7. What do you see as the main challenges and opportunities facing safe pilotage over the next 5, 10, or 15 years?
The big issue has been Government policy on 'Free Trade' deals, CETA is a classic example, allowing some cabotage without any reciprocity for Canadian flag vessels. The more difficult it is for young people to be encourages to go to sea, and the poor wages they currently receive during their training period, the greater difficulty we will have in getting qualified seafarers to train as pilots and other ship/shore related work. If the Government does not get behind supporting Canadian marine training, in 10, 15 years we will have to import our trained pilots from India, the Philippines or China! The unfortunate problem is Ottawa is 1000 mile from the nearest ocean and most officials do not realize that 90% of everything we have here is imported by sea. Recruiting new pilots will be the biggest issue in years to come.Ships are getting bigger, the ports are restricted in expanding, new ports are difficult to build due to ever more stringent regulations and pandering for political reasons to minorities, there has to be an awakening. We are going to need new larger ports, encourage new business to build new terminal (currently business does not know if the same policy will last through to the next Government Federally or Provincially, BC is a good example) and recruit and train mariners if we want to be a Maritime Nation. The Coasting Trades Act should be strictly enforced and the Government should not give way to pressure from foreign shipowners for more free access to our local trades and resources.
One challenge I see is getting future pilots as not as many candidate's are willing to go to sea for 4, 6, 9, and even 12 months for very low pay. There are ways to turn this into opportunities and that is you look for good candidate's, test them and then you can start a longer apprentice program before someone becomes a pilot and in some cases you can then get younger candidate's which can then have longer pilotage careers.The size of ships especially container ships is a real safety concern as you can look around the world and in the 360m class of container ships you are seeing more accidents/groundings due to engine failures, steering failures and the ships are so large that they cannot be saved due to tug size has not kept up to ship size.