Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries and Oceans
Issue No. 25 - Evidence - February 13, 2018
OTTAWA, Tuesday, February 13, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met this day at 5:07 p.m. to study Maritime Search and Rescue activities, including current challenges and opportunities.
Senator Fabian Manning (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good evening. I am Fabian Manning, a senator from Newfoundland and Labrador, and I am pleased to chair this meeting this evening.
Before I give the floor to our witnesses, I’d like to invite the members of the committee to introduce themselves.
Senator Poirier: Rose-May Poirier, New Brunswick.
[Translation]
Senator Ringuette: Pierrette Ringuette from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Christmas: Dan Christmas, Nova Scotia.
Senator Hartling: Nancy Hartling, New Brunswick.
The Chair: Thank you, senators. Seeing that the Senate is still sitting, we may be joined by some other members of the committee as time moves on.
The committee is continuing its study on maritime search and rescue activities, including its current challenges and opportunities.
This evening, we are pleased to welcome two witnesses to discuss maritime search and rescue in the Canadian Arctic. I want to welcome Michael Byers, Professor and Canadian Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law, University of British Columbia, who is joining us by video conference; and Dylan Clark, Program Manager, Climate Change Adaptation Research Group, McGill University.
On behalf of the members of the committee, I thank you both for joining us today. I understand that each of you has opening remarks. Following your opening remarks, we will be taking questions from the committee members.
Mr. Clark, the floor is yours.
Dylan Clark, Program Manager, Climate Change Adaptation Research Group, McGill University, as an individual: Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you this evening. It’s a pleasure to be here and to share insights we gained from the research with you. The Climate Change Adaptation Research Group led by Dr. James Ford has been researching climate change impacts on Inuit communities for over 50 years. Over the past four years, I’ve been the team’s research manager for projects focused on search and rescue across the Arctic.
Our research projects have explored why search and rescues are occurring across the Canadian Arctic, what communities can do to adapt and further promote safety, and vulnerabilities of emergency response systems and critical infrastructure.
We’ve conducted over 60 interviews with community members, elders, hunters, fishers and emergency management officials over the past three years. During our research, I’ve spent over 15 weeks in 10 communities across Nunavut, and I’ve collaborated and participated in three search and rescue trips with the Canadian Armed Forces.
We’ve also analyzed all available search and rescue data, and data about infrastructure and transportation across the region. Over the past decade, search and rescue rates across Nunavut have more than doubled. While recent attention has focused on increasing marine traffic through the region, the majority of search and rescues have been, and continue to be, for Inuit subsistence harvesters and travellers. In fact, we estimate that in 2014, the 543 reported search and rescue incidents above 55 degrees north represent roughly 1,000 individuals. Of those individuals, roughly 20 per cent were in danger.
I’d like to reiterate that across the Canadian Arctic, search and rescue response is provided by numerous actors and agencies often working together. However, the RCAF is generally responsible for aeronautical incidents; the Canadian Coast Guard is generally responsible for marine incidents; Parks Canada is responsible for incidents in national parks; and the provincial and territorial governments are responsible for everything else on the ground considered GSAR, ground search and rescue, which includes over the land, on sea ice and in inland waters. GSAR events also use resources of RCAF and the Canadian Coast Guard, depending on the emergency management officials’ discretion and the availability of those resources.
Our research has demonstrated that the increase in rates of search and rescue is due to both social and environmental factors. Factors include climate change impacting traditional travel routes and routines. Several environmental changes have made hazards and weather observations more difficult to read and understand. The cost of quality equipment and safety gear is prohibitive for many. Changing local demographics and economies are impacting how people hunt and fish and are on the land, and colonial histories and policies continue to influence knowledge systems and harvesting routines in many communities.
Many communities are responding to the increase in search and rescue incidents with prevention programs, emphasizing providing avenues for youth to learn with elders. Communities and territories are also promoting safety by leaning on satellite beacons and subsidizing equipment and gasoline costs for hunter support programs. Our research has indicated, however, that additional efforts are needed and may lead to significant cost savings and prevention.
In terms of search and rescue response and the capacity across the Canadian Arctic, we found that most communities in Inuit Nunangat are minimally prepared and resourced for current search and rescue demands. The system is largely dependent on volunteers, with high rates of burnout. Often community search and rescue and leadership positions turn over annually. Volunteers often have to use their own boats and snowmobiles for search and rescue missions, with only gas and oil reimbursements.
While the push for more Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary units has increased resources and tools, training available to most communities remains minimal. Where individuals have observed that training is lacking includes first aid, emergency management training and training on how to work with the RCMP and others of the multi-agency responders in the region.
Across the Canadian Arctic, there are numerous threats and larger-scale emergencies with varying probabilities. This is the kind of separate category that we look at in addition to the subsistence harvesters.
Along with an increase in marine traffic, since 2003 there has been an increase of over 1,100 per cent in polar flights across the Canadian North. Further, communities face their own risks, ranging from prolonged power outages to floods. While there are contingency plans and exercises to practise response to some of the scenarios, across much of the Canadian Arctic communities will be first responders and will have to manage a situation for an estimated 4 to 12 hours.
