Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries and Oceans
Issue No. 25 - Evidence - February 15, 2018
OTTAWA, Thursday, February 15, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met this day at 8:35 a.m. to study Maritime Search and Rescue activities, including current challenges and opportunities.
Senator Marc Gold (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: My name is Marc Gold, the deputy chair of this committee and a senator from Quebec. I’m very pleased to chair this meeting for the time being, as we await the arrival of Senator Manning, who has been unexpectedly delayed.
Before I give the floor to our witnesses, I’d like to invite members of the committee to introduce themselves, starting on my right.
Senator Christmas: I’m Dan Christmas from Nova Scotia.
Senator Hartling: Nancy Hartling from New Brunswick.
[Translation]
Senator Ringuette: Pierrette Ringuette from New Brunswick.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: I expect other senators will be joining us in due course. For those who are watching across the country, it’s rather icy on the streets of Ottawa today.
The committee is continuing its study on maritime search and rescue activities, including current challenges and opportunities.
This morning, we are pleased to welcome, as a witness to discuss maritime search and rescue in the Canadian Arctic, retired Colonel Pierre LeBlanc, the President of Arctic Security Consultants. We’ll be joined by a second witness that I will introduce in due course.
Colonel LeBlanc, on behalf of the members of the committee, I thank you for being here today. I understand you have some opening remarks, following which the committee will have some questions for you. You have the floor.
Colonel (Ret’d) Pierre LeBlanc, President, Arctic Security Consultants: Mr. Chair, members of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, thank you for the opportunity to appear as a witness on the matter of search and rescue in the Arctic, where the challenges and opportunities are greatest.
On the challenges, many of you know the challenges well. The size of the Canadian Arctic and distance to SAR resources are great, and they are compounded by weather. You will see in the supporting documentation a map that shows that the Canadian Arctic is actually larger than the whole of continental Europe.
Another image highlights the fact that part of Canada’s SAR responsibility under the Arctic Council’s Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic includes the North Pole, which is 4,463 kilometres from SAR aircraft based in Winnipeg. It is the equivalent of stationing the SAR assets for Newfoundland in Frankfurt, Germany. Yet, there are no major SAR assets in the Arctic. They are too far south, requiring a transit time that is too long for an area where time is critical.
Increasing maritime traffic, made possible by the accelerating loss of Arctic sea ice, has led to some 178 vessels making a total of over 406 visits to the Arctic, including 32 Northwest Passage transits in 2017 alone.
I have also raised concerns with our aging Coast Guard icebreaker fleet on several occasions. All of our icebreakers are reaching the end of their design life, and increasing demand for icebreaker service support is leaving the fleet stretched.
One of the challenges in the Arctic is acting fast enough because of the cold weather. If we were to have a Costa Concordia accident in the Arctic, the passengers who would jump, unprotected, into the frigid waters would be dead in minutes, while SAR aircraft would be hours away and Coast Guard vessels could be days away.
Northern people expect and deserve more. They should not be forced to accept a much lower standard or quality of service of federal services.
Arctic maritime accidents are not a theoretical exercise. Two cruise ships and one tanker have already run aground in the Arctic. You can note the statistics in the supporting pages.
Unfortunately, the deployment of SAR assets is based on historical facts rather than anticipated activity. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, during one of his trips to the Arctic, stated that Canada could not provide the same level of SAR service in the Arctic as in the South. That is true, but I say that we can certainly do better than what we have now.
There are several opportunities to do better, and I’d like to name a few.
All SAR air assets should be equipped with forward-looking infrared radar, such as the new search and rescue fixed-wing aircraft will have. It will make searching for survivors and vessels that much easier and faster against the cold water background.
Canada has been investing in the Arctic Coast Guard Auxiliary, and this will increase SAR assets, but this investment needs to be long term.
For a number of years it has been recommended, including by your own committee, to provide the Canadian Rangers with a maritime role. They could increase our SAR capabilities but also act as first responders to report illegal fishing, initiate action on marine spills and provide a sovereignty presence throughout the Arctic. Who could criticize the Inuit for doing so? They would reinforce our sovereignty position over the internal waters of the Arctic Archipelago.
Resolute Bay could be further developed as a contingency facility that would increase our capacity to deal with a major accident for the recovery and extraction of survivors, and to deal with the environmental impact.
The U.S. Coast Guard positions helicopters in Alaska during the shipping season. We could do something similar. It has been recommended in the past to position air assets in Yellowknife to reduce the transit time to the Arctic. Those assets could also be deployed south if need be.
