CMAC meetings

I sat in on two days meetings on the environmental side of this spring’s CMAC meeting in Ottawa, April 28&29.

In the Ballast Water working group a comment was made that no ballast Water Treatment System had been tested, specifically in fresh water. The assumption was voiced that therefore reliable performance of such systems was not guaranteed. RWO have submitted their application for approval and it is expected that approval will be issued at the July MEPC session.

• The system was tested in Bremen, Germany, a fresh water port, and it performed as expected.

In the Air Emissions working group, Environment Canada summarized the benefits from an ECA, referring to some 159 lives saved with total health benefits of $ 900 Million per annum.

The health problems are, to a large degree, caused by particulate matter. The latest Environment Canada statistic shows PM from marine transport at 10,404.9t out of 18,377,707.2t for all of Canada. Marine represents 0.056% of the total. Dust from paved and unpaved roads (generated primarily by vehicle traffic) is about 11,450,000t or 62.3%, which is considered an “open source”. PM totals for vehicles including tire break lining wear (but without open sources) comes to about 13,800t, which is about the same as marine transport. What I see is that the ECA proposal addresses the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" in pollution, ignoring the potential increase in greenhouse gas emissions from a modal shift and also ignoring the increased PM emissions for road and rail traffic. With the ECA submission, we address a narrow emission sector and ignore the climate changing millions of tons of PM, which accelerate the shrinking of snow and ice cover.

Environment Canada gives some interesting graphs on Canadian pollution, which may provide some additional reference as to how skewed the ECA proposal is.

At the standing committee on the environment, Environment gave a presentation on the current Bill C-16. Below is the link to the bill, and underneath a link to an opinion by one of the marine lawyers.

Bill C-16

Osler opinion

If the industry was concerned about Bill-15, the amendment to the migratory bird act, I feel 16 indicates that this is Bill 15 on steroids.