and we have an amazing program in British Columbia to guard and watch all these killer whales.
Our fog alarm building is now part of that network and we are building a hydrophone and doing these things. That will be of enormous economic benefit to our little island, because if you do not want to go out in the boats and harass them — which many people think it is doing — you just come to Saturna Island and you can see them from the beach very well.
That will fill our bed and breakfasts; it will do all the things we want to do — as do the seminars, like the Santa Saturnina, which filled every room on the island. The new one we will do on the orcas and on Moby Doll will also do the same thing.
Our building has become very successful in that way. It goes beyond the exhibits. We have created the Saturna Island digital archives. We are collecting pictures from all of the island families and family documents. They go into our computers in our new building.
The Chair: I want to make sure we leave time for questions. People may have some.
Mr. Blagborne: Let me go to the end. In terms of some insights as to your relations with community groups, at the end I went back to your terms of reference and asked myself if there were some things that, as a community group, I would like you to think about.
In terms of the local interest to community groups, which was your terms of reference F, it is incredibly clear that in a community like ours, we had enormous interest in retaining the presence of the light. We worked hard to do that. The interest is there in many of these places.
Parks Canada, who was the landlord, became interested after they were presented with an imaginative and feasible concept that helped the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve develop and demonstrate a positive relationship with local communities. That says you have to find a way to help those communities get to that first stage, where they can present these fully developed, interesting ideas about what they will do with it.
Many of the communities do not have either enough money to do that, which does not take much — maybe they need the $1,500 like we got — or they might not have the talent in the community to do it. Until you get that document that you can put in various people's hands, the managers, it is difficult for you to consummate the relationship. That is important.
In terms of G, preservation of heritage lighthouses, we preserved ours. We did it with a lot of volunteer labour, which is a much more economical way to do it. The community did that, but the key was that Parks Canada gave us a $1-a-year lease — a renewable 30-year licence of occupancy, but it only costs us $1 a year. In our community, again, with such a small population, that was key.
The second thing that was important was that the landlord took on the responsibility for environmental clean-up. Some of these lighthouses will have environmental issues. In this case, it was simple; it was lead paint. Still, because it is in a park, Parks Canada must clean that up, according to their protocol and their policies which, believe me, is an expensive way to do it.
Because we were the tenants, we would have had to do it the way they had to do it, and we could not have afforded that. They took that on, which is important — the environmental clean-up.
Next, they were willing to cooperate with us by allowing a community operation within the park. That was key, so Parks Canada was key.
The other thing in terms of tourism, I think I have already mentioned that our programs — symposiums and whale watching, et cetera — are definitely helping our little community. It is growing now as people have gotten involved and started to understand what it is.
The last point is that, in terms of enriching our lives, this little building has now become like a new theatre. Our writers and filmmakers have a new outlet and they are proud of it. Even the schoolchildren are making movies. I brought some of those to show you, too. It has definitely enriched the life of the community; yet, we are doing it on something that was about to be demolished.
Senator Hubley: My question goes back to Ms. Carney. When I listened to your presentation, we had a good trip to the West Coast and it was a different focus than we saw on the East Coast. We thought that was really interesting.
One thing we had not heard was the importance of the light station at all times of the day — that, because of its colouring and its positioning, it is essential to aviation and mariners during the day, as well as during times of storms.
The other issue that was brought forward was perhaps because you have such a long coast, there may be some need to look at other light stations along the coast.
Would you comment on that?
Ms. Carney: When you say look at other light stations, do you mean add them?
Senator Hubley: Other places along the coast that may need a light station.
Ms. Carney: First, I am glad you came. When people say the U.S. got rid of their light stations and so did Scotland or something, we have the largest, wildest, roughest coastline in the world — 25,000 kilometres, I think it is.
The Chair: We have discovered that the U.S. did not actually get rid of all of its light stations. It got rid of its keepers but it put in search and rescue people.
Ms. Carney: They belong to the army; its coast guard is under the army and they have the budget to do that.
The Chair: The point is there are still personnel there.
Ms. Carney: That is an important point. There are personnel close to the light stations.
The coast is a marine highway. Senator Rompkey made the point that when you talk about British Columbia, they think about Victoria and Vancouver and the big centres, but Senator Patterson was raised in Woss on the coast. There are coastal communities that go from Alaska down, where tens of thousands and more live, and they rely on the marine highway. There are no roads.
There are two roads between Prince Rupert and Vancouver, the Bella Coola Road and Highway 16. You need the marine highway, and for the marine highway, the lightkeepers do all of these services — not just search and rescue and the weather, but the pollution control. You have all heard it and I hope you get a chance to put it into the record.
When they de-staffed our lighthouse, we had a volunteer lightkeeper and he would report to the police on the Saturna resident who made seven trips in one day during the height of the cigarette smuggling to the American island across the way. Some of these lightkeepers work on a police watch. Multi-use them.
The Coast Guard, I think Senator Murray knows this, is an agency. Do not just say they have to mow the lawn and paint the light building. Use them. At Bamfield, at the Cape Beale lighthouse, a university uses them for ecological studies. Use them for coordinated purposes — police monitoring, environmental monitoring, human trafficking; monitor that because nowhere else in the world do you have such locations.
On East Point, you are where Juan de Fuca Strait comes down from the Pacific Ocean and hits the Georgia Gulf, which goes to Vancouver up to Prince Rupert. You are on the crossroads.
Mr. Blagborne knows I love this story. The Spanish were there long before Captain Vancouver. When the Spanish crew of the Santa Saturnina rode around to East Point and looked out on this vast expanse of water, they thought they had found the Northwest Passage — that they would get to either the Mississippi or Hudson's Bay. They were Mexicans and Spaniards. That is a wonderful story. They could not get around the point, but the first European navigator in the area was a Spaniard. They could not get around the point, but the first European navigator in that area was a Spaniard.
So yes, re-staffing lighthouses would be wonderful, but I would multi-purpose them.
Senator Patterson: I am happy Ms. Carney was able to be here and present before us on the record. You are no shrinking violet, if I may compliment you.
When you heard about the declaration of the surplus lighthouses, did you speak to the authorities about that and did you get a rationale as to why that was done?
Ms. Carney: We are speaking to them through you, I suppose. First, it took us a while to assess what this would do to our act. The mandated department for the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act is Parks Canada. They have nothing to do with the surplus. It took us a while to say, "What surplus lights?" Then, as it emerged that they are almost all of the lights that are not staffed and which they want to de-staff, which means it would be all of the lights, we were informally trying to figure out what this means. Then the communities in British Columbia started telling us they cannot apply for heritage status; they do not know what it means.
We are actually looking to you to make the positive responses to the government and get them off the list before we can proceed in our role to Parks Canada. Parks Canada is collecting petitions. There are four of us on the committee, because there is a gentleman from Quebec who lives in a lighthouse. We say candidly among ourselves, "How can we go to a community and say 'sign this petition' when they have to have a business plan, they have no idea whether they can spend a lot of money or whether they will get the light, or whether they are to maintain and operate a navigation light?" Communities do not know what to do.
Clean up the surplus list — get the surplus lighthouses off the list — and then we can take a look and, in the 18 months left, see how many communities we can get to sign petitions to save the lights. Right now, we are derailed. Derailed is not appropriate, Senator Murray, for a Maritime analogy — we are scuttled.