Despite strong knowledge of the land, regional navigation and traditional knowledge of survival, we found that the cost of communities to respond to these large disasters is lacking and could lead to loss of life by rescuers or patients.
As some tangible examples of these gaps, numerous communities have worked across the region and have been unable to find emergency management protocols that have been developed for them by the territorial governments. There’s wide concern that during a large incident, health care centres and town communication lines could be tied up with calls, inhibiting emergency management communication. The vast majority of communities have no pre-hospital medical providers.
We’ve concluded that it is highly likely that search and rescue rates will continue to increase. Search and rescue and disaster risk will also likely become more complex and heterogenous in the coming decades. More research is needed to better understand response system weaknesses and the costs and benefits of potential policy changes.
Further, it is essential that search and rescue data continue to be collected and aggregated from all search and rescue agencies. However, with present knowledge, territorial and federal partners can continue to improve and prevent search and rescue across the region. Our research supports recommendations made by Senator Patterson at the defence policy review Nunavut round table in 2016 for RCAF to station C-130s in Yellowknife and Cambridge Bay.
Further, air SAR deficiencies and coverage will become an increasing issue with the C-295 in operation in 2019 as we estimate that response times will increase by at least 5 per cent, and remaining fuel when the aircraft arrives on scene will be at least a quarter of the C-130.
It is also essential that communities are better equipped with resources to deliver quality ground search and rescue and act as first responders to larger disasters across the Canadian Arctic. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Clark.
Go ahead, Mr. Byers.
[Translation]
Michael Byers, Professor and Canadian Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law, University of British Columbia, as an individual: Thank you very much. I am very happy to appear before your committee today. As you can tell, I speak French, but today I will speak in English.
[English]
When this committee invited me to testify on the subject, it probably did not realize that I am regularly reliant on marine search and rescue coverage and that I live on Salt Spring Island, 30 kilometres south of Vancouver, and I am a recreational sea kayaker who goes out on a weekly basis throughout the year.
But unlike the vast majority of Canadians who would normally call upon marine search and rescues, I have exceptional coverage in that the Canadian Coast Guard has a 50-foot lifeboat stationed just 500 metres from my home. That is not the case in the Canadian Arctic. The coverage is relatively sparse, and the Arctic is, of course, 40 per cent of the second-largest country on earth, with Canada having the longest coastline of any country, most of it in the Arctic.
Let me talk about search and rescue coverage in the Arctic. My basic premise is that the coverage needs to be much better, not as good as would be the case in southern British Columbia or most of the Atlantic provinces because the population density is so much lower and therefore the actual occurrence of events is less frequent. But the coverage needs to be good, there needs to be equipment that can arrive on scene and there needs to be a capacity to deal with large accidents involving substantial numbers of victims.
The Arctic is a dangerous place, with extreme weather conditions, very poor infrastructure and very little in the way of governmental reach. In the last seven years, I’ve lost four colleagues due to accidents in the Canadian Arctic, and that’s just one reflection of how dangerous the region is.
There are a couple of things that I would like to suggest could be done to improve upon the situation. Mr. Clark already mentioned one, which is the satellite beacons. If everyone who ventured out onto the land or the water was carrying a satellite search and rescue beacon, we wouldn’t be talking about search anymore. It would simply be a case of rescue.
Satellite coverage now is quite exceptional. Specific satellites carry the equipment to monitor and receive signals from these specialized devices, and these devices are becoming quite reasonable. Any serious recreational hiker or boater here on the West Coast of Canada has a personal device that they carry in their backpack. Every single Inuit hunter should have a device when he goes out on the land or the ice or the water, and every tourist who does likewise; every adventurer who sails through the Northwest Passage and everyone who hikes in one of the national parks should be carrying such a beacon. Get rid of the search element of the dilemma and you focus on rescue and save a lot of money and probably save more lives.
A couple of other things to say, and that is that we now have a commitment from the federal government to put a rigid inflatable and a trained crew in Rankin Inlet to provide search and rescue along the western side of Hudson Bay. Similar initiatives are necessary in other northern communities, in Cambridge Bay and Pond Inlet, for instance, and probably in Kuujjuaq, Nain and Churchill, although I don’t know the provincial situation as well as I do the situation in the territories.
Those are things that are necessary, and it’s a small investment, given the return, not only on the saving of lives but also in the provision of employment and training purposes for young Inuit in those communities.
I’d also like to talk about larger assets. This committee will know that the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker fleet is becoming very old, an average age in excess of 35 years, with only one planned construction of a new icebreaker, namely, the replacement for the Louis S. St-Laurent. There is at the moment no plan for the construction of mid-sized icebreakers to replace the rest of the fleet.
I understand the federal government is now in negotiations with several companies about the possibility of chartering oil-supply vessels that can serve in an icebreaking capacity as a kind of traditional capacity for the next 10 or 15 years. What we actually need, though — and I don’t think anyone would question this — are purpose-built icebreakers in the Canadian Arctic to replace the ones that have served so very well. We need them fairly quickly, and that means that tenders need to be issued, contracts need to be signed, and shipyards need to be engaged. This is an absolute urgency, given the increasing need for search and rescue in the Arctic and the primary role of the Coast Guard with regard to the maritime domain.
