:
Good afternoon, everyone.
[English]
Welcome, everybody. I call the meeting to order.
We will start meeting number 43 of the Standing Committee on National Defence.
I want to welcome today's witnesses. From the Offshore Helicopter Safety Inquiry, we have the inquiry commissioner, Mr. Wells, and also Ms. Fagan, inquiry counsel. Thank you for being with us.
From Seacom International Inc., we have Mr. Clay and Mr. Rodriguez. Merci d'être avec nous aujourd'hui.
We have an hour. I will give Mr. Wells of the Offshore Helicopter Safety Inquiry five to seven minutes to do his presentation, and then we'll give the floor to Seacom International Inc. for five to seven minutes. Members will be ready to ask questions at that time.
Thank you, Mr. Wells. You have the floor.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me.
As we have spent a year and a half studying offshore helicopter safety on the inquiry--and of course, response times are important in that--I felt that it may be helpful to your committee and to this group if you were able to ask questions of me, and that it could be helpful in the decisions and the recommendations that you will make in due course to your colleagues in the House of Commons.
With me today, as you've said, Mr. Chairman, is Ms. Anne Fagan. She is one of the inquiry counsel. The other, Mr. John Roil, is not able to be here today.
Ms. Carla Foote is also here. She is the person who has guided us in the last year and a half in our relations with the media.
Very briefly, everyone, I suppose, knows of the Atlantic Accord. That's when the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Government of Canada, about 26 or 27 years ago, agreed that the offshore would be jointly managed. To jointly manage it, they have set up a board called the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, usually referred to as C-NLOPB, which is a mouthful until you get used to saying it.
When there is a serious accident or incident in the offshore, that board is required under the legislation to call and have a public inquiry. That inquiry was set up shortly after the crash in March 2009, which killed 17 people in our offshore.
There are many facets to the inquiry itself, because it deals with offshore matters and safety generally, but it is largely focused on helicopter transport, which is most practical and really much more convenient, of course, for everyone concerned. It's not exclusively the only way you can get people back and forth, but ship transport or boat transport, when you're talking about hundreds of kilometres, is both slow and rough going in our ocean.
There are a couple of things I should bring to your attention at the outset. One is that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada is examining that accident from the technical point of view--from the point of view of what actually caused the accident and the various related factors--but they're also entitled to comment on things like life-saving methods and the suits that people wear if they should be immersed in water if a helicopter goes down. On a lot of things there is some overlap. I, of course, was not able--nor did I wish to, nor did I have the staff--to look at anything that is within the principal role of the Transportation Safety Board.
They're going to report eight days from today, and that report will be very interesting.
I have completed phase one. Phase two will be an examination of the Transportation Safety Board's findings to see if there are any additional recommendations or observations that I may wish to make to, say, C-NLOPB.
So I can't deal with or touch anything to do with the Transportation Safety Board's primary role. The other limitation is that I can't advise and I couldn't look into what the Department of National Defence does--not so much what it does, but where it stations its equipment and how it is organized. This is for the simple reason that when the Atlantic Accord was signed and the enabling legislation passed, there was nothing delegated to the board that would impact on the Department of National Defence and its search and rescue modes and what it does. That was outside my terms of reference, but I do want to make one point, and I'm glad of the opportunity to make it publicly. Although I couldn't inquire into what DND does in search and rescue, I found DND to be one of the most helpful entities that interacted with the commission.
We had a senior officer, Colonel Drover, come from Ottawa to explain the role of DND. Later in the year--this past summer--DND took me and two counsel on a daylight practice mission and on a nighttime mission. That was very valuable to the three of us, and to me especially, in learning how search and rescue actually works, rather than reading about it or being told about it.
It was one of the best days, actually, in the whole of the work of the commission, and as a Canadian citizen I want to say how proud I am of these people, who take daily risks without fuss and furor when they are engaged in rescues. I do want to make that point.
To come back to the inquiry, search and rescue arose really as a formal issue after the tragedy of the Ocean Ranger, and that's nearly 27 years ago now. There was a five-person commission set up. I have one of the recommendations here in front of me and I will read it to you if I can find it—
:
This is, I suppose, an occupational hazard.