The new Arctic offshore patrol ships will soon increase the SAR capability. They will need to deploy there during the shipping season.
One of the most cost-effective actions Canada could take would be to direct preventive measures that will reduce the likelihood of expensive accident recovery and environmental impact, such as making reporting to NORDREG compulsory for all vessels over 30 tonnes and above, all vessels carrying passengers and all ships carrying dangerous cargo. Similarly, Canada could require all such vessels to be equipped with automatic identification systems. Those can be monitored from space.
Both measures will improve our Arctic domain awareness, a stated federal government priority.
Other thoughts: Enforce the new Polar Code and request even higher standards of the International Maritime Organization; complete the selection of Arctic marine corridors and make those compulsory; map the corridors to modern standards and provide them with navigational aids; ensure that the obsolete search-and-rescue mission management system is replaced with a modern system in a timely fashion; consider the use of drones as a cost-effective option to support local SAR; increase funding for the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association in the Arctic; and consider contracting civil aviation to provide Arctic search and rescue similar to the services provided by Cougar Helicopters to the oil and gas industry.
All of the above recommendations are well supported by policies, and many echo your own Senate recommendations in 2009 and 2011. Thank you.
Senator Fabian Manning (Chair) in the chair.
The Chair: Thank you, Col. LeBlanc. We will go to questions now, starting with our deputy chair.
Senator Gold: Thank you very much, and once again, welcome. My questions are both about the short-term challenges we face and how we might address them into the longer range.
We’ve heard testimony and know that with the climate change there’s likely to be an increase in eco-tourism and large-scale traffic through the North. We also know that our procurement process takes time and that we’re under-resourced everywhere in the North — perilously so.
Do you have any recommendations for us as to what we could put into place immediately to ensure safety in the North in the short term? Whatever longer-range solutions are chosen will take time to put into place. Beyond that, I might have a follow-up question about the longer-range prospects for ensuring safety in the North.
Col. LeBlanc: Two ideas come to mind. One would be to allocate some SAR resources and move them to Yellowknife or possibly Iqaluit. Those are the two possibilities that would make sense from a cost point of view.
If you deploy a CC-130 Hercules aircraft to Yellowknife, the ones on standby at Winnipeg or Trenton are not going anywhere. The aircraft has to be fuelled, made ready to go, and in two hours, wheels up and flying toward the North. If you put them in Yellowknife or Iqaluit, they would deploy much faster to deal with search and rescue in the Arctic.
The maritime dimension of it is really shared between the Coast Guard and the Canadian Armed Forces. The Coast Guard has very limited assets. It would be their icebreakers that are deployed up in the Arctic, but the initial action would probably be driven more by the Canadian Armed Forces using search and rescue aircraft.
If you position those in the North, when they’re on standby, they are not going anywhere anyway. If there’s a search and rescue requirement south from Yellowknife, that aircraft can be there just as fast as it would be from Winnipeg.
Second, I would say that it would be relatively quick and easy to deploy the Rangers in a maritime role, and provide them with the equipment and the training to do that. In one of the documents I provided to your committee, there was a study that was conducted in 2010 to look at how we could do that. Within a very short period of time, at relatively little cost, we could deploy SAR assets, or the Canadian Rangers, especially along the major routes of the Northwest Passage.
Senator Gold: To follow up on your first point with regard to positioning SAR assets in the North, do you have a sense of the financial implications of such a deployment?
Col. LeBlanc: I would say they would be very limited. The two locations that I’ve suggested both have military assets on the ground, so the aircraft would be stationed at the airport in both locations.
There would be a requirement to house the crew, more than likely in a hotel, or if this was to be developed as a long-standing plan, they could use the barracks facilities that are at the CF-18 forward-operating locations.
There are quarters available in both Yellowknife and Iqaluit for the housing of military personnel.
Senator Gold: I have one last question. We’ve had testimony about the possibility of contracting out search and rescue services to private companies, and you alluded to that in your remarks. We heard from witnesses yesterday that some private aircraft might not have the ability to fully meet the needs of those in distress, whether it’s providing medical care or to land safely on ice. I wonder if you could comment on that. What assets would be appropriate for deployment in the North?
Col. LeBlanc: The example I mentioned is Cougar Helicopters. On the East Coast, they provide search and rescue capabilities for oil and gas. They’ve also done it in Alaska, as well as in Inuvik, to support oil and gas. Their helicopters are equipped to perform a certain level of search and rescue capability, including first aid and stabilizing a patient or somebody who has been injured and fly them south.