The last point I’ll make concerns the provision of search and rescue from the air. Some people talk about drones as the answer. Drones could certainly do the search function, and they could even drop supplies such as an inflatable raft or a tent, but you cannot winch a victim off of the ice or out of the water with a drone. If you have the satellite beacons out there — people carrying them — and you’re focused on the rescue function, what you absolutely need are helicopters. They need to be long-range maritime helicopters like our existing fleet of Cormorants.
Regarding the Cormorants, I will say just two things. Our Cormorants are based in Southern Canada, and it’s a long way from Comox on Vancouver Island to the western Arctic. It’s a long way from Nova Scotia to the Arctic. It’s a long way from Newfoundland to the High Arctic. These helicopters can take up to two days, refuelling en route, to get to an accident scene.
We need to have one of these helicopters deployed in the Canadian Arctic during the summer months. Those months are becoming much, much busier in terms of shipping and other activities. Rankin Inlet is the obvious SPOT, and I would encourage the committee to look into that possibility.
In closing, the Cormorants are growing old. I know that might be a surprise to some members of the committee. It was a surprise to me. Time has flown. They’re now a quarter of a century old. We all know that major defence procurements in this country can take a decade or more, so we need to initiate the procurement of replacement long-range maritime search and rescue helicopters so that we have those new helicopters coming on stream before the Cormorants reach four decades in age. That is still looking forward. Cormorants are still able to do the job, but that will not be the case indefinitely. Now is the time to initiate that process.
The Arctic is becoming much busier. The Arctic will always be dangerous. The distances are extreme. We already have many smaller accidents where one to five people need to be rescued. At some point, an intercontinental jet airliner will crash-land in the Canadian Arctic with 300 to 500 people on board. At some point, a cruise ship will run aground during an Arctic storm. We need to have significant assets. They need to be able to get there.
Recapitalize the Coast Guard icebreaker fleet, initiate a procurement to replace the Cormorants, and put one of those Cormorants in the Arctic during the summer months. Those, and the provision of satellite beacons to everyone who goes out on the land, ice or water, are the obvious steps to take, in my view. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Clark and Mr. Byers. We will begin questions.
Senator Christmas: Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations. Mr. Clark, I really appreciate the research you’ve done on search and rescue in the Arctic. You touched on it briefly in your presentation, but could you elaborate on what you feel are some of the main causes of SAR incidents in the Arctic region?
Mr. Clark: Absolutely. We focused a lot on trying to understand why the rates have essentially doubled in the last decade. The first point to be made is that the majority of search and rescues, particularly in Inuit Nunangat, are individuals going out — subsistence hunters harvesting, fishing, travelling on the land. From the data that are available, the majority are mechanical breakdowns. That’s been echoed in our community interviews as well. Machines are breaking down. You can imagine a snowmobile hitting a rock and someone not being able to fix the cooling system, for instance. An ATV could pop a tire or break an axle. A boat propeller could hit a rock. So these are individuals who are stranded for mechanical reasons or as a result of running out of gas.
The reasoning behind that is also something we’ve been exploring. It’s tied up quite a bit in socio-economic factors. Individuals are not purchasing the part, or they’re not waiting two months to get a part to come up from the South to fix their snowmobile. They’re not able to pay the hundreds of dollars it costs to do that. Using ingenuity, they are jerry-rigging fixes, plugging holes in tires or coming up with a system that’s going to work to get out and harvest food right now. That, in turn, contributes to a bit more vulnerability when they’re out on the land.
There are also cases where we’ve seen massive transitions in the machinery being used. We’ve gone from dog sleds to snowmobiles, and now snowmobiles with computer chips nobody can repair when they break down on the land. That’s commonly talked about.
We’ve gone from wooden boats that have 20-horsepower engines to aluminum boats that have 200-horsepower engines. You can go a lot faster, a lot farther; in half an hour, you can be 75 kilometres away from anybody. The culture of preparation hasn’t kept up with the changing equipment, necessarily.
There are certainly exceptional hunters who are bringing what they need with them, but there are also some people who are hopping on a snowmobile to hunt caribou 20 miles out of town, and they’re not bringing the right gear, because that costs a lot more in gasoline.
It’s this complex network of a lot of social changes, and then on top of that you throw some of the changing hazards in environment, and it’s the perfect storm for seeing a doubling in search and rescue in Nunavut and across the region.
Senator Christmas: So I’m understanding you correctly, some of those factors you just mentioned are leading to the doubling of SAR rates in the Arctic?
Mr. Clark: Yes. We’ve seen in a number of communities that those are leading increasingly to individuals needing search and rescue. There’s certainly also a factor of the increase in the use of SPOT devices — satellite beacons — and there is probably more calling for search and rescues, whereas before, perhaps people would wait for somebody to find them on the trail, or they’d use CB or VHF radio and get someone informally to come and find them. Increasingly, the formalized search and rescue system is being used. That’s a piece of it, too.
Senator Christmas: Mr. Byers, I was quite intrigued by one of your comments that in the Arctic, we need more properly built icebreakers. Could you elaborate on what that means? What’s a properly built icebreaker for the Arctic?