The Ocean Ranger inquiry recommended that there be a search and rescue based in St. John's, or as they put it, in the port nearest to the offshore. St. John's happens to be that port. The inquiry said it should be “provided by either government or industry”.
What happened over the years was that there was no dedicated helicopter provided for search and rescue. Rather, there was a standby helicopter that had to be reconfigured before it set off. This was important in the tragedy that occurred in March. Word came that a helicopter was in trouble, and then it very shortly afterward crashed, but a helicopter had to be reconfigured. That took 45 minutes, so it didn't leave the ground until 50 minutes after the word came in. The accident was 30 nautical miles offshore, which is about 45 kilometres. There was a 50-minute delay before the helicopter took off, and then it took 22 minutes to get to the scene, so it was about 76 minutes before it got there and was in a position to rescue.
The other thing I should mention--and I'll mention very quickly why this is important--is that my inquiries have led me to believe that our offshore waters are the most hostile in the offshore oil world. The North Sea is the nearest comparator, but our waters are colder than the North Sea because of the Labrador current. Because of the jet stream pulling in low-pressure systems, our winds tend to be consistently higher. Our waters are bitterly cold, the winds are high, and fog is frequent, so the whole panoply of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador offshore is, I believe, more dangerous than offshore areas elsewhere in the world because of natural conditions.
It means that we, in my opinion--and I've made this very clear in my report--need search and rescue that is second to none. As I learned more, and as I learned more about the North Sea, I began to learn that response times in the North Sea and elsewhere in the world--and interestingly, elsewhere in Canada, although we and Nova Scotia have the only offshores in Canada at this time--are a lot less than the hour we had. In the Gulf of Mexico, response times were 15 to 20 minutes instead of the hour that we had. It was because the helicopter as provided by the industry had to be reconfigured. This concerned me.
After reading what happened in other jurisdictions--not in every jurisdiction, because I tended to concentrate on the North Sea as the nearest comparator--and seeing the evidence that was laid before the inquiry about search and rescue times and what was possible, I became very concerned. I made an interim recommendation, which the terms of reference allowed me to do, in February of last year, 11 months ago. I recommended that although the inquiry was not finished, we should start right away to work toward a 15-minute to 20-minute response and a fully dedicated helicopter.
I must say that the C-NLOPB board rose to the occasion, and the oil operators rose to the occasion. I knew that it would take some time to do this, because a helicopter would have to be acquired--another S-92--in the circumstances. That took until July. To get to the 15-minute to 20-minute response time, there has to be a special hangar, and the helicopter has to be ready to go at all times. At the moment, we're down to half an hour, but when that hangar is constructed and everything is in place, we will be down to 15 minutes or 20 minutes.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee, for inviting us today.
I'm not as well known, obviously, as Mr. Wells, so I'll give you a 30-second brief history of who I am and what we do.
My name is Paul Clay. I have a company called Seacom International, and we're an emergency preparedness company located in St. John's, Newfoundland. We've been here for 15 years. About 70% of our business is related to oil and gas and marine, and the other 30% is mining, etc. In other words, they're large industries that operate in quite often remote and dangerous locations.
Because of that, we have a lot of insight into how emergency preparedness is managed in other countries--specifically, the physical response itself, be it by helicopter, by boat, or through a combination; how long it might take; what the standards or norms are in other countries; and how to interpret some of the information that one may look at from other countries, which can at times be very confusing. One may often see a response time of 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes, but there are reasons for those response times, so we have to keep a little bit of an open mind as we interpret the data.
That's enough about who we are.
What I'd like to do is move forward. What I'm going to talk about today and answer questions on.... As I said, we have a lot of information, but we can look at specific areas of the world—Australia, obviously Canada, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, Norway, the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and other countries where we've worked--where we have specific data and information about search and rescue response times. We can look at not only the actual time, but in a lot of cases the reasons those times exist.
Of course, one must always consider that a number of factors go into determining what a response time may be, one being the distance to the location where the response may be anticipated. Just to give you an example, in the oil and gas industry we're now operating more than 500 kilometres offshore. That's a long way. It substantially limits the time one might have on location to physically do a search and rescue operation. Helicopters can go only so far.
On the onshore side of Newfoundland and Labrador, we have extremely large projects operating in Labrador in remote locations. Projects coming, such as lower Churchill, for example, will, if they go ahead, have maybe 2,000 to 3,000 people and operate in very remote locations, with lots of helicopters and lots of potential for problems.