If you were to contract that service in the North, the government could stipulate what standards are to be met and pay for that service.
Senator Gold: Thank you very much.
Senator Christmas: Thank you, colonel, for your statement.
I’m always interested in how we can use technology to help us in difficult situations. You mentioned the use of drones. You also mentioned that you recommend that all SAR air assets have forward-looking infrared radar. Is it possible to equip drones with this technology?
Col. LeBlanc: Yes, it is.
Senator Christmas: Who would operate the drones? You mentioned the Canadian Rangers. Do you think that’s a good match and that the Rangers would have this capability? Would it be useful in their operations?
Col. LeBlanc: It would be possible to train the Rangers to do that.
You’re probably aware that there’s an explosion in the development of drones today. When you deal with search and rescue, the first 24 hours are critical, when you need to find out where the incident or the accident is to be able to react to it appropriately. Whether it’s one person or a cruise ship that has run aground and you now have 400 people in the water, obviously, will require a different answer.
As soon as you can get eyes on the scene to provide information back to the headquarters that will deal with the crisis, on the nature or the extent of the problem, that would be very helpful.
Some drones can be equipped with a forward-looking infrared radar system. Drones are becoming increasingly easy to fly. The concept that I have is to have drones in all of the northern communities that can be launched very quickly on a preset pattern for the search.
Typically, the hunters and trappers go in specific areas. If Joe Inuk is missing, typically it goes into this area. You can launch a drone on a search pattern to do a quick search of that area. Once you locate the person, you can then send the Rangers, who typically do the search and rescue missions in the North with Skidoos, to get the person or get helicopters to deal with the situation or bring in the Armed Forces. You bring in the assets you need to deal with the situation, but knowing where that situation is and the scope of it is critical at the very beginning.
Senator Christmas: You also mentioned that the U.S. Coast Guard has helicopters in Alaska during the shipping season. Do any of the other Arctic countries or states provide some seasonal deployment of SAR assets in their countries as well?
Col. LeBlanc: The one that is probably most impressive would be Russia. Russia has five search and rescue centres in the Arctic. They are manned by 280 personnel. They are building another four.
Mr. Putin wants to develop the Northern Sea Route, and in doing so they are investing in having the assets right across the Northern Sea Route to have search and rescue capabilities. Norway has bases all the way up to the northern part of the country. Those would be the two that come to mind as having much greater capability than we have.
Senator Christmas: In comparison to Canada, where we have no deployment of assets at any time of the year, I guess we’re the exception.
Col. LeBlanc: Yes.
[Translation]
Senator Ringuette: Hello, Colonel LeBlanc. Thank you for being with us and for sharing your recommendations. They seem to me to reflect closely those of other witnesses that we have heard to date.
I am curious, does your company conduct research for the federal government or the territorial governments?
Col. LeBlanc: Yes, I have done research for the Government of Canada, Industry Canada and the Senate. So, yes, I have the ability to do those studies.
Senator Ringuette: We are studying the question of Arctic sovereignty, a subject that Canadians care about, but when it comes to security, are there private companies such as cruise lines or oil companies that use your services to provide security plans?
Col. LeBlanc: I have offered my services to multinationals such as Raytheon, in the United States, in order to help them better understand the challenges that exist in the Arctic. All too often, people are deployed to the Arctic thinking that you can do the same thing there that you do in the South, and very quickly they become a source of problems. They become people that need rescuing.
I will give a rather funny example. There was a group that was called “the space scientists” who wanted to cross the North-West Passage on sea-doos. Eventually, the Coast Guard had to rescue them because they were caught in the ice and threatened by polar bears. If you go to the Arctic and you are not aware of all the challenges, if you are not properly prepared, sooner or later, there will be problems. If it is a strictly economic trip, the costs will be enormous. If you are trying to install a system of some sort and you forget a component or a tool, it will cost you a lot of money — tens of thousands of dollars — to correct that shortcoming. Here, in the South, you can buy component pieces at Canadian Tire or Lowe’s and carry on. If you are in the middle of the Arctic, it can take several weeks before you can fix the situation.
Senator Ringuette: Do you have contracts with the Armed Forces?
Col. LeBlanc: I had a contract with the Canadian Forces, yes.