Mr. Byers: I’m referring to the current effort to investigate the possibility of leasing commercial vehicles as a stopgap as the current fleet of icebreakers ages out. The federal government is exploring the possibility of leasing vessels that were built to support the offshore oil industry and therefore were built for a different task than what a Coast Guard icebreaker would normally do, namely, break ice for commercial vessels. Icebreakers need to be wider than oil support vessels to clear a wider path so that a cargo ship can follow. They also need to have the capacity to support scientific research. They need to be able to carry supplies to northern communities. They need to be able to do search and rescue. To have vessels that are built for a different task is not optimal, nor is it, in my view, taking the long-term perspective where if you have a Coast Guard vessel properly built to government standards, you can actually expect four decades out of that ship, not the stopgap of buying second-hand vessels from the oil industry.
Senator Christmas: What about the new Arctic patrol vessels that are now being built? Do those have the capability to do SAR missions as well?
Mr. Byers: Any Royal Canadian Navy vessel can engage in search and rescue. Indeed, they’re called upon from time to time, depending on where they happen to be located and where the accident actually is. Yes, you’ve got a government hull with government personnel on board. In the case of the larger vessels, including the AOPS, you will have a helicopter on board. But the Arctic offshore patrol ships are not icebreakers. They have limited ice capacity. They can operate in up to one metre of first-year ice. Any captain would be reluctant to go into an area where there was multi-year ice or growlers — that is, pieces of glacial ice from icebergs. Those are hazards even to icebreakers and very hazardous to a simple ice-strengthened vessel. The AOPS will provide improved coverage in the east and western fringes of the Arctic when they’re deployed there. That’s actually an important point also, because the AOPS will not only serve in the Arctic; they will also end up replacing the Kingston-class maritime coastal defence vessels. Therefore, they will do a lot of service in ice-free waters on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. There may only be five of them, though, so they’re not an answer.
One last point about the AOPS is that they will not have a new maritime helicopter on board. You know that the Royal Canadian Air Force is bringing the Cyclones into operation. The helicopters that will usually be deployed on the AOPS will be a much smaller, short-range Bell helicopter. So, again, the capacity will be somewhat limited.
Senator Poirier: Thank you to both gentlemen for your presentations.
I have a couple of questions. We’ve heard from previous witnesses a lot that since the Canadian Armed Forces has no aircraft stationed in the Arctic, the presence of locally based, private companies can provide ready support. In fact, they are contracted on an as-needed basis. I want to know your opinion. To what extent can a private company operating in the Arctic help to fill the gap of search and rescue capabilities? Should we look into the possibility of renting aircraft and vessels for the private sector to fill that possible gap in the Arctic search and rescue capability? Either one or both can answer.
Mr. Clark: I would start out by saying that they are being used for sure as an asset that is quickly available. However, if we’re talking about the need to not only find somebody but also provide medical attention and bring them back safely to a health care centre in their community, you can’t do that from a private aircraft. In a best-case scenario, if you’re renting out a Twin Otter and flying out of Resolute Bay, or something, and searching out of Arctic Bay, if you’re able to find the individual, they’re still going to be 100 kilometres away from any community. You will need individuals, community volunteers, to go out on their snowmobile or boat to find the person and bring them back safely or to wait for that person to drop something in self-rescue. Further, most of these aircraft aren’t legally allowed to drop anything. Kenn Borek Air’s insurance company no longer allows them to land on snow or ice. They can only land on actual tarmacs. So there’s no way that you can actually extract anybody from the region. I think it’s missing two thirds of the main point of search and rescue, which is actually to provide care and make sure the person is stable and bring them out of that situation.
It certainly has a place if you need to figure out where somebody is quickly, but a SPOT device or satellite beacon would be a great way to do that as well.
Mr. Byers: To follow up on that, Mr. Clark is absolutely right. There is a role for private aircraft. Private aircraft are used across the country, for instance, to support land search and rescue. In some cases in the Arctic, that may be all you need. There are helicopters in a number of Arctic communities, and if they can land, they can do an extraction. But they’re not a purpose-built, long-range maritime search and rescue helicopter. A Cormorant can carry up to 40 people. It has a powerful winch on board. It can extract from the deck of a ship during a hurricane. These are really impressive pieces of equipment.
Canada is just now purchasing some new fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft which, although they cannot winch someone up, will drop search and rescue technicians by parachute onto the ice, into the water — highly trained, courageous personnel who can provide that essential medical assistance while the helicopter comes to actually do the extraction.
For some more minor incidents, yes, private equipment can do the role. But in the majority of circumstances, no, they can’t. And in the worst-case scenarios, the ones that I really worry about, for example, the cruise ship running onto the rocks during an Arctic storm, the Boeing 777 crash-landing on northern Baffin Island, you need serious assets. You need big helicopters. You need to be able to drop a whole lot of SAR techs down onto the ground by parachute to provide that emergency medical care. We’re a G7 country. There’s no reason why we can’t do that.
Senator Poirier: Tell me about the cruise ships. If I remember correctly from previous hearings, we heard that the number of cruise ships going up to the Arctic is increasing. Have you had an issue with a cruise ship that needed rescue to date? If yes, how did you deal with it? If no, and if there was one in the near future, are we equipped at all to deal with it? How would we go about doing the rescue?