Again, when one considers search and rescue response times and physical locations of helicopters and all that sort of stuff, it's very important to look outwards and in, not necessarily inwards and out. In other words, maybe it's not what the Department of National Defence has to do or what the oil industry has to do, but what the needs are of the greater community that is expecting us to provide service to them--so 530 kilometres from Gander and some 435 kilometres from St. John's, which is a difference of about 40 minutes in response time if you look at dispatching a helicopter from St. John's or a helicopter from Gander.
There are a number of factors that must be considered when interpreting the data that we will give you today, such as the area of responsibility and how big it is. How big is the area that we must respond to? We have three aircraft in Gander, two of them operational, that have to respond to an enormous geographical area. There are the incident patterns: where do most of the problems occur? Are they marine? Are they terrestrial? Are they fishing boats? Are they oil industry? A fishing boat with a crew of five is five people who may have a problem. An oil and gas installation could have two people on board, and you could lose the installation in five minutes, so response times become critical. As the Honourable Mr. Wells has pointed out, two or three minutes in the waters of Newfoundland is a long time.
Is it a land versus marine response? What is the population to be protected? Is it one person, two hundred, a thousand? There is also the type of industry those services must be provided to, and there's the number of search and rescue assets, such as helicopters, that may or may not be available.
I do have specific data for each country. I'm not sure whether you would like me to address those now, very briefly....
:
Okay. I'll go through the physical response times very quickly, but again, bear in mind the points I made.
In Australia, as an example, search and rescue is governed, as in most countries, by the Department of Defence or the federal government. They have the mandate to respond, but there are no physical assets dedicated to the civil marine and oil and gas industries. They have search and rescue efforts of opportunity. In other words, if an emergency happens, they have some 60 fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft they can deploy to a given location, depending on what they are doing currently.
What does that mean? When they say they have a “wheels-up” time of 30 minutes, the time it takes to launch the helicopter, that's 30 minutes to find a civil aircraft and to launch that aircraft to a location, if one is available. However, the defence resources are not dedicated to oil and gas; they are dedicated to air force response, primarily when pilots are in training.
So the Australian Defence Force has a 30-minute wheels-up response time. Civil search and rescue units launch within five minutes to one hour; however, the five minutes is questionable, because it really depends on how the aircraft is configured and what that aircraft will do. Some of these search and rescue assets are not, as you might imagine, a Cougar helicopter or a helicopter from Gander or somewhere else, but they have five minutes to one hour. Others, in other parts of the country, launch in 15 minutes. Other oil and gas operators have no response times because there are no aircraft that can respond on their behalf. It's all done by aircraft of opportunity.
In the U.S.A. 30 minutes is the standard. If you're looking at the federal government, the United States Coast Guard, you're looking at a 30-minute response. They have 30 minutes to get up in the air. Then they have a number of hours to be physically on location. However, private industry also participates in search and rescue for marine operations. The Cougar is launched in operation in the Gulf of Mexico and has a response time of 20 minutes in the day and 45 minutes at night. Chevron has a fleet of some 17 helicopters that launch in 45 minutes day and night. However, they only can do medevacs; they can't do search and rescue and they can't fly at night, etc., so again one must consider all the factors when looking at these numbers.
With regard to Mexico, one would think that Mexico would have a terrible response infrastructure. There are some 5,000 people working on installations in two regions, meaning 10,000 in total, and there is a fleet of 27 helicopters to service them. None are equipped for search and rescue, so the military do that on their behalf, but their wheels-up time is 40 minutes, day and night. Their response requirements are somewhat limited because each installation has a doctor on board, so if there's an urgent medevac to be conducted, a doctor on board can physically attend to the patient much more than could be done in other areas.
In the United Kingdom, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency times are 15 minutes between 0800 and 2200 and 45 minutes between 2200 and 0800. Those assets, though, are now civil assets: the coast guard manages the operation, but the assets are owned by private helicopter companies. In many ways that type of operation is a lot easier to manage, because they don't have the restrictions that a federal department might.
:
Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our guests.
