PORT and MARITIME SECURITY
Canadian facilities better protected
after decade of security upgrades
By MARK CARDWELL
May 10, 2010
Chris Badger wasn’t the only person who loved eating at The Cannery. Located in a leased waterfront building in Vancouver’s port area for the past 39 years, it served world-famous seafood that was praised by culinary experts and earned it a No. 2 ranking among the city’s 1,630 restaurants on Trip Advisor.
“It was one of my favourite places,” said Capt. Badger, chief operating officer at Port Metro Vancouver and a well-known figure in Canadian marine circles. “I had many great times there.”
All that ended on March 27, however, when The Cannery shut its doors for good. “It’s sad,” Capt. Badger said about the closure, which resulted from the construction of a perimeter fence and the putting in place of several other post-9/11 security measures that ended unrestricted public access to the landmark restaurant. Despite being given three years’ notice that their lease would not be renewed after the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, The Cannery’s owners were reportedly unable to find a suitable spot to relocate and chose instead to close the business.
“We tried to keep them on the waterfront,” Capt. Badger said. “But we couldn’t offer them the quiet conditions they used to enjoy (and) we told them security at the port is going to increase, not lessen. Their decision was a loss for the community but it was likely best for them.”
The Cannery’s demise is a good example, too, of the growing pains that many ports across Canada – plus the people, places and partners who rely on them – continue to experience as they learn to live and work according to the myriad of new and proposed security regulations, guidelines, procedures and tools designed to thwart potential seaborne threats and to protect Canada’s reputation as a safe and secure international maritime trading nation.
And while those changes have forever altered the way in which business is conducted in and around Canada’s ports, marine experts and industry stakeholders agree that the benefits of having more secure facilities has vastly outweighed the inconveniences – at least so far.
“The simple truth in today’s world,” said Gary LeRoux, executive director of the Association of Canadian Port Authorities, “is that if you’re not safe, you’re not going to trade.”
To be sure, when it comes to port and maritime security, the stakes are high for Canada. In any given year, roughly 40 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product is shipped abroad by vessel. In 2007, a record year, 17 ports run by Canada Port Authorities handled some 300 million tonnes of cargo worth roughly $162 billion. That represented more than 90 per cent of the seaborne commerce that went through all of Canada’s 549 ports and harbours on three oceans and on large navigable waterways such as the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
“The sea is a major lifeline for Canada’s economy,” Mr. LeRoux said. “And ports are the eye in the needle. They need to be secure and be seen to be secure.”
It is, of course, a mammoth task to keep track of the comings and goings of the tens of thousands of international and domestic commercial vessels – plus fishing and recreational vessels – that visit Canadian ports each year and sail along the nation’s 243,000-kilometre-long coastline, the longest in the world. Unlike airports, for example, where passengers and cargo can be more easily screened and their movements controlled, ports represent a far more complicated security challenge.
“Water ports are tough places to watch,” said Damian Stoilov, director of marketing and business development with MacDonnell Security Risk Management, a Halifax-based company that helps ports to secure their facilities by providing federally approved risk management, training and integrated maritime security services. “There are a myriad of risks and variables that need to be considered.”
MacDonnell organizes the annual PortSecure conference in Canada. This year’s event is being held in Vancouver May 26-28.
In previous decades, port security across Canada was provided by a hodgepodge of port, municipal, provincial and federal police forces and government agencies that varied in make-up from location to location. In Vancouver, for example, the disbanding of the port police following the implementation of the Canada Marine Act in the 1990s led to agreements that gave municipal police jurisdiction over the port for local interdiction, while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police ensured national security co-ordination.
“It wasn’t an ideal situation,” recalled Capt. Badger, who spent 14 years at sea before joining the Vancouver Port Authority in 1988. He then spent four years as director of operations and harbour master at the Port of Nanaimo before returning to Vancouver as harbour master, eventually joining the port’s executive team in 2001. “Security wasn’t well co-ordinated (and) there was jurisdictional infighting,” he said.
Efforts to address those concerns gathered steam with the rapid growth of the cargo and cruise ship industries and the recognition of Canadian ports as international facilities. However, the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, immediately transformed port security into a scorching front-burner issue for decision-makers and stakeholders at all levels of the marine industry.
“Before 9/11, security was fifth or sixth on the hit parade,” Mr. LeRoux said. “After that, it was number one for the next five years – and it’s still one of the top two or three, depending on the day. Security now trumps trade. The link between security and competitiveness is critical.”
From the get-go, there were intense efforts to establish an international framework of co-operation among governments, government agencies and the shipping and port industries to safeguard ships and port facilities used in international trade. Notably, it took the International Maritime Organization, which needed more than a decade to pass a treaty dealing with oil pollution from ships, just a year to ratify a new International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code.
“The speed of the process was groundbreaking,” recalled the British-born Capt. Badger, who went to London as a member of the Transport Canada team and participated in the IMO meetings that produced the ISPS. “It was quite clear that the U.S. was going to make it happen come hell or high water. If anyone objected to a provision, the American delegates would literally swarm that person.”
The new protocol, which Canada, an ISPS signatory, adopted