Senator Raine: Thank you very much for your presentation. Mr. Blagborne gave us a wonderful example. Do you think your experience could be duplicated for other lighthouses in the Maritimes, for instance, or for other communities where there is a bona fide surplus lighthouse?
Ms. Carney: It does not have to be surplus. It can be just a lighthouse. You do not have to be surplus.
Senator Raine: We want designation of lighthouses, whether they are operational or not, as iconic heritage structures. Is anyone doing that?
Ms. Carney: We were supposed to do that under the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act. That was the process for a community to ask that their lighthouse be designated heritage. Then whoever owned it was responsible for looking after it.
The heritage aspect can proceed. It is the putting lighthouses on the surplus list that has "befogged" everyone because they do not know what their responsibilities are.
In terms of whether other communities can do it, it helps if you have a Richard Blagborne to help organize this. I have said that the fog alarm building — the fabulous FAB for which we have newsletters and everything — is a good example of how things can work if you have a cooperative government agency, $1 a year, volunteers and federal money. We looked at it and we were all seniors. Therefore, we could try for a New Horizons for Seniors grant and heritage grants. We have high school students Mr. Blagborne had working.
Yes, you could do that. The valuable work that Mr. Blagborne and the volunteers have done is to help develop the guidelines that he has just given you on how to make this work.
The Chair: Is Mr. Blagborne available for our consultation?
Ms. Carney: For a fee — I am his business manager. He does too much volunteer work, according to his wife.
Senator Raine: If the lighthouses are deemed by the community to be designated as heritage because they are declared surplus, do they now need to go through the real property and charge market value?
Ms. Carney: Yes, that is one of the hang-ups. If it is on the surplus list, the Treasury Board rules say it has to be market value and they back off. I just want to make the point that it does not even have to be heritage; you do not have to wait four or five years to find out if your structure is heritage. The community needs to express an interest in the fog alarm building or at Sheringham Point. There is the tower, and then there is the building attached to it, which might be a tourist vendor place. It might be a place where you buy postcards. Peggy's Cove had Canada Post in the tower until they moved it recently, I understand.
You can use facilities on a light station that are not being used for the active light part for community purposes. That is what the act was to encourage.
At the end of the day, FAB may never be a heritage building. We will petition, if that is what we do. They might say it does not meet the criteria for heritage, but the community still has it. It is a way of getting unused facilities and community involvement into facilities that are not being used. Those are real surplus facilities. Our point is that an active navigation aid is not surplus.
Mr. Blagborne: I was pleased to respond to the senator in that I am also a sailor and I paid my way through university working on the tugboats. I know a lot of the lights on the West Coast. It is not an easy thing to say off the top that they could all be used for things, because it depends on the community close by, where they are, what the costs would be of actually trying to do something and so on. You have to assess them all individually.
The other point I tried to make in my presentation was that "heritage" means different things to communities than it may mean to FHBRO, Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office, or agencies that are particularly interested in defining buildings of particular architectural heritage merit or whatever. As far as we are concerned, even the little simple structure we are talking about, which is not FHBRO-rated, is a heritage building to us. It is important to our community and we wanted to do something with it. We have saved it and the community is delighted we have done it and so are the visitors who come to the island.
Ms. Carney: Can I ask Robert Square to comment because he has direct experience with that?
Robert Square, Chair, Cove Island Lightstation Heritage Association: We have plans at Cove Island, which is on the Great Lakes. It is at the point where Lake Huron and Georgian Bay meet. The light station is about 150 years old, built the same time as Race Rocks, one of the 10 Imperial towers.
We are looking at pretty much what Mr. Blagborne has done out in Saturna. We are looking beyond the light station as a navigational aid and want to bring it alive with the stories, the histories of Canada, the histories of the lightkeepers themselves for shipping and shipwrecks. There are amazing stories. It is a small house, approximately 30 feet by 24 feet. Second lightkeeper David McBeath and his wife, Mary Jane, had 10 kids, and one winter they ran out of food.
We are looking at bringing these stories and education alive and getting people excited. We have had young kids who have come out there and they think it is an amazing place. We get involved with educational institutions and courses. Ecotourism is another big factor; we can utilize that facility to help preserve and protect it.
Ms. Carney: Remember the Spanish story I was telling you about? All of that area of the coast has Spanish names. The Spanish embassy here in Ottawa funded two videos for our fog alarm building. One of them funded the schoolchildren making a map of the southern Gulf Islands with all the original Spanish names. The video shows the students talking about it. Georgia Strait had a grand Spanish name and all of the other islands still have names like Valdes and Malaspina. Alberni was named after Don Pedro de Alberni, the Spanish commandant at Nootka. It changed their world when the students changed the names. The Spanish embassy was thrilled to do it. It did not cost them much, but officials could report back to Madrid that this is what they had done and they have offered to do it again. Mr. Blagborne is meeting with them tonight.
Mr. Blagborne: Yes, I am meeting with them tonight. One thing I did not mention is that one of the other activities we have created in this building is — because we do storytelling and our tourist season is just in the spring, fall and summer — in the wintertime, the building converts to a production studio where we make videos, little vignettes.
If you go to our website, we have actually two websites but the one you would like to look at is www.exploresaturna.com. You can look at some of these locally made little productions. These vignettes are three minutes or so, and you will soon be able to see the two Spanish videos.
These videos were not made by people we hired from Vancouver to do them. They are the local videos we did and the people are proud of them. The Spanish who came to visit us were delighted to find there was a pocket of Spanish enthusiasts out there on the West Coast, and I think we will be doing more with them.
That is another way we enrich the islanders' lives through the use of this simple facility.
The Chair: Before I go to Senator Murray, I am wondering if a template could be done. We have come across other sites that are roughly similar, but people have problems. I can think of Low Point in Nova Scotia, for example, where there is a group that wants to take it over and has a rough plan in mind, but cannot get the initial capital. Capital is a problem.
I am also thinking about Crow Head, near Twillingate, where the same thing is happening. The municipality owns it; the province took it over and gave it to the municipality. There is a development association that is actively working. They are accessing ACOA, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, funds so different people are in different stages.
What comes to my mind is some sort of template that people could refer to. This is an example of something that worked, and it draws together all the various issues — money, plan, clientele, bringing together the stakeholders and so on.
What I am really asking is if we could have some kind of template, but I do not know if that is possible.
Mr. Blagborne: I would like to comment on that. I hope Ms. Carney does not mind.
A great deal of work I have done is to work with Parks Canada, who is our tenant. Since they will be directly involved in the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act and trying to do something with these lighthouses — and I think they are not quite sure yet what that means — I think your idea is a wonderful idea, that there be some kind of a template that we develop, but Parks Canada should be part of that.
If the communities, Parks Canada and other people who have skills and interests could cooperate to do something that could be used as a template — something to help communities make these assessments, help them identify where they can get funding, et cetera — that would be an extremely useful thing from the point of view of the communities.
Ms. Carney: Parks Canada will say it does not have any money but the Government of Canada must have money somewhere to do that.
The Chair: Treasury Board.
