Vanguard Magazine

14 JUNE/JULY 2017 www.vanguardcanada.com I IntervIew on the ground. People who know how to deploy equipment in the middle of the night in crappy weather conditions to make sure we keep oil off the shoreline and oil out of sensitive habitat and ecosystems. It's going to be frontline forces. It's going to be our policy people. We'll be looking to hire more mariners for sure, and we always have a need for engineers and technicians, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate about the Coast Guard. We have about 1,000 people now who work on communications towers and radar systems and very sophisticated, high-end GPS which is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than you might have in a car today. Some of these folks are at drafting tables drawing solutions to problems, and others are out on snow mobiles and 4x4s and climbing towers and fixing satellite dishes and that kind of thing. That technical engineering side is also an area where we'll be focusing. Q: You've touched on some of the challenges already. What would you say are the other top challenges facing the Canadian Coast Guard today? We have areas that we need to reinvest in, like training of our frontline forces. We have very capable people, but I would love to support them with more hands-on training. Think of training in the sense of learning equipment, learning techniques, learning about how different products respond in the water and about en- vironmental response. Q: Innovation is a big component in organizations today, are there any new programs that you are looking to initiate within the Coast Guard as it relates to innovation in technology? We used to have a program that promoted research and develop- ment within the Coast Guard. We are putting that program back on its feet. We have a lot of technical expertise in this organization, and those folks have been very focused on ship maintenance, ves- sel life extension, tower maintenance, emergencies repairs as some of our assets have aged. With the focus on the Oceans Protection Plan, one of our mandates within that plan is to be at the lead- ing edge of environmental response technology. We think that that means internally having a program – internally understanding what's happening out there in other countries in the industry. Given our level of hands-on experience, I think that we need to be part of the conversation of where the whole conversation goes next. People talk about alternate response measures, chemi- cal agents that disperse oil and things like that, I think we need to push beyond that thinking to the next level. I think we've got to talk about the role of automated equipment, both ships and air- borne drones for search and rescue, for environmental response, for coastal protection, for prevention. One of the things that both the Brits and the Canadians are doing right now is monitoring the behavior of ships as they approach, in the British case, obviously, the English Channel or as they approach the Canadian shoreline. We watch the behavior of ships to look for anomalies – things that might tell us in advance that we're going to have a problem. I want to get our folks thinking that innovation is what we do for a living, to make sure that we are as ready as we can be as far in advance as we can be so our response is ready to go. We also must be looking at technology for service delivery. Q: Last year there were some reports about the fleet deple- tion in the Coast Guard with the average age of vessels being around 34 years. What is being done to address this? The first thing I want to address is that number 34 years. We've actually got quite a large fleet. It's 115 vessels. When you see a number like 34, that's actually referring to a subset of our overall fleet. When we talk about a number that's in the 30- to 35-year range, we're generally talking about the ice breaking fleet. The idea that gets into the media sometimes that any part of the fleet, including the ice breaker fleet, is about to disappear from service is just absolutely wrong. Most ships are very well-built. They're very heavy in their construction. They were built for a robust job, "We don't want to buy a bunch of one-off ships. We don't want a patchwork of 15 different ice breakers. We want classes of ships."

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