Mr. Byers: In 2011, a small ice-strengthened cruise ship, the Clipper Adventurer, ran itself onto a rock ledge in Amundsen Gulf. It was travelling at somewhere around 12 knots in a poorly charted area. The roughly 150 people on board were incredibly lucky. The seas were calm. The weather was good. The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen was only two days’ sailings away and it was able to come and extract all of the people. There were no injuries. But that was a best-case scenario. Like I said, the weather was good; the seas were calm. I’ve been in Amundsen Gulf in 25-foot waves during an Arctic gale, and had that accident occurred in those conditions, 150 people would have died. So we’ve been lucky so far.
Some of the cruise ships are getting much larger. The Crystal Serenity has gone through the Northwest Passage each of the last two summers with 1,600 people on board.
This will only increase, because climate change is melting the ice, extending the season, and also contributing to more and more search and rescue incidents because the sea ice is becoming unpredictable and so the Inuit hunters are falling through the ice with increased frequency. That’s part of the explanation as to why we’re seeing more search and rescue needs coming out of these Inuit populations.
Senator Poirier: From your point of view, what would be the short-term challenges we’re facing compared to the long-term challenges, and what’s the immediate solution?
Mr. Byers: For me, I think the federal government should partner with the territorial governments and actually provide substantial numbers of satellite beacons, do the training and make sure that anyone who is going out on the land, water or ice has one of those. Eliminate the search component. That will save a lot of money and save lives, and it will be relatively inexpensive. And then base one of the Cormorant helicopters in the central Arctic during the summer months, during the busy season.
Those are the two most obvious things to me. We have the equipment. It’s a question of political will. Those are short-term solutions.
In terms of the icebreakers, I’m not averse to the idea of leasing stopgap vessels, but we need to sign some contracts to build new icebreakers. There isn’t even a single contract right now. Even the big polar icebreaker that’s supposed to be built here in Vancouver is not yet subject to a construction contract, and all that needs to change.
Mr. Clark: I think we have been extraordinarily lucky to this point that there hasn’t been anything more serious in the Arctic. We are fortunate that the Canadian military was in Resolute when the 737 crashed there in 2010. There would have been more fatalities if they weren’t there. We were extremely lucky that the Clipper Adventurer had good conditions when it was grounded.
However, I think at some point you can’t plan on luck going in your favour. Some of the immediate things need to be stopgaps for these larger incidents. The Nunavut Department of Health estimates that medical help essentially isn’t going to be able to be provided immediately for most communities. They need a plan to meet needs from 6 to 12 hours. There are seven aeromedical planes on the best day available in Nunavut, and there’s essentially no surge capacity for medical resources outside of Iqaluit and Rankin Inlet. So that alone requires federal assistance, essentially, if there’s a medical need beyond that, because essentially it’s a one-to-one ratio for an acute care patient. Beyond seven individuals needing serious medical provisions, federal assistance would be needed in that scenario.
Further, obviously resources like airplanes and helicopters are needed quickly. You can see, with the handout I provided, essentially you’re looking at, best-case scenario, six to eight hours for a C-130 to be up near Resolute. For a helicopter, that’s roughly a day. Pilots will be timed out at 18 hours, so they won’t be able to search around.
The benefit of having an aircraft in Yellowknife or Rankin or Cambridge Bay, wherever you have that, that’s more easily able to respond, would be beneficial.
As I mentioned, the new C-295s will be more limited in their capacity in terms of what they can carry, how far they can go, and safety regulations, because they have only two engines instead of the five engines that the C-130 has.
Also, it’s important to remember that roughly 10 per cent, or less, of search and rescues now actually use any kind of DND or Coast Guard assets. It’s mostly ground search and rescue. So provisions and improving training and access to those community resources is essential: first aid training for the individuals, some kind of provision for improving the Coast Guard Auxiliary units and ensuring that communities have boats and snowmobiles they can use to go out for at least 90 per cent of the search and rescue cases they have. Communities have reported to me that they’ve had to wait 12 hours or more to find a boat or snowmobile to go out and search, and that shouldn’t be happening.
Further, prevention is obviously key. Communities have set up VHF and CB radios that they use to communicate. The provision of towers that are strategically placed so that coverage is improved would be another remedy to that SPOT device challenge, so that community members could talk to one another and relay messages.
Further, SPOT devices and paying for those plans could be huge. I know that a massive part of the Nunavut emergency management budget is just paying for the subscription plans for the SPOT devices.
Some other important improvements that could be made are continuing to invest in the CASARA volunteers and working with Rangers. We saw last summer the emergency planning and the exercise that took place in Rankin Inlet where the army actually worked with community members and had a mock scenario of what happens if there’s a large community disaster. More of those integrated responses and exercises would be important for both the communities’ response in the day to day and also improving response for potentially a larger disaster.
Senator Ringuette: Your last comment is a segue to my question. A number of weeks ago there was a big earthquake on the coast of B.C. and there was a tsunami warning for the Arctic. What is the state of preparation? Because when you’re looking at a tsunami, all of a sudden you’re trying to prepare communities. Considering the items you have identified that are lacking already, if you have a situation where 100 communities are affected at the same time, how can we respond? How can we help these communities prepare for such situations?