Ms. Carney: It does not fund those kinds of things but, yes, there should be a template. Some of the early work on this project was funded out of my Senate budget, to see if it was feasible. Yes, you can do that.
Mr. Blagborne: May I make one last point? If you are talking about money, in the beginning, Parks Canada was concerned that this project might be a burden for them. However, now that the project is becoming a success, they have done very well.
We have a very interesting enhancement to a national park, which is being run by volunteers, which was built by volunteers, and which expresses the community in a way that makes the visit to the park far more interesting. It is an asset for them that they did not have to pay a lot for, in the sense they got all of our volunteer labour.
There has to be a way, when we have these discussions about how to encourage this kind of assessment, to help Parks Canada realize there is real value in their participation.
Ms. Carney: I would say DFO could also fund that kind of work. Parks Canada owns some of the lighthouses, but the main ones are DFO. Parks Canada should be able to fund the development of some kind of template that can be used by other agencies.
Senator Murray: I do not want to belabour this issue of the designation of surplus lighthouses, but just to say that when we passed this act — in particular, subsection 8(1), requiring that any minister who has lighthouses under his or her control had to maintain and make available a list that he or she considers to be surplus within two years — we expected that they would put out a short list of inactive lighthouses as a first step.
Ms. Carney: Inactive lights.
Senator Murray: Then community groups could look at those and decide whether they were interested in pursuing the matter to have it designated for heritage purposes.
Instead of that, Fisheries and Oceans, mostly, designated all of the inactive lights and almost all of the active lighthouses as surplus, thereby throwing the whole process into confusion, sabotaging it, I believe — certainly overwhelming it.
I simply make the point that I hope this committee will take a strong stand on that matter and demand that the active lighthouses be removed now from the surplus list — and that they go back to the drawing board so that community groups will be able to proceed in some orderly fashion without this surplus designation hanging over their heads.
Wherever we went, whether in Newfoundland and Labrador or in British Columbia, we were told of the important functions that the lightkeepers perform. The anomaly is that when you confront the Coast Guard with these matters, their answer is: That is fine, but heritage and tourism are not our mandate. Weather is not our mandate. That is Environment Canada or NAV CANADA or someone. Ecology is not our mandate; that is someone else's mandate. Why do you expect us to pay the freight for these activities?
I discovered the Coast Guard is a special operating agency. You will recall how those were set up, and there are a number of them across the government. The essence of the special operating agencies is that they are supposed to have much more flexibility than a conventional department of government.
That is a matter we can explore to see whether the lighthouses, under the Coast Guard, could have a horizontal mandate, and that they could recoup the money from the appropriate departments for doing what they do. We can pursue that.
The other question that arises — and your eyes will glaze over, Ms. Carney, when I mention the words "machinery of government." Do you remember that?
Ms. Carney: Yes.
Senator Murray: On the machinery of government issue, one is whether the Coast Guard is a good fit with Fisheries and Oceans. It came out of the Department of Transport, as I recall, and went to Fisheries and Oceans. Some people whom we met have said perhaps it belongs in Public Safety, or under National Defence or somewhere else.
One person we met privately from the Coast Guard said: We are a tenant, and Fisheries and Oceans is a slum landlord. What he was saying is that the Coast Guard is at the bottom of the pecking order in DFO.
Do you have a view as to whether the Coast Guard ought to be somewhere other than where we put it a few years ago?
Ms. Carney: Senator Murray is referring to our mutual experience in Parliament — Senator Rompkey would have been part of that debate, too — where we thought we would solve the problems of the Coast Guard by moving it out of the huge Department of Transport and into the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which also had ships and things like that, and there would be a community of interest.
It has not worked to date because the culture of the Coast Guard has not changed. They do not really want to look after people. Most of the search and rescue of the Coast Guard is done by auxiliary volunteers who provide their own boats and much of their own gas.
I think the answer lies more in the multitasking concept and the idea that the Coast Guard is a special operating agency that has been set up to be more flexible. DFO already charges Environment Canada for some of the weather information — some of those services are paid for. Therefore, the nucleus model is already there. Change or expand the mandate to include all these other associated government uses and charge the other agencies for the policing, the pollution, the human trafficking and all the other functions that people on the lights can provide. That is better than moving it. Moving it out of DFO to Public Safety will not change anything. Examine whether the Coast Guard mandate as an agency has the flexibility to do these other jobs, and build up the Coast Guard so it is not the basement tenant of a slum landlord but something that has more capacity, more funds and more pride.
Senator Murray: Going along with this idea of, you have put it as multi-tasking, it was suggested to us several times that perhaps additional training and equipment could be given to the lightkeepers for these purposes. We were told, of course, that on the contrary, the Coast Guard has been going in the opposite direction, taking equipment away from them, such as their boats, for example, and taking responsibilities away from them.
Ms. Carney: Downgrading the weather reports to the mariners, for example. Yes, I think that is the way to go. The Canadian Coast Guard is, in essence, a very proud agency with an enormously heroic past and role that they have fulfilled. Let us build up the Coast Guard. The people who serve in the Coast Guard on the water and in the field, particularly on the water, are very dedicated to their jobs. Let us build up the Coast Guard, expand their mandate to add these things and ensure they are adequately funded. As you know, there is always money in government for something like this. That would be more effective than changing the stationery one more time.
The Chair: Are there further questions?
Senator Raine: It is obvious to me that once you de-staff a lighthouse, deterioration of the building sets in immediately.
Ms. Carney: Yes.
Senator Raine: We have seen in the Maritimes where these iconic lighthouses are being neglected to the point of being shameful.
Ms. Carney: It is demolition by neglect.
Senator Raine: Yes. Do you think there is a way of putting something in place — maybe it just needs to be a policy — whereby in the transition between being unmanned and being taken over by someone, that there be a caretaker and one cannot just abandon them? I do not know.
The big question, the elephant in the room, is who will pay for something like that — the Coast Guard will tell you they can have a light on a stick to do the same job. We can look at the picture there, Sheringham Point, with that light station that is active but the Coast Guard would say, "Bulldoze the building and put a light on a stick."
Ms. Carney: I will not get into that. If they have dumped 1,000 lights and 494 of them are active navigation beacons like that, it will cost a great deal of money to go to all the coasts and put a light on a stick. In many cases, it is better to use what they have.
Thinking of Amphitrite on the West Coast, I am sure they could start a cooperative venture with Ucluelet to use part of the facility when there are people on it who would help restore it like we did so they could, in fact, have access and operate the light. I am not ruling that out. Under the heritage law, they can do that. There is nothing to prevent DFO from doing that with the existing rules.
However, just to walk away and dump them and determine they are surplus lights that have to be sold in three years and, in the meantime, the buildings collapse as they are — Race Rocks is a good example. The tower is crumbling because, once you turn the heat off in a cement tower, it falls apart. It does not have to be a lightkeeper who keeps the heat on; it can be someone else who is mandated to do so.
I am saying that DFO has blindsided us, befogged us with the surplus light issue. Remove the surplus light issue back to the inactive lights, which was what the act was designed for, and proceed with the heritage preservation and the existing program that DFO has to divest itself of surplus outbuildings and inactive lights and things like that. There is nothing to prevent one from doing that.
