Patrick Weiler says Canada’s seven-year-old abandoned vessel law is in need of a refresh to ensure reckless ship owners are being held accountable.

The B.C. Liberal MP has tabled a private members’ bill that would require sellers to ensure that prospective purchasers have the resources and capacity to take care of a ship, boat or other marine-craft.

He said it’s needed because too many ship owners are selling aging vessels for basically nothing to get around their legal requirements to safely dispose of them.

In some cases, an owner will sell their boat or ship to an unhoused person for as little as $1, eluding their legal responsibilities but creating a host of environmental and safety risks for seaside communities, especially in B.C., said Weiler.

“In many cases, someone is just looking for a roof over their head, and then if something goes wrong, they don’t have the resources to actually dispose of it properly. So, it’s really taking advantage of people in a vulnerable situation that has major risks to the community writ large,” he said.

“This bill is going to require people to take extra steps to to ensure that you’re going to mitigate the risk of that, and fits into a whole separate series of measures we’re doing to address the issue, where so now you can’t abandon your boat.”

Back in 2019, the Liberal government passed Canada’s first-ever law to penalize people for improperly disposing marine vessels. Under the law, individuals could face fines up to $50,000, while corporations could be on the hook for as much as $250,000.

More serious offences come with maximum fines of $1 million for individuals and $6 million for corporations.

To avoid these penalties, owners can dispose of their vessels by sending them to dumping them at scrap yards or sending them to specific boat recycling facilities. This can cost anywhere from the low hundreds to a few thousand dollars.

Weiler said recent improvements to the registration system for boat owners will work in tandem with his bill, but also called for funding for a “proper vessel disposal system” for cases when the owner can’t be tracked down.

He noted that recent storms in Vancouver have led to a flurry of vessels washing up on shore, where they’ll sit for months on end without removal.

Ottawa has created a fund to dispose of abandoned vessels with no known owner, though it’s limited to those located on properties under the purview of federal small craft harbours. The Abandoned and Wrecked Vessels Removal Program has an annual budget of $250,000.

A broader $6.4 million federal program launched in 2017 has had its funding lapse.

Weiler’s bill passed at second reading in February with support from the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, New Democrats and four Conservative MPs.

Three of those represented coastal ridings on Vancouver Island, where Weiler said abandoned vessels are a very visible problem. Ontario MP Jacob Mantle was the other Conservative MP to vote in favour.

For the Conservatives, the main criticism centres on how the bill would be implemented, and specifically what steps the owner would have to take to determine if the purchaser had the resources necessary to take over the vessel.

B.C. Conservative MP Ellis Ross credited Weiler’s intent in introducing the bill, but worried that it could create a “legal mess.”

“I do not know how a buyer would ensure that the new owner could actually maintain a boat. We do not do that with vehicles or anything else,” he said during second reading debate in February.

“It is going to be interesting to see how the government or the regulator would ensure that that happens. I can see it being a legal mess. I can see it going before the courts. Unless there are some provisions that would come out in the regulations later to show the steps that a seller would have to take to ensure that the buyer is not reckless.”

Weiler said this could be remedied by requiring disclosures from the seller on the state of the vessel and the buyer on their ability to take care of it. While it would fall short of definitive proof, he said it would would create more steps in the process that would help “mitigate the risk” of dubious sales.

As for the bill, Weiler said he’d be open to amendments during clause-by-clause review that could help address these concerns from the opposition.

That would likely happen in the fall as the House has powered down for the summer recess.

In the last week of the spring sitting, Weiler appeared at the House environment committee in what will likely be the only meeting hearing from witnesses about the one-page bill.

The bill also seeks to clarify that dumping into Canada’s waters is a strict liability offence, meaning the courts would no longer have to prove intent. 

Weiler said this is a response to how courts are interpreting the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, referencing the legal saga involving the MV Marathassa, which dumped 2,700 litres of oil into Vancouver’s English Bay in 2015.

The operator was acquitted of a charge under the act in 2019 because the court found the law was designed to only prosecute deliberate disposals in Canadian waters, not unintentional discharges. 

Weiler called the court’s interpretation a “big shift in what the original intent of the legislation was,” and said it made it very challenging to successfully prosecute spills from vessels.

For strict liability offences, the prosecution only needs to prove the accused committed the act. Once that’s been proven, the accused can only argue they took all reasonable measures to prevent the act from taking place, known as the due diligence defence.

The operator of the MV Marathassa successfully used this defence for a charge laid under the Canada Shipping Act. The court found there was no way for the crew to identify a defect in the vessel blamed for the spill.