Mr. Wells, it's nice to finally get to speak to you in person after reading so much about you and the work that you've done. I think a lot of us appreciate what you've done over the past while. You gave us a great little précis of what you've worked on in the past year or so. As well, the speech was so good you brought the lights down. There you go; it was very good.
I want to ask you, though, and I want to generalize to a point where.... With regard to the situation that occurs offshore, Mr. Clay alluded earlier to the large number of people who work in the offshore industry. I appreciate that fact. When it comes to the Department of National Defence, there is a very broad area. It's what they call the SRR, the search and rescue region, as you know. There may be two fishermen in trouble on the northeast coast off Bonavista. There might be 200 people in trouble across Hibernia. Thousands of people travel the gulf every day. On my first time on the job in 2004, the first thing I heard about was a medevac in northern Labrador, in Nain. It's incredible. The fact that search and rescue is tasked to do medevac as well certainly makes it an intense place to be, as you've experienced, and as I have too.
What I want to know--and maybe you can allude to the North Sea example as a good comparator--is where the responsibility is for private industry, as opposed to the government resources of the Department of National Defence. In other words, where is DND's role when it comes to the offshore operations?
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I think the primary responsibility, certainly for first response, should be and is with the oil operators. To my understanding and from my visit to the North Sea, Norway, and the U.K., the oil operators are very much involved in first response.
With regard to the North Sea, you can approach an oil installation or a downed helicopter from both sides of the North Sea. There are various countries involved--Denmark, Norway, and the U.K. from the English, Scottish, and Shetlands sides--and there are helicopters on the installations, so you can get a quick convergence onto a disaster scene in the North Sea, more so than probably anywhere else in the world, and certainly more so than we can, because our helicopter can come from only one direction and we have no helicopters stationed offshore.
I see DND as being the backup. My understanding is that when things go wrong, it is DND out of the Halifax office in this region that has the primary responsibility to direct even the private SAR helicopter owned by the companies. As an example--
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If you want to be a “right honourable” at the Supreme Court, you have to speak both languages.
[Translation]
First, I would like to thank our guests for being here. I feel they gave a great presentation that will be useful to us.
I will first ask Mr. Wells some questions.
Mr. Wells, as members of Parliament, we are used to submitting our reports and recommendations to the government. We then expect the government to respond to our recommendations and give us an answer within a fairly reasonable timeframe.
If I am not mistaken, your commission of inquiry was set up to make recommendations to the C-NLOPB, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.
Could you tell me who is on the board of directors of this organization?
:
Yes, I consider it a very positive response; of the 29 recommendations, they accepted 27 and are going to work on putting them into effect.
Of the two that were not accepted, the 28th was about night flying. I agonized a lot over night flying. The reason I agonized was that statistics show that if an accident happens or a helicopter is forced to ditch at night, the fatality rate is much higher than if it happens in the day. Not only are you risking the lives of the passengers, but you're also risking the lives of the SAR technicians who are trying to rescue them. The whole risk is greater. At the same time, a bare-bones S-92 helicopter costs $20 million; fully equipped, it's $25 million. These are not cheap. Nobody would be expected to have several of them sitting around just in case a backlog occurred.
It's a really difficult problem, and I suggested a possible compromise. I suggested that a worker representative, a C-NLOPB representative, an oil operator representative, and a helicopter operator representative have a committee, and if it was imperative that there be night flying to clear up a backlog and if the weather and everything else were suitable, then they could authorize it. That's how I approached it.
The other recommendation, which C-NLOPB has not commented on but has submitted to the two governments, was that there should be a separate safety authority, as in the United Kingdom, in Norway, and in the United States. The presidential commission recently reported--on January 11, I think--and also recommended a separate safety agency.
The federal government has not said anything about that recommendation as yet, but the provincial government has announced that it's in favour of it.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both of the presenters.
First of all, Commissioner Wells, I want to thank you for your contribution to the whole issue of offshore safety. If our committee's recommendations, particularly on the speedy response time for the Cougar helicopter, were so readily accepted by Parliament, our committee would be a lot happier if we could have that kind of influence. That was a particularly important ruling, and one that was based on not only your seeing what happened in other places, but also on the imperative of getting there as fast as possible.
I think my colleagues know that I had standing at the inquiry as a party to ask questions of witnesses. One of the issues that came forward was the recognition that in this case the industry--Cougar--was the first responder. In other words, it didn't necessarily have the primary responsibility, but it was the first responder, the one that could get in the air first and be there first, because it was closer. That was the idea of being in St. John's.