Senator Ringuette: Two or three years ago, the Canadian government finally attempted, at the last minute, to re-claim its share of Arctic sovereignty. Did you help with the research into the development of those documents?
Col. LeBlanc: No, not directly. The main part of the research aimed to accurately determine the position of the sea bed in order to file our submission, which was based on the science of measuring depths. I am not an expert in that field.
Senator Ringuette: Thank you very much.
[English]
The Chair: You mentioned some recommendations that you would make to the committee to improve search and rescue in the Arctic. We’ve had a fair number of recommendations and many are coming forward. What would you see as a priority in the Arctic in relation to search and rescue, maybe the two top priorities that we could give to the government to address the concerns of the search and rescue in the Arctic?
Col. LeBlanc: I would say that initially it would be the deployment of our air assets to the Arctic in support of search and rescue. The next one that I would go after would be to give the Rangers a maritime role.
The Chair: I like direct answers, and they are direct.
Senator Hartling: Good morning, Colonel LeBlanc; it is nice to have you here. This is a new committee for me. I’ve only been on it a short time. I find your testimony concurs with the other witnesses I’ve heard.
It sounds like things are not going to get better due to climate change. It sounds like a question of equity, that the people in the Arctic are over there and forgotten. I know we have a special committee in the Senate studying the Arctic which hopefully will raise the profile on this, but this sounds like it’s a serious issue that’s not going to change.
You and others have done a lot of good studies. What are some of the reasons that nothing is changing?
Col. LeBlanc: It’s the lack of allocation of resources. At the end of the day, it’s dollar signs as opposed to anything else. The government needs to shift its centre of gravity toward the North because the North is opening up.
When I checked the ice coverage yesterday in the Arctic, it was at its lowest point since records have been kept. It’s an exponential curve. The loss of sea ice is actually accelerating, which means that you will see more cruise ships like the Crystal Serenity going through.
A workshop was done in preparation for the Crystal Serenity coming through, and it quickly became clear that it would be a nightmare, even if the ship just ran aground and you needed to get all these people off the boat and flown south because of distances, the size of airports in the Arctic, the amount of fuel that’s available, crew time for the pilots. By the time they get there, they can’t fly back because they’ve expended all their flying hours. You would only be able to get a few people off at a time. If you have 1,600 people, it’s going to take a fair amount of work.
While you’re doing that, you would be depleting the fuel reserves that are in the small communities, and their next shipment would be a year later. You would have to fly fuel into that community at great cost. Obviously, we’re the ones who are going to end up paying for a lot of that.
It’s important that we take some of the preventative measures that I’ve indicated. The third item that I would put on your list, Mr. Chair, is to make the corridors that have already been studied — it was a Coast Guard initiative, and the Pew Research Center has also done something similar — map those appropriately so people know where they are going, make it compulsory, and then focus on a small area to look after. It would make everyone’s life a lot easier.
Senator Hartling: You make some good points. We don’t want to wait for a major disaster to happen before the profile of the idea is raised. We appreciate your good work. Thank you.
Col. LeBlanc: Unfortunately, as you say, it will probably require a major disaster, a major loss of life, headlines across the world, “Canada failed,” for the government to put assets in the North.
People don’t realize how big the Arctic is because of the representation on a two-dimensional piece of paper. But the centre of Canada is in the Arctic. It’s near Baker Lake in Nunavut. It’s a big place to look after, a very small population, and very expensive to do business. But that’s part of our country, and that’s the price we need to pay to look after it properly.
Senator Hartling: You’re absolutely right. Thank you.
Senator Gold: Of course, we all hope and pray there is no large-scale disaster, but I think it’s also important to recognize that on a daily basis hunters, trappers or fishermen are at risk, and it is said that if you save one life, it’s as if you’re saving the whole world.
Can you give us a sense of the magnitude of the problem? Do we have statistics about how many incidents there are, whether on land or sea in the North, and how well or poorly we’re doing in providing rescue services to those who find themselves in difficulty? What is the magnitude of the problem and what is our scorecard in addressing it?
Col. LeBlanc: The problem is relatively large. On an average basis, the statistics you have in your package show that on the marine side there are 4.3 accidents per year. So they happen all the time. The two that I’ve mentioned, the cruise ships and the fuel tankers, are obviously because of the possibility of major loss of life or an environmental disaster. If we were to have something like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, the cost of the cleanup would be tremendous in the Arctic because the infrastructure is not there. We would have to fly it in to deal with the issue. On the marine side, there are ongoing accidents.