Mr. Clark: There are a few things that can be done. I think a big focus needs to happen at the community level, and acknowledging that the community is going to have to be contained in their response for up to 12 hours and be able to respond in that capacity. As I mentioned, I’ve been to numerous communities where the emergency management official and the people who work at the hamlet cannot find the emergency management plan. They don’t know where it is. I think that when you have that level of ill preparation, whatever is going to happen would be amplified in terms of potential risk and harm to community members.
You also have to remember that there are critical assets in each community — the diesel power plant, the runway — and if one or both of those go down, particularly in the middle of winter, there are real challenges.
In Pangnirtung they had a power plant go down and it was the middle of winter, so obviously the sun is not coming up. How do you get an airplane in with technicians to repair the power plant when you don’t have runway lights? They ended up lining up snowmobiles with headlights pointing in the direction as a way to get them in.
There are some challenges and important investment that must be built at the community level, and acknowledging that they need to have capacity there.
More broadly, the other point would be to ensure that there’s response capacity from the federal level for those needs. RCAF could fly a C-17 with drop pods and drop supplies off in communities if there’s a large incident. Also, having helicopters or assets up in Yellowknife or Cambridge Bay would be beneficial, or larger ships in the region as well. But I think working at both of those levels is really key.
Mr. Byers: If I could just add on the issue of the tsunami. The tsunami a couple of weeks ago was on the west coast of Alaska, and the tsunami warnings were for communities down the western coast of Vancouver Island. Vancouver itself and places like Nanaimo were not giving warnings because they were protected by Vancouver Island from any tsunami that might have been coming from the Pacific.
I tell you this because Canada’s Arctic is a place of large islands — 19,000 islands, in fact, in Canada’s High Arctic, two of them larger than the United Kingdom. So a tsunami would not threaten more than a couple of communities, depending on where the earthquake was and which communities were exposed, but we wouldn’t be talking about all 28 communities in Nunavut, for instance. In fact, I have difficulty imagining a disaster that would strike the majority of communities all at once.
Also remember that the people who live in these communities are highly resilient. They can handle extreme conditions far better than most of us, in large part because of the traditional knowledge that they hold. But I do worry increasingly about the prospect of a single large accident involving hundreds or thousands of people.
The Northwest Passage is opening up, and we are going to see more and more large ships go through. We’re going to see more tourism. We’re going to see even more large aircraft on intercontinental routes flying over the Arctic.
So it’s the combination of two quite different tasks. Rescuing locals who are going out on the land hunting, on their own or in small groups, that’s one clear challenge; and the other is this large accident involves hundreds or thousands of people who are very exposed because they lack traditional knowledge, and, if they’re tourists, they will also tend to be quite old, because the demographic of the people who go on these cruise ships is that they’re of an age where they cannot easily take care of themselves, in the water or on the land.
Senator Hartling: Thank you very much for your very interesting presentation. I keep hearing over and over prevention, prevention, prevention. What often happens is a disaster happens and then we figure out what we should have done. Thank you very much for bringing that up over and over.
I was wondering about those satellite beacons. How much would they cost?
Mr. Byers: Less than $500 per beacon. It’s a fraction of the cost of a new snowmobile, and it’s probably less than 1 per cent of the cost of sending a Hercules up to fly around looking for three days. We have to balance all these things. These are pieces of equipment that may be a real stretch for the residents in northern communities, many of whom are far from wealthy. But in terms of saving the federal government money, this is the best investment that we could make.
Senator Hartling: In some cases, I know, we give money for people to improve their house energy-wise or something. Maybe there would be some incentives to get that, because the costs down the road would be greatly saved.
You also mentioned groups in the community. Are there groups that are advocating for change that can support this movement to better equipment and better safety?
Mr. Clark: I think the main group that would be advocating for that, especially in terms of the community incidents and safety of subsistence harvesters, would be the hunters and trappers organizations that are essentially in most of the communities. Most of them, at least in Nunavut, that I’m aware of, either the hunters and trappers organization or the hamlet lends out SPOT devices already. Most communities that I’m aware of have around 20 of the SPOT devices.
My understanding is that Nunavut emergency services pays for those. I think the large cost at this point is the subscription satellite cost, and I believe they spend upwards of $150,000 a year for those. Those organizations are definitely the liaison between many of the public health programs and the Nunavut Emergency Management Office, ensuring that subsistence harvesters have access to float suits or SPOT devices.
Senator Hartling: It sounds like you’re asking us, as a Senate committee, to make sure we include some of this information in our report to make sure there’s prevention and that equipment is updated, and do it now rather than later, when something happens. Is there anything else you would hope we would hear? Is there something to add?
Mr. Byers: I would add something about the equality of treatment of all Canadian citizens. Search and rescue is a fundamental service. We expect it as citizens, and certainly we in Southern Canada benefit from pretty good coverage. Obviously, it’s more expensive to provide search and rescue coverage at a high level in remote regions, but I think of it as a question of equality.