At the end of the day, DFO must accept some responsibility for maintaining the lights. Our argument is that local communities are happy to help if they are given an opportunity to do so. Our little island raised $3,500 or more so far for this —
Mr. Blagborne: Try $53,000.
Ms. Carney: That was through government grants and that. Money on the island —
Mr. Blagborne: Money on the island is about $6,500.
Ms. Carney: That is on our little island. People will donate to it because now we provide tax receipts.
To answer your question quite clearly, you can have the best of both worlds. You can have an operating active navigational aid system and community cooperation in some areas — not on Triple Island that you saw, bunkered down out there in the Pacific — but at Sheringham Point where you can get community involvement in facilities that are not being used. You can also have heritage preservation, but you cannot have it under the Treasury Board rules for the disposal of surplus lights, so take them off.
Mr. Square: We have suggested to Fisheries and Oceans on numerous occasions to work on some alternatives. Work with us. Why can you not work with us? They do not want to. It seems they have no interest in working with community groups. When Senator Murray mentioned that it is not our mandate, the Department of National Defence has a lot of heritage buildings and they are taking it seriously. Why can fisheries not take it seriously?
Ms. Carney: Or the Coast Guard as an agency.
Mr. Square: For some reason, they do not want to work with us. We have a lot to offer them.
The Chair: Speaking of a lot to offer, that brings us to the end of our questions. I am just wondering, Mr. Blagborne, if you have set down the steps that you went through, and if not, could you? If you could do so, could you then send them to us?
Mr. Blagborne: Yes.
The Chair: That would be useful. It would be the start of this template idea — if you could give us the steps that you went through and how you did it. Could you do that?
Mr. Blagborne: Yes, I certainly can.
The Chair: I want to thank you for coming. It has been useful. It has supplemented our visits, so thank you very much indeed.
Ms. Carney: We are glad to be here. I can say that in 10 years, I have appeared before your committee many times on the issue of lighthouses, and I am always willing to come back and discuss them again any time you wish. I want to thank you for your attention and for taking a rigorous trip to the West Coast. The response you received, the credibility of the Senate and the profile was just enormous.
The Chair: Thank you so much.
We will now hear from NAV CANADA. We have Rudy Kellar, Vice President, Operations, and Jeff MacDonald, Director, Operations Planning and Programs. Welcome to you both. Make your presentation, please, and then we will have some questions.
We have one hour. We do not have to use the hour, but we have it.
Rudy Kellar, Vice-President, Operations, NAV CANADA: Thank you, Mr. Chair and senators, for inviting me to appear before the committee as part of your study on light stations. Accompanying me is Jeff MacDonald, NAV CANADA's Director of Planning and Programs.
As this is NAV CANADA's first appearance before the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, I would like to outline who we are and what we do. NAV CANADA is the private company that owns and operates the Canadian Civil Air Navigation System, the second largest air navigation system in the world. I should stress "air navigation." We provide air traffic control services to domestic and international flights operating within Canadian airspace, and in delegated international airspace, including half of the North Atlantic, which happens to be the busiest oceanic airspace in the world. We also provide weather briefings, flight planning and en route advisory services, and we maintain electronic aids to navigation including radars, approach aids and communications facilities.
We receive no government funding. Our operations are funded through service charges levied on aircraft owners and operators. One of the services we offer to our customers is a weather information service. We maintain weather observations at airports and other operationally significant locations throughout Canada, through both a human observation program and through automated observation stations. These observations meet strict Transport Canada standards that govern staff training, the accuracy of the sensors used, the frequency of the observations and the requirement for an ongoing weather watch so that pilots are aware of relevant changes in the weather.
This information is available through our website or by contacting one of eight flight information centres we have that provide specialized aviation weather briefing services across Canada to pilots, both before and during flight.
We also own and operate weather cameras at specific locations throughout Canada to augment our aviation weather service. This is a relatively new program and one that has been very well received by pilots and operators. These wide-angle weather cameras take a photo every 10 minutes which can be accessed on our website by pilots and/ or flight dispatchers to assist in decision making prior to conducting a flight.
There, a photo of current weather conditions can be compared against a good weather or good day photo, and height and distance reference markers can be added to the image to allow pilots to assess prevailing visibility, cloud height and visibility distance. I have included in the information package provided to the clerk a few samples of what they look like.
Pilots in flight, who would not have access to the website, can contact our flight information centres by radio to have our specially trained weather briefers access the current actual weather, forecasted weather, and weather conditions in the last shot taken by a weather camera.
We conducted consultations in 2002 with float plane operators in British Columbia, specifically on the subject of weather requirements. As a result of those discussions, we added weather cameras at Estevan Point, Chatham Point, Nanaimo Harbour, Addenbroke Island and Bella Bella. We also added a full automated weather observation station at Bella Bella and a staffed weather observation station at Masset. Additional cameras are planned for Egg Island, Knight Inlet, East Point on Saturna Island, and Salt Spring Island next year.
We also added a new forecast weather chart that is unique in Canada. A pilot flying visual flight rules, VFR, can receive a VFR route forecast for the B.C. coast. That began production in June 2006. This product incorporates all available information in a detailed coastal forecast map-based product that includes the weather factors relevant for operators flying in those areas. Those forecasts are updated every three hours. The areas specific to this forecast weather chart are within the package also supplied to you via the clerk.
In addition to the extensive information I have described, as Environment Canada officials may have explained a few weeks ago, it also involves employees at the 17 light stations in British Columbia. They take supplemental weather observations for aviation use. NAV CANADA provides funding for that program to the Meteorological Service of Canada. The weather is provided as part of marine weather reports and includes estimates of cloud height and amount, temperature and dew point; the reports are provided every three hours during daylight hours.
When operating a float plane on the B.C. coast, all of the available weather information along the route for the flight is valuable. In some cases, some people might say there is no such thing as not enough weather.
The weather information from light stations is one of the many sources that pilots use; however, it does have its limitations. The biggest limitation is that the observations are only taken once every three hours and the weather reports are not updated if the weather changes materially during that period. Many of us from different parts of the country know how fast weather can change.
As you can see from the information that has been provided, there is a comprehensive network of weather information available to West Coast operators, which has been built to meet the unique needs of aviation for real-time weather data. That network has been augmented significantly by the investment NAV CANADA has made in recent years since its commercialization. We have recognized the strategic locations of B.C. light stations and have, therefore, negotiated with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to install weather cameras at some of those sites. This gives pilots the ability to "take a look for themselves" every 10 minutes, whereas before they may have had only limited weather data provided every three hours.
If the supplemental weather observations from the 17 light stations were not available, NAV CANADA would consult with the West Coast float plane operators to determine what, if any, additions to the existing weather network may be required to fill any gaps that are created by the loss of the supplemental reports.
I will be pleased to take any questions from senators.
Senator Patterson: I would like to welcome the witness who I know from his days in the North. This is pretty impressive stuff. What is the reliability of this equipment? This may be a silly question, but how do you keep the lenses of the cameras clean? What is required to keep this all going?
Mr. Kellar: I am not sure to which piece of equipment the question about reliability was directed, so I will specifically comment on two pieces.