Missing persons is more of a territorial responsibility, typically of the RCMP. Normally, the Canadian Forces will assist with the search and rescue of individuals. That happens on a regular basis. Typically, it’s the Rangers that will form the core of the search and rescue group that will go out to find these people.
The Canadian Forces will support through the use typically of aircraft, the C-130. The C-130 is not equipped with a forward-looking infrared radar. So what they do is bring on board a number of spotters, and they fly at relatively low altitude. It’s people with eyeballs trying to spot people in distress. The new aircraft we’re going to get will be much better equipped. But if the system was to be contracted out in the Arctic, one of the requirements would be to have that kind of system built on it.
On the air side, I didn’t bring the statistics. Those are available as well. There was one year where the fatalities in the Arctic were 25 per cent of the fatalities in Canada on air accidents. I think it’s in the range of 5 to 7 per cent of the air accidents are in the Arctic, and that’s where a lot of the casualties are because of time.
When I was a commander of the Canadian Forces in the Arctic, I recall an accident where the pilot and the passenger of a small aircraft survived when they crashed, but they died of exposure before search and rescue reached them. If you’re injured, bleeding, and it’s minus 40, you’re still in shock because of the impact on landing. Unless we’re there in a very short period of time, people will not make it.
The Chair: I want to delve into contracting because it has come up on a couple of occasions from other witnesses. At the present time, it’s not happening.
Would you envision that as a pilot project, or should we go right into it? How do you think we should look at the option of recommending a portion of our search and rescue, especially in the North, to be contracted out?
Col. LeBlanc: I think the idea of a pilot project is a good one. If you were to ask me to do that, I would sit down with Cougar Helicopters and look at their experience. Where are the pitfalls? What works or doesn’t work? What is the best way to do things?
I would probably try it out of Cambridge Bay. Cambridge Bay has a sizeable airport that is capable of landing a Boeing 737. The Canadian High Arctic Research Station is there. Cambridge Bay is starting to grow as a facility.
A North Warning System Logistics Support Site is also in Cambridge Bay. So you start building up on the assets that you have there. Cambridge Bay sits on the Northwest Passage — not the classical route, but the one that is most used — which puts it closer to the action. It’s relatively central to the Arctic. You would see how that works and then do something similar out of Iqaluit to deal with the Eastern Arctic.
Cambridge Bay could deal with the Central and Western Arctic. If you had Resolute Bay as well — the article I attached to your package goes into more detail about paving Resolute Bay, increasing the assets there. We don’t even have radar coverage north of the North Warning System. Anything north of Cambridge Bay, on the tip of the archipelago, has no radar coverage; so you develop all these assets.
But to go back to your suggestion, do a pilot project possibly out of Cambridge Bay or Iqualuit.
Senator Christmas: Colonel, one of your recommendations is to ensure that the obsolete search and rescue management system is replaced with a modern system in a timely fashion. Can you elaborate why the current system is obsolete?
Col. LeBlanc: It’s very old technology that has not developed with time. The Auditor General indicated that that system was about to collapse. If I recall correctly, the Auditor General’s report was in 2011. I could be wrong on the date, but for sure the Auditor General looked at the system, its capability to deal with the amount of information that we can generate nowadays with the Internet, with cameras and cellphones. There is a program in place to change the system to a more modern one. But to a comment that was made earlier, our procurement system is very slow. It’s politicized. It takes time.
Look at the replacement of the search and rescue aircraft. It took almost 15 years. And that’s to save people as opposed to building a park that doesn’t impact human life.
Senator Christmas: You mentioned a more modern, up-to-date system. Are there states or countries using more up-to-date, modern systems than we are using in Canada?
Col. LeBlanc: Yes, there are, sir.
Senator Christmas: What would you say are some of the critical features of modern systems versus the system we have?
Col. LeBlanc: It would be the ability to deal with a very large number of sources of information, whether it’s space, data or geodesic information. As well, also to record all the conversations and actions that have been taken that can be used in a court of law, if need be.
The Chair: Colleagues, our second witness is delayed due an accident on the Queensway, so we will reschedule that appearance to a later date.
Thank you for your presentation this morning. It was very interesting information. Thank you for the extra information that you provided to us. We will certainly take it into consideration.
The North is a very important part of our study. We have heard from many witnesses that it is left on the back burner a fair bit. We’re hoping to address that in our study, and your presentation this morning will greatly enhance that.
(The committee adjourned.)