There are many services that the federal government essentially subsidizes for remote communities on the basis that there’s a minimal standard required, and search and rescue needs to be treated just like that. That’s why there needs to be a Cormorant maritime search and rescue helicopter in the Arctic during the summer months.
Fundamentally it’s a question of equal treatment. I don’t think anyone — anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador or anyone in B.C. — would think it acceptable that it would take one or even two days for a big yellow helicopter to arrive if their boat had foundered during a winter gale. We expect to have this backup, so let’s give it to the Arctic also.
Senator Hartling: Good point. Thank you.
Do you have anything to add?
Mr. Clark: I also believe it’s an issue of equity of health care or public health. Similarly, we wouldn’t expect individuals in the South to use their own $20,000 snowmobile to drive out onto the ice that somebody else just fell through to find them, and then not reimburse them if they lose theirs. We wouldn’t expect people to have to wait for a volunteer in the community to come find them when they’re in medical distress, and that volunteer not to have any medical experience.
So I think that is pressing. Certainly as we also look at the increase in traffic in the Northwest Passage, we have to think about the impact to communities if an incident does happen. As Michael referenced, for the Crystal Serenity, the average age of passengers was over 70 years old. The time it would take to evacuate 1,000 people from Pond Inlet, for instance, would be upwards of a week, just with the amount of aircraft you would have to bring in and out, and then the town would be depleted of food, of fuel for the year. We have to think about what we will do to make sure the community isn’t impacted by those kinds of large disasters as well.
The Chair: Just to give perspective to the cost of the personal beacons, Mr. Byers mentioned less than $500. The information we received here today is that for a CC-130 airplane it costs $30,792 per hour to have it in the air. That will give you a perspective of what it costs.
I’d like to ask a question, if I could. I certainly understand the comments. I’m from Newfoundland and Labrador, and when I look at some of the stats we have before us, we talk about anywhere between 10 hours to 1.5 days to respond — from where the assets are today in Canada — to respond to something in the North, anywhere from four to 10 hours, up to 1.5 days. When your boat is capsizing in the Arctic, 1.5 hours is much too long. I won’t say 1.5 days. In some cases, 1.5 minutes may be too long.
I notice that in 2014 there are 543 SAR incidents above the 55, and then there’s a knowledge gap. I’m concerned about the knowledge gap because when you’re trying to build a case for improved services, location of assets, training and so on and so forth, most of the time that case is built around stats that have been collected. The National Search and Rescue Secretariat has not been updated since 2014, and, to our knowledge, no one is currently tracking how many SAR incidents are happening at all scales, territorial, RCMP, JRCC and the Canadian Coast Guard. Do you want to elaborate on that a bit for us, please.
Mr. Clark: To my knowledge, the NSS, which is now under Public Safety, established the KMS, the Knowledge Management System, and they were kind of aggregating data from these multiple actors. I believe they were pulling data from all JRCC calls, which would be Coast Guard and RCAF, as well as from territories and the RCMP. They were pulling all that together to give us a global picture of what was happening in the Arctic.
My understanding is that, as of a few months ago, it hadn’t been updated since 2014. To my knowledge, there wasn’t any current work on pulling. I think there’s a difficulty in pulling the territorial data into that. I would imagine that JRCC is already electronic, but I think most of the territories and other regions in Inuit Nunangat are just doing paper records. So I think that has been a challenge, and obviously that data gap is large in just not knowing what’s happening.
The Chair: We all believe, from witnesses that have been here before, that the amount of activity in the North has increased, as mentioned earlier, and climate change and things that are happening are causing people to go further from the shore than they did in the past. So I truly believe that a collection of this type of information is vital to what we’re trying to do as a committee, and indeed for the country as a whole to address the concerns.
Mr. Byers, do you want to make a comment?
Mr. Byers: Yes. I will just say that my understanding is that these kinds of statistics are actually relied upon by the federal government to justify not deploying on a forward basis a helicopter in the Arctic. The argument is that the actual number per year of call-outs is so low compared to Southern Canada that it simply doesn’t justify having such an expensive machine with all of the personnel and equipment needed to base it in a place like Rankin Inlet.
They’re right about the statistics. We don’t have hard numbers in front of us, but I just think of the thousands of search and rescue incidents that happen here in southwestern B.C. on this coastline every year because of the sheer amount of traffic, including many thousands of recreational boaters every weekend. It’s busy here.
It’s not busy in comparison in the Arctic. The Arctic is huge. The population is very sparse. There are only 110,000 people across all three territories. So if you look at the statistics, you are enabling the government to say, “Well, no, the frequency is too low.”
I don’t think that’s actually the right approach to take. I think one should look at the equality of provision of a fundamental service. And yes, it costs more per person rescued, but that’s a Canadian citizen and they deserve to have good protection, regardless of where they might live.
The Chair: I tend to agree. With the knowledge that it’s going to take 16 to 18 hours for a helicopter to arrive, maybe you wouldn’t bother making the call anyway.
I want to get back, if I could, to community capacity. I know in other parts of Canada that we have visited, and I know in my home in Newfoundland and Labrador, there’s maybe not 100 per cent, but certainly there’s a constant avenue for training, especially with SAR volunteers, such as local fishermen who may be brought in to do some training.