First, the automatic weather observation system that we are now installing in all of Canada as part of our national weather installation program is proving to be significantly more reliable than its predecessor. We spent two years testing the new automated weather observation system in St. John's and Iqaluit, Nunavut, a few years ago. We presented our data to Transport Canada and were told that it met the standards and requirements, and we commenced installation across the country.
To date, I think we have installed well over 30 new AWOSs, automated weather observation systems, and we are on the tail end of our installation program in other parts of the country. We will verify the number that have been installed, because I am merely guessing based on the past summer.
The model of weather cameras that we are using is a relatively new addition. These are the cameras that supply a real-time, updated shot of the weather conditions with some visibility markers every 10 minutes. We used these extensively during the Olympics to assist B.C. float plane pilots and helicopter pilots navigating through the sea to sky corridor to and from Whistler, and we had nearly 100-per-cent reliability during that time.
However, as far as established reliability metrics, it would be fair to say that we have not had them in service for a sufficient length of time to clearly quantify the reliability standard we are getting. They are a tool, provided by trained weather observers in various locations, that is used to augment the surface weather reports and support the forecast model that the Meteorological Service of Canada uses.
I think that operators who use them would encourage having more of them because any weather reporting is good weather reporting, but we have not had them in operation long enough to get a true flavour for their reliability.
Perhaps Mr. MacDonald has some specifics that I am not aware of.
Jeff MacDonald, Director, Operations Planning and Programs, NAV CANADA: We have 76 AWOS sites across the country. Some are legacy sites that are being replaced, as Mr. Kellar explained. We also have 139 sites across Canada that have the cameras, and some of these are being upgraded from analog to digital.
With respect to the lenses and things like that, we test them and ensure that the type of weather conditions that can happen in an area are addressed with the establishment of the cameras there. Within NAV CANADA, we establish maintenance response times for every piece of equipment that we have — that is, the number of hours within which we must react when there is a failure. The cameras are subject to those maintenance response times as well.
Having said that, if it is considered urgent, the maintenance response time can be elevated. We look at that on a dynamic basis and if something needs to be repaired faster, it will be repaired faster.
Senator Cochrane: Are these augmented stations for airline pilots?
Mr. Kellar: All of our aviation weather is for airline pilots, private pilots and commercial pilots of all types, and/or dispatchers.
Senator Cochrane: Our function is to find out whether lighthouses are reliable. Could this be used for lighthouses?
Mr. Kellar: The weather reporting that is being provided today out of lighthouses is not to the same scale as that provided for aviation, but we do make the marine weather reports available to pilots and aviation by way of our flight information centres at eight locations across the country. Particularly for the B.C. coast, the primary flight information centre is based in Kamloops. People transiting up and down the coast will speak on an en route frequency to the Kamloops flight information centre and get all information available, whether it is coming from one of our facilities, one of our cameras, or from the lighthouse operator who is including it in the marine system.
Senator Cochrane: How and how often do you service the cameras?
Mr. Kellar: We service the cameras when they break.
Senator Cochrane: How do you know that they have broken?
Mr. Kellar: You stop seeing a signal on the website. They are live on the website. As I said earlier, they are a relatively new technology and they are an additional tool to provide decision support to aviation. They augment the automated weather stations as well as the manned weather stations that are already out there. When they break, we fix them.
Senator Cochrane: You have someone monitoring your website all the time?
Mr. Kellar: That is correct, at our eight flight information centres across the country.
Senator Cochrane: And that services all of Canada?
Mr. Kellar: That is right.
Senator Cochrane: How long did you say this has been operating?
Mr. Kellar: For the B.C. coast, following the initial transition to NAV CANADA in 1996, we had a total of two automated weather stations. We had weather being reported at four flight service stations. We had five contract weather offices and three old-generation weather cameras, as well as, at that time, nineteen light stations reporting marine weather.
Today, we have three automated weather stations, four flight service stations, five contract weather observation locations with people, ten existing new-generation weather cameras versus the initial three, and another five planned for the following year, as well as only seventeen light stations now reporting marine weather in addition to that. In one location, DND is providing this aviation weather.
Senator Cochrane: Can we talk about funding? You say you are a private company?
Mr. Kellar: That is correct.
Senator Cochrane: Where does your funding come from?
Mr. Kellar: Our funding comes through a fee-charge system where the airlines or air operators operating in Canada, across Canada or above Canada contribute on a fee-based structure into NAV CANADA, and we operate as a non-share capital corporation. Private pilots who own an aircraft that is registered in Canada pay a fee for the annual use of our services. Foreign aircraft operators who transit over top of Canadian airspace pay a series of fees that contribute to the operation of the Canadian air navigation system, and domestic operators or transborder operators pay various fees based on a wide range of criteria, some of which could be aircraft size or weight.
Senator Cochrane: Do you have smaller planes mostly or do you have larger aircraft like Air Canada?
Mr. Kellar: Both.
Senator Cochrane: How many employees?
Mr. Kellar: Approximately 5,000 now. We commenced privatization in 1996. I think we had 6,300 and we are around 5,200 currently, or 5,000 to 5,200. In the summer months, we tend to have more employees during the construction season.
Senator Poirier: I just have one question on the funding. I know you receive no government funding and you said where your funding comes from. Since you are also offering services to the mariners in certain areas that are using your services through NAV CANADA, are there any fees? Do they help fund? Is there any fee for them to use your services or is that free to them?
Mr. Kellar: I think I understand the question correctly. Anyone in Canada who wishes to have access to our weather does not pay if they wish to access the weather over the Internet or over our aviation weather website. There is no fee for accessing or acquiring the weather. The only fee that kicks into place is if you are operating an airplane in Canadian airspace or over Canadian airspace.
Senator Poirier: Does that mean that any aircraft coming from another country but flying into Canadian airspace also helps with funding?
Mr. Kellar: Yes. Pre-1996, there was no collection of fees for foreign aircraft operating into Canada. As of 1996, a foreign aircraft operator operating into Canada or across Canada contributes to the Canadian system.
Senator Poirier: Would you say your service is used quite frequently, on a daily basis, by the mariners?
Mr. Kellar: Yes, extensively across the country. Our system is used on an hourly or minute basis, extensively.
Senator Poirier: Would you assume that is their first stop for weather information?
Mr. Kellar: Your question was about aviation or mariners?
Senator Poirier: Mariners at this point.
Mr. Kellar: I will qualify. I have absolutely no knowledge of how much the mariners use our system.
Senator Raine: It is good that you are here. Thank you very much. Frankly, I am finding a big disconnect between what you are telling us and what we just heard when we visited users of the services that are provided by lighthouses on the West Coast. We heard from resource companies, fishermen, mariners of all kinds and aviation companies.
The aviation companies especially were unequivocal. I will paraphrase some of their remarks: Local information very important. Though lighthouse weather reports are less frequent, they're more valuable. They give the visibility in the sea state. The automated ones only give the wind speed and direction. We rely on the marine reports from the lighthouses. Too often the automated ones say no information. We rely on the West Coast. This is the Float Plane Operators Association. They need the cloud cover and the visibility and the sea state. Cannot depend on automated weather stations. Lighthouse keepers are dependable.
I was just trying to quickly pull up some comments, but a recurring theme in what we heard is that, where weather is a critical component of their safety, whether it is on the ocean or in the air, it is critical for them to get that weather from the lighthouses.