In this Cougar helicopter crash, to use it as an example, there were two people in the water when the first responder arrived 76 minutes later. There were 18 people on the helicopter when it ditched. I suppose if it had been a more successful ditching, we would have had 18 people in the water.
Leaving aside the first responder, what's the importance of the second responder? What issues are related to the second responder? In this case DND has responsibility. What do you have to say about that?
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They lost control, whereas a ditching, to my mind, is a controlled alighting or landing on the water, which is not such a shock. This helicopter hit hard, and pieces came off everywhere, as we know. That's one aspect of it.
The difficulty is that helicopters in oceans usually turn over, and they turn over very rapidly, so a lot of training goes into survival, because if you are not trained in getting out of the helicopter, you're going to drown. If you have gone through the training--especially if you're physically fit, mentally strong, don't panic, know what to do, and have a plan as the ditching begins to take place--you have a much better chance of getting out of the helicopter.
To the best of my knowledge, most people involved in helicopter crashes are not killed in the crash. They drown. However, if they don't drown, they face a further ordeal, especially in our very hostile waters.
:
Thank you, Commissioner.
Mr. Clay, I noticed that you were reading from a document. I don't know if you have a written report that you might be able to submit to us afterwards, but if you can do that, it would be appreciated. I know you were cut short in terms of trying to give us the details of these operations.
You talked about the United Kingdom having a 15-minute response time from 0800 to 2200, which is ten o'clock at night. It's 45 minutes thereafter. A report done for the defence department shows that incidents are actually time sensitive. In fact, the 2004 report I have here says that with our 30-minute standby time from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and two hours, the number of incidents that occur during that period from Monday to Friday, which is our coverage, is 17%, but if you increase that to, let's say, the time we're talking about in the U.K.--from 0800 to 2200--in fact 74% of the incidents would be covered. In this case, the example given is seven days a week and 16 hours of coverage from 8:00 a.m. until midnight.
Did you get that kind of analysis in other countries, or is that something that is too detailed for you to talk about? I do see that you talk about evenings in some cases, and night and day. Are there stretches of time? Can you give us more detail?
:
I think we first have to clear up that there are different types of responses in different countries. In the U.K., there are four levels of response.
Her Majesty's Coastguard has the primary responsibility for all search and rescue, much the same as the Department of National Defence here in Canada. They have a response time of 15 minutes. The Royal Air Force also has four search and rescue aircraft, which are helicopters. They also have a response time of 15 minutes. They respond in a different way in different hours under different circumstances, and they are in different locations.
Then the oil companies, as Mr. Wells has already explained, have what they call Project Jigsaw, which is composed of dedicated search and rescue helicopters and extremely fast vessels that are the primary search and rescue means in the North Sea now. In fact, the helicopters are now the secondary means of search and rescue for the oil companies. The vessel that gets lowered, the fast rescue craft, is the primary means.
To answer your question, there is no simple answer to your question. It varies. There is no doubt that the quicker the response in the evening, the better, no matter where you are in the world.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to thank the panel for appearing today. It's a very important issue that we are talking about.
I certainly appreciate the work you have done on the commission, Mr. Wells. During your remarks, I was interested to hear you talk about training. I come from a petrochemical industry background, and training was of the utmost priority, particularly around safety, first aid, and responsible care practices.
I saw our industry as the primary responder to be able to meet those requirements in terms of emergency response, even including fires at our facility, so I would like to get your take on who has the responsibility in terms of the training. In particular, we're talking about the helicopter you mentioned and its passengers. Could you could elaborate on that point? Who has that responsibility?
:
The primary responsibility in this jurisdiction is that of the oil operators. The training is done in two places. The great majority of training is done in a place called Foxtrap, near St. John's, and it is under the aegis of the marine sciences department of the university. The training takes place there.
I did that training, which was very instructive, and Ms. Fagan did it also. The training is demanding, and it gives people like ourselves a grasp of what's involved. It's not easy.