But in the North there’s little or no training for SAR volunteers or community emergency management leaders that involves instant command or emergency management. Can you elaborate on that a bit? From the testimony we have heard in places we have visited, we have seen a positive impact that the volunteer resource brings to search and rescue in Canada. When we’re looking at ideas and suggestions for how to improve our search and rescue efforts in the North, I’m sure that will be one of the things we look at, the training and the education for the people that will be volunteering their efforts there.
Mr. Clark: Absolutely. Yes, it’s quite astounding how individuals commit so much time, particularly in the northern communities, from what I’ve observed, to risking their lives to go out and search for people, particularly the emotional stress that takes when it’s either a family member or some friend of yours, and many of these communities are fewer than 1,500 people. But I think that gets to some of the challenges, which are really high burnout rates and high turnover. So for communities that I come back to, it’s quite unusual that within a year it’s the same individual that’s leading the search and rescue group, just because of the high turnover rate and the emotional stress that comes along with that job.
In terms of training, there is not much access to it. There are sometimes CPR or first aid courses that come through, which community members tend to take because they need certification for government jobs or other occupations in town, and search and rescue volunteers would take that as well, but there are not many engagements with other search and rescue resources or understanding of emergency management systems.
I will say there is strong knowledge and obviously continual practice in learning about land skills and land navigation and traditional knowledge, but when we talk about response to search and rescue and maritime incidents, the continual kind of practice and training is really not there.
There are also some challenges with, as I mentioned, burnout and fatigue of rescuers. We’ve been seeing increasing incidence, particularly along communities that are close to Churchill or other nearby towns that are not dry, of moving alcohol and other illicit substances back and forth. That’s been increasing the emotional toll as well for individuals because there’s increased fear of how they’re going to interact with individuals when they meet them out in the land and what the RCMP dynamics will be with that situation.
None of these individuals have any training on how to deal with a violent person. They don’t really know what their place is with RCMP, in terms of apprehension or what they do when they get back to the community. “We know that this has happened, and they’re threatening us if we tell RCMP. The RCMP wants to know what happened.” So I think it puts volunteers in a really tough spot. Without any training or formalized protocols of what to do, you certainly see that that’s another emotional toll and stressor for the system.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Clark.
Senator Christmas: Given the lengthy response times in the Arctic and the high cost of deploying SAR assets in the North, why haven’t Canadian Rangers been trained and equipped for maritime SAR?
Mr. Clark: I’m not sure I can completely answer that question. I do know that a number of search and rescue volunteers that are doing ground search and rescue are also Rangers, and they’re also Canadian Coast Guard and CASARA members and firefighters in town. So they’re really skilled in terms of their knowledge base, but it’s a big loss when you lose them. There are also challenges with Ranger deployment. From my understanding, it’s varied quite a bit throughout the last decade, depending on who’s in charge in Yellowknife. Sometimes Rangers will be deployed, and they are actually paid for deployments for search and rescue.
Unfortunately, then you lose all your volunteers in town because they’re seeing that a Ranger is being paid to go search and they’re not being paid. So when you’re barely making food payments, why are you going to go out and risk your life when your friend, who is a Ranger, is going out and getting paid to do that. I think there are challenges to that and some consistency needed and policies. But I think expanding the role of Rangers could be beneficial in building up a community resilience response.
Senator Christmas: I understand that Rangers are not trained for maritime search and rescue. Given the circumstances that both of you have described here this evening, I’m trying to find out why we already have some local assets and why they aren’t trained and equipped to do maritime SAR. I guess that’s my question.
Mr. Clark: I’m saying that would be beneficial, but I’m not sure why it isn’t happening at this point.
Mr. Byers: There is this new project in Rankin Inlet with the Coast Guard actually putting a rigid inflatable boat into that community and actually providing professional personnel for the first year or so to train some locals to then operate that small, fairly useful vessel. To the credit of this government, there is at least this pilot project, and I think more needs to be done.
As I mentioned in the introduction, I have a very capable Coast Guard vessel stationed 500 metres from my home along with a professional crew. Rankin Inlet will now have something close to that, but what about Cambridge Bay? These are other places.
The other thing to mention in this context — and I know the community knows this but many Canadians don’t — is that the Arctic is so large and the communities, as a result, are so far from each other. There are vast spaces that can’t be reached by community-based personnel, a small boat or a snowmobile. You can provide good coverage for maybe 100, 200 kilometres away from the hamlet, but it’s the spaces in between that are then left. And that’s where the adventurers go, the tourists go and the cruise ship or the plane crash happens.
So the Rangers are important, the local volunteers, absolutely, and Coast Guard trained people in these communities; this is all good, but it doesn’t replace the need for high-quality and large equipment manned by dedicated Coast Guard or Canadian Forces personnel.
The Chair: Thank you. I want to thank our witnesses for your testimony this evening. It’s certainly an opportunity to discuss the part of the country that we haven’t had a lot of discussion on up till today. Certainly, we’re hoping to have the opportunity to visit the North and see for ourselves some of the things that you talked about here today, and some of the information we received will be very beneficial to us as we work towards our report and our recommendations.
I want to thank you for taking the time to join us here this evening. It’s been a wealth of knowledge.
(The committee adjourned.)