My question for you is the following: There are 27 staffed lighthouses on our coast. Why do you not have hourly weather information coming in from every one of those lighthouses? The lighthouses are there. In the past, they used to provide hourly weather reports. The services are being downgraded. We are hearing from the people that you cannot replace a person with a machine, no matter how good they are, because they do not always work; just when you need them the most, they can have a malfunction or breakdown.
First, why are only 17 lighthouses reporting to you?
Mr. Kellar: I will give you what I believe is the answer, and if I miss anything, Mr. MacDonald will augment it. I am not sure there is a disconnect. As I mentioned earlier, most people in aviation will indicate there is no such thing as too much weather information. With respect to a human observation versus an automated observation, there are various opinions on that.
To answer your question of why we are only providing the weather to our aviation customers, if they are looking en route up and down the coast, out of 17 locations every three hours, this is what has been made available to us through our contract with the Meteorological Service of Canada. If there are more lighthouses that are providing weather, we are not aware of that, because when we started as a privatized air navigation system, we had 19. I am only making the assumption. We have lost two since then and we have seventeen. Our relationship is with MSC.
Senator Raine: What is MSC?
Mr. Kellar: Meteorological Service of Canada, Environment Canada.
Senator Raine: The lighthouse keepers, all 27 of them, send their weather reports every three hours?
Mr. Kellar: Marine weather through the meteorological service.
Senator Raine: They send their observations: wind speed, direction, temperature?
Mr. Kellar: As well as ceiling, if they have it.
Senator Raine: They send that somewhere?
Mr. Kellar: To the Meteorological Service of Canada through a marine weather report. It enters into our system.
Senator Raine: Through the Coast Guard?
Mr. Kellar: No. From the Meteorological Service of Canada, with NAV CANADA, we share weather data back and forth. We have 200-and-some airports or locations in the country where we report the weather every hour or, when the weather changes, within the hour. In Kamloops, we might report the weather every 20 minutes if there is a significant weather change. We are providing direct weather services at that location because our level of service requires that. We put all that data and weather information out there for the aviation operators.
The Meteorological Service of Canada interprets the weather and provides forecasts and other information. If they receive weather from other parts of the country that is not NAV CANADA-reported weather information, they make available what they feel they can make available to us to provide the operating community of aircraft whatever we can give them for weather, and that happens to be 17 current lighthouse weather reports every three hours.
One of the things we may want to clarify so that you understand clearly is that there is a significant difference in the standard and training required for a weather observer that is providing aviation weather, versus the weather that is being provided on the marine weather reporting system by the lighthouses. It is a very different structure of training and level of standard and in terms what is expected. That is a fact.
Senator Raine: Is there any reason why lighthouse keepers cannot be trained to the standard required by NAV CANADA?
Mr. Kellar: No, there should not be a reason. We train people every day.
Senator Raine: I understand. Many of your observations are made by volunteers across our country?
Mr. Kellar: No. In parts of the country there is weather that is reported to a lesser standard. We do not ignore that information.
However, when it comes into the criteria that are used on hourly weather observations or "specials," as they are referred to — because they happen throughout the hour and the weather has changed significantly to generate a special — the trained personnel, meeting a certain standard, are trained to report the actual weather. That goes into the system, into the Meteorological Service of Canada system for their interpretive use for forecasting and other.
To your question, is there any reason to think that someone working at a lighthouse could not be trained, the answer is, no, there is absolutely no reason they could not be trained.
From our understanding, in the early days between the lighthouse service, the marine weather every three hours, to the Meteorological Service of Canada, we understood this to be — and I think we still do — a supplemental activity to whatever their core job was. We appreciated the weather, and still appreciate the weather, every three hours or whatever they give us, to help the rest of our weather network. I am not sure what their full-time job is. We are in the air navigation business, not the lighthouse business.
Senator Raine: I can appreciate that, and this is one of the things that we are wrestling with. The lighthouses are located strategically where there are marine hazards, but they are located in 27 locations up the wild and wonderful B.C. coast. They are fixed, they are warm, they have power, and they have caring and intelligent personnel who are capable of doing all kinds of services.
I am hearing from you that you would welcome the opportunity to get hourly reports to NAV CANADA standards from those locations.
Mr. Kellar: We welcome weather, and the more weather the better. Those same people you spoke to last week, or whenever it was you were out there, have an active dialogue and relationship with us. They are working on a list where they will see the possible enhancement of more aviation weather cameras, because they fly on visual flight rules. There are not eyes everywhere.
I can appreciate their interest in utilizing the services wherever there are humans to provide visibility on a structured format. The current structure within that lighthouse weather reporting is every three hours. If the weather was coming out every hour, we would be sharing it.
Senator Raine: It is funny, because they used to do it every hour, and somehow they have been cut back to doing it every three hours. The ones we have spoken to, I am pretty sure they would be happy to do it every hour.
Mr. Kellar: The only concern is there is a big difference between the aviation weather observation, every hour that we provide it in 200-and-some locations across the country, and the degree and standard of the weather that is being reported out of those 17 light stations. There is a big difference today, but that is today.
Senator Raine: We have heard that the AWOS, the automated weather observation system, is 99 per cent accurate. That is from, I think, the Canadian Coast Guard or Environment Canada.
The Chair: Coast Guard.
Senator Raine: When we talked to both the lighthouse keepers and the people who use their services, we heard frequently that they are not reliable, they do not have a complete picture of the weather, and when they are out, because of where they are located, it takes a long time to go and fix them.
Mr. Kellar: I have no idea what knowledge a lighthouse operator would have of an automated weather observation system.
Senator Raine: The mariners are saying that.
Mr. Kellar: Back to the mariners. Unfortunately, our mission in life as an air navigation service provider is to aviation.
The Chair: If I could interject for a minute, because the disconnect that Senator Raine is talking about is across the board. There are people out there who pay taxes to the Government of Canada and who want services from the Government of Canada. There is a Government of Canada and it has various branches. The problem that we have is that those branches are operating in silos. The silos, they may talk to each other, but they do not work together.
Senator Raine is asking those questions in depth because we have just spent a week listening. You just heard the testimony that those lighthouse keepers will go. Every five years they have been told: "You guys are going. You are out of here."
If you are going to have a partnership, how can you have a partnership with people who are constantly under threat? What we found was a diminution of services and not an expansion. What we are trying to do is expand the services that lighthouse keepers get. We are trying to figure out a way to do that.
Our frustration is, on the one hand, we have the Coast Guard cutting down services, and, on the other hand, we have opportunities for services, like the one you just mentioned, if you could train those people.
Senator Raine is right when she talks about the pilots we spoke to, all the way from Vancouver Island up to Prince Rupert, and we must have talked to 15 different pilots and an association. We are talking about small aircraft here, not about Airbuses. That is how people get from island to island on the West Coast. They would like to talk to the lighthouse keepers but, if they are not there, how will they talk to them?
Mr. Kellar: I can appreciate the committee's task. We, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending how one might look at it, do not receive any money from the silos or the Canadian government. We are responsible to a fairly rigid group of customers, and our regulator is Transport Canada. We are responsible under some fairly rigid regulation on the quality of services we provide, one of them being weather. Although I may be able to appreciate some of what I am hearing, I am not sure how relevant it is to what we do.