There is training done in Halifax by a private company called Survival Systems, but most of the training is done here in Newfoundland. It's done every three years. You update every three years. When I was in the North Sea, I was interested to find that their training is every four years. Our experts pretty well all said it should be more frequent even than two years, but you have to be careful because you don't want to cause injury to the trainees, so you walk a fine line. You don't want to drown anybody or anything like that, and you don't want to put them into water that is too cold, because somebody who may not be strong or who does not have a strong heart may die. There's a fine balance to be achieved, but I think physical fitness, training, and familiarity with water--especially cold water--is a help.
The survivor of the crash that we had, Robert Decker, was a young man of about 26 or 27. He was in good shape. He had been a sailing instructor in small sailing boats for years. He was familiar with tipping over and being under the boat and in cold water. My own opinion, and perhaps the opinion of others also, is that his background helped him, because he didn't panic and lose his head when he found himself in a helicopter that was sinking on its side.
He didn't panic. He was knocked out, shall we say, at the instant, but he came to quite rapidly; the helicopter was sinking because all the windows and doors were knocked aside in the crash, and the water was literally going up through the fuselage of the helicopter and up through the windows on top. It was sinking sideways. He looked up and saw the open window. He didn't panic and he got up to the surface. He is, of course, the only one who did. There was another young lady who was found on the surface, but she was deceased. I don't know any more than that about the circumstances in her case. Perhaps the Transportation Safety Board may.
I think training, fitness, and familiarity with cold water are assets for anybody in a ditched helicopter in our waters.
I was born on the northeast coast of Newfoundland and grew up close to these cold waters. I have some knowledge of cold water. When I say cold, I mean cold. These waters are cold because of the Arctic Labrador current.
Commissioner Wells and Mr. Clay, thank you for your presentations. I share the view of my colleagues that it's been very interesting. I'm from New Brunswick, and the regional Atlantic media have shown your commission's deliberations, including the rather dramatic day that the survivor went to testify. That really marked our imagination.
Commissioner Wells, I wonder if you have any simple recommendations on federal government assets that are available in search and rescue. Obviously the helicopters or the aircraft are key parts of this. This morning we had an interesting discussion with the coast guard. They have a critical role as well. Could you offer a wish list to this committee or to the Government of Canada of the changes that could be made to improve what I think is a phenomenal service already? The brave men and women in that service do phenomenal work.
It comes down to resources. I acknowledge that from the outset. If there were additional resources that could be found or changes that could be made, how would you go about improving this outstanding service? Take the discussion of night flight. There is a 30-minute standby that exists in certain air assets during the day. Maybe you could just flip that around. If the risk at night is so much higher, why wouldn't you have a 30-minute standby from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., and then have a two-hour standby during the day? For a whole bunch of logistical and resource reasons, that's not simple, but what kind of things like that might you suggest?
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From my perspective, it's simple. The intention of search and rescue times is to save lives, and the intention of those resources is to save lives.
Canada's two-hour response is the longest in the world, as far as I know. In my opinion, it is grossly where it shouldn't be. We should lower those times. Irrespective of the cost or the resources required, we should lower those times and provide a rapid response, irrespective of whether they have to go offshore or onshore.
I also believe there is a case to be made for not necessarily eliminating resources in Gander, but having another resource located in St. John's. That would be my opinion.
:
There hasn't been one on pooling resources, but when, during this commission, the issue of a closer liaison between DND and the oil operators' helicopter operator and first response provider came up, I recommended a formal protocol if DND was prepared to enter into one, and I think there can be closer cooperation.
I'll tell you a little anecdote that came up as surprise to me, but a very happy surprise. I spoke to the International Regulators Offshore Safety conference in Vancouver back in the fall, and I was talking to an industry representative from Nova Scotia. He told me that after my letters to Mr. Ruelokke on improving the response time and the dedicated helicopter went around the industry--in this area, at any rate--they began to think about it. Whereas they had flown without reference to DND, after the letter they started thinking about it.
They only have one helicopter in their fleet in Nova Scotia. They worked out an informal system whereby, if they are going to fly, they first get in touch with DND. They tell them they want to fly today, tomorrow, or whatever, and they ask them what resources they have. I was told--and this person was in a position to know--that if DND does not have the resources available, they don't fly. However, DND is alerted that they're going to fly, and there's this liaison. Two or three of my recommendations talk about a closer liaison between DND and the private or oil operators' helicopter operator.