Vancouver just got a small whiff of what a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic could mean for a place aspiring to be the world’s greenest city. On a calm afternoon in English Bay this week, a grain freighter at anchor apparently started leaking bunker fuel into the scenic waters off Stanley Park.
Local residents and their municipal government were not informed for 13 hours. The Coast Guard was ostensibly in charge of the cleanup, but its private sector partners at West Coast Marine Response Corporation took six hours to start skimming the oil and nine hours to put a boom around the leaking vessel.
Making matters worse was the apparently invisible response from the federal government. While the Vancouver Aquarium staff and police boats were doing what they could to pitch in, where were Transport Canada and Environment Canada?
Years of federal downsizing and program cuts have come home to roost. The Environment Canada Environmental Emergencies office in Vancouver was closed by the federal government in 2012 and moved to Montreal. Sixty staff nationwide specifically trained to deal with oil spills lost their jobs.
The Harper government also mothballed the Kitsilano Coast Guard station in 2013 that used to be one of the busiest in the country. This life-threatening decision to local mariners saved Ottawa the whopping sum of $700,000 per year. Coast Guard officials gamely maintained that the closure had no impact on their reaction to the spill. However, a former commander at the station told a local radio station that had the station been operating, the response time would have been six minutes