The Chair: That is what everyone is saying, you see. NAV CANADA says, "not my problem," Transport Canada says, "not my problem," Environment Canada says, "not my problem," and Parks Canada says, "not my problem."
Mr. Kellar: All but one are paid by taxpayers and one is private.
The Chair: That is right. They are all paid by taxpayers. We are all paid by taxpayers.
Mr. Kellar: They are not all paid by taxpayers. All but one are paid by taxpayers. NAV CANADA is a private company. Let us just be specific, if I could.
We absolutely appreciate the additional information we are getting via the Meteorological Service of Canada of the lighthouse observers. I think we were asked here to give our view towards aviation weather, and if you talk to the pilots who flew up the coast, you got a good view from those people flying the Turbo Otters, the Twin Otters and everything else. We speak to them a few times a year as well about where we are growing our weather information and what more we can make available.
Since our Olympics exercise, we have had a fairly active dialogue about growing the amount of information available. How we do that is by the fees we collect from the air operators as a private business.
The Chair: I interrupted Senator Raine. Please continue.
Mr. Kellar: I am not sure if I answered the end of your question.
Senator Raine: Senator Rompkey was right in that there has been kind of a concerted, ongoing devaluing of lighthouse keepers by the agency that they are part of, which must be demoralizing for them. In spite of that, many of the most experienced ones are still there — they work 24/7 and there they are.
It is a resource that I think, personally, NAV CANADA should be asking the question of the Meteorological Service of Canada: "How can we get more information from those lighthouse keepers into your system?" It makes sense. They are there. If you have a webcam, for instance, if you wanted to put webcams, it makes sense to put them where someone can look after them. It is right there, on their building, rather than not having them.
Mr. Kellar: Today we have a contract in place until 2021 to have weather provided out of the light stations every three hours, at the level they are trained. I do not have an opinion as far as whether they could be, should be, or will be, trained further. Right now, we are happy with what we are getting.
The Chair: Let us turn it around. If you were asked by a government agency to do more training and to make them more familiar with technology and so on, would you do that?
Mr. Kellar: If we were asked, we would go to our customers under a structured consultation process, which is risk-based, all the aeronautical study. We would have a discussion about what level of service could be enhanced and how, whether it is additional weather reports coming from lighthouses, additional implementation of technology that is not human aided and so forth, on where it was. We would look at the traffic in certain parts of the area that we are assessing, and we would do a full risk analysis that we would eventually share with Transport Canada. That is how we conduct business when it comes to assessing levels of service. It is safety, risk based.
Mr. MacDonald: All the changes that happened since 2003 with weather cameras and AWOS were based on a full consultation process with our customers and ongoing through the aeronautical study process.
The Chair: Who would you have a dialogue with on the coast of British Columbia?
Mr. Kellar: It would be the following: the BC Aviation Council; all of the float operators — there are less now that some of them have merged — that operate on the coast; general aviation through COPA, the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association; general aviation through the CBAA, the Canadian Business Aircraft Association; and the Air Transport Association of Canada because they have some members that are residents of the coast. That is pretty much it as far as domestic organizations. Many of the operators that reside on the West Coast belong to more than one of those groups.
We are regularly getting feedback from some of the operators that you may have well travelled on last week, both by way of the BC Aviation Council and by way of the Air Transport Association of Canada. We have had a lot of discussion on services pre- and post-Olympics, and some of the things we have learned from the Olympics, such as enhancing more weather cameras in parts of the islands that never had people but might have electricity that they could stand to benefit from. That is not necessarily taking into account with respect to the light stations.
The Chair: The same problem does not exist on the East Coast, I assume — does it?
Mr. Kellar: Which problem would that be?
The Chair: The same situation, let us put it that way.
Mr. Kellar: We do not receive any marine weather observations out of any lighthouses on the East Coast through the Meteorological Service of Canada. Whether they are there and providing something, I am not sure.
Senator Cochrane: What has happened to the weather forecasting that airports used to provide from Transport Canada?
Mr. Kellar: When you say what has happened, the answer is nothing. There are more of them, but Transport Canada does not provide them.
In 1996, when Transport Canada commercialized the air navigation services to NAV CANADA, at all of those airports we took over the responsibility for reporting the weather. We have since grown that number, and we report it every hour or, if the weather changes significantly within that hour, it all goes into the Meteorological Service of Canada, and they have employed forecasters who do forecasts, in some locations, 24-hour rolling forecasts, and in some locations 12-hour forecasts.
The simple answer is nothing has happened, other than it has increased, as far as locations. It is just not Transport Canada anymore. That is the real difference.
If you go on the Weather Network, or if you access the web, as many of us do, to see what is happening tonight in Ottawa, that same information is coming from the Meteorological Service of Canada as forecasters, but the raw data they start with is being reported at over 200 airports in the country by our observers or contract observers — we have many contract observers — every hour or fraction thereof where the weather has a significant change. Nothing has happened, other than it has increased.
Mr. MacDonald: If changes do occur, once again, we are required, by regulations, to go through this process of an aeronautical study to consult with the customers to make changes either to the weather service we provide or any air navigation service.
Senator Cochrane: When an airline pilot needs to find out what the weather is like 10 minutes before he arrives, do you give that information?
Mr. Kellar: Yes. He can contact the air traffic control tower, the en route air traffic control centre, the flight information centres I made reference to earlier, and most of the country is covered by a radio frequency where a pilot of an airline or a float operator on the West Coast can talk to someone to get the latest weather.
Senator Cochrane: In other words, they are subcontracting.
Mr. Kellar: Or they are our employees; it is a combination of both.
Senator Raine: I am almost positive that in the job description for the lighthouse keepers, every three hours they take weather observations and they send them in. In addition, any time the weather changes, they send that in as well. Obviously, it is not coming in to you in the form that makes it optimal for your use. They are not trained up to your standards, and you would rather have hourly. Am I correct in that?
Mr. Kellar: Yes, in part of what you said you are correct. They are not trained up to our standards. We get hourly weather in various locations in the vicinity of many of the lighthouses. I cannot answer if any, or which of those 17 lighthouses on the West Coast we would like to have hourly weather for, unless we conducted an aeronautical study with our customers and the stakeholders in the area to determine that. Either way, I could not answer that.
Senator Raine: Have you conducted an aeronautical study of what we call the "Marine Highway" up the West Coast of British Columbia?
Mr. MacDonald: Yes, in 2003 we did an aeronautical study. Many of the things we have implemented came out of that aeronautical study that was fully consulted, and risk assessments were completed on it. The weather cameras at those sites, the AWOS and the different types of local weather graphics that came out were implemented as a result of that study.
Senator Raine: Did you find any places up the coast where you are missing information? I am thinking of Cape Scott in the southern tip of the Haida Gwaii.
Mr. Kellar: Based on the aeronautical study and the level of service with consultation at that point in time, we employed the appropriate weather services to mitigate what risk was exposed.
If that has changed since 2002 to what you are referring to, it has not been brought to our attention by the aviation operators in that area. There is quite an active dialogue back and forth with those operators. When we did that in 2002, we would have identified areas of concern or risk and mitigated them by implementing the significantly expanded amount of weather information that we have done since it was operated by Transport Canada in 1996, or pre-2002 even. We have continued to expand it. I would never say "never." We have not heard of a new concern or risk in the particular area that you are making reference to, to the best of my knowledge, from our operators.
Senator Raine: When you did the consultations in 2003, did you have good consultations with the Canadian Coast Guard with regard to their plans for the lighthouses?
Mr. MacDonald: If you go back in history, the services or the supplementary weather reports being provided were being provided by Transport Canada at the time of transfer. It was under contract. When that happened, we accepted that responsibility and continue to do that.
Looking at the requirements in 2003 was based on, as you will recall, the decision to cancel that program. It was reinstated very quickly after that. We continued to do a study.
Senator Raine: Let me make it clear here. When you were doing the study, you were under the impression at that time that the Coast Guard would be de-staffing the lighthouses, were you not?
Mr. MacDonald: Yes.
Senator Raine: Perhaps the optimal use of the lighthouses has not been fully considered by NAVCAN.
Mr. MacDonald: I would not say that. At the time, in 2001, because the weather reporting was not up to the standards we have for aviation weather set by Transport Canada, the decision was made by Transport Canada to remove those supplemental weather reports. However, after reaction by the customers and the float plane operators and the people operating, it was reinstated in 2002.
After that, we undertook a study to look at all the requirements in that area, including the supplemental weather reporting done at the time, to see where we needed to augment with additional weather capability. That is what came out of that study.
Mr. Kellar: It would be fair to point out we interpret the information that we get every three hours, first, because of the level of information and the training that goes into providing it as supplemental. To this day, we are under the understanding they have a full-time job, and this was supplemental.
The Chair: You mean the lighthouse keepers?
Mr. Kellar: Yes. Second, we have not been informed that they will stop doing this.
The Chair: Okay.
Mr. Kellar: Other than by being asked to come to this committee.
The Chair: Let us tell you. We found that they have been under siege. As a matter of fact, this goes back to the 19th century. Lighthouse keepers have been at the bottom of the food chain, and have been treated as such. That is still happening because the Coast Guard feels they are not necessary. Technology is in, human beings are out. That is the simple message.
They are no longer needed. Here you are and we are talking about training these people. You ask what they do. Their services have been cut. Their boats have been taken away from them and they cannot do carpenter work anymore. There are all sorts of things they used to do that they cannot do now. They are told not to do it for labour relations reasons or one reason or another.
The reality is that their duties have shrunk. Tonight, we are talking about how we can enhance those duties. The problem we have here is that you are a private organization, so a government really has to come to you and say: "Would you do this?" I do not know whether the Coast Guard will do this.
Mr. Kellar: We are a private business that operates as a business and we have a service level to provide, which we do exceptionally well, particularly when it comes to weather.
That being said, we are continuously having discussions with various different departments of federal and provincial governments about different parts of our business. I suspect we will for years to come.
The Chair: I hope that your discussions with the Coast Guard take place very soon.
Mr. Kellar: It is important. Marine weather reports are with the Meteorological Service of Canada. We do not communicate with the Coast Guard. I do not mean we do not communicate with them. Every time a helicopter takes off, we communicate with them. I mean we pay annually for contractual relationships. We do so for those 17 lighthouses to provide us a modified observation from what we would provide every three hours. We pay it to the Meteorological Service of Canada.
The Chair: Yet they are not owned by the Meteorological Service of Canada.
Mr. Kellar: I suspect there is a contracting arrangement between the two federal departments.
The Chair: That is what I meant a minute ago by the frustrations we have. We keep going around in circles here; it is like nailing jelly to a wall. We cannot seem to get at anything substantial and get the right people talking to each other. That is part of our problem.
Mr. Kellar: We talk continuously and often with the Meteorological Service of Canada about information available cross this country. The 17 lighthouses we are talking about today are only 17 locations of many. We have a contractual arrangement for a certain degree of weather with the Meteorological Service of Canada.
I am trying to quantify this. We do not go out and shop multiple different federal governments for one service. When it comes to weather, Environment Canada are the experts and we report the data to them regularly.
The Chair: Those pilots who fly up and down that coast want to know the sea state at any one time. The weather in B.C. can change just like that. There is a fair amount of traffic, and the traffic is increasing as far as we can tell. They not only want to know what is happening in the air, what the temperature is and so on; the pilots want to know what is happening on the water.
Mr. Kellar: We are very familiar with that. We often do aeronautical studies that address just that. I think we are very much aligned with what the pilots want.
Senator Raine: This has been very interesting. I think we need to call Environment Canada back.
The Chair: We need to keep calling people.
Senator Raine: We were getting from the users of the information that the automated systems were not as reliable. They were often out of commission with no information coming through, especially during storm periods when they need them.
Mr. Kellar: Part of that reliability that they referenced is the reason we have a national program to replace 80-some of them with a new-generation automated weather station that has a different reliability factor. That is the automatic weather system we tested for two years before being approved by our regulator in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and St. John's in Newfoundland to ensure that the reliability was there, and the quality of the weather was there to meet the standards of our regulator, Transport Canada. That is why we embarked on a multi-million dollar project to put that in place in 86 locations in the country.
It is possible that some of the feedback regarding reliability could be attributed to the older generation. I am not sure. I do not know specifically what you are referring to. However, we were not satisfied with the reliability of the old generation of AWOS either, which is why we made the decision to put a capital plan together to replace them.
Senator Raine: Everyone would agree that the more tools you have at your disposal the better. We are looking at the idea that heat, light and a human being in a location, surely, must be a valuable resource for you to look at when deploying all of your aids to navigation. We need a little bit more information on that.
The Chair: We have been at this for almost three hours.
Senator Cochrane: If the Meteorological Service of Canada would ask you to take on the role of supplying the weather information that the lighthouses now provide, would you be able to do that?
Mr. Kellar: I am not sure I understand that question.
Mr. MacDonald: You are saying that if the light stations did not exist and the reporting being done by the individuals today was gone, what would we do?
Senator Cochrane: Yes. Would NAV CANADA be prepared to, under contract with the government, take on that service?
Mr. MacDonald: As we said before, we would get back into working with our customers to reassess through the aeronautical study what the gaps and requirements are for that coast, and work with them to address those issues through our normal process.
Senator Cochrane: To see if it was feasible.
Mr. MacDonald: Yes.
Mr. Kellar: It is important to note today that such weather does not constitute "essential" as far as providing aviation weather to that area; it is additional, supplemental information. If that was removed, we would have to sit down, assess the traffic levels, operators and have everyone's feedback to determine whether we needed to change that.
I will stress again that it is supplemental. It is not part of the core aviation weather requirement today.
The Chair: The float plane operators do not see it as supplemental.
Mr. Kellar: The way our relationships work with operators in all of Canada is that, if they have a concern they raise with us, we sit down and do an aeronautical study. It does not matter if it is removed, closed or open. That is the relationship we have with the operators in this country.
The Chair: Thank you very much for coming. We have work to do. You have at least clarified some things for us. Thank you very much.
Mr. Kellar: Thank you for having us.
(The committee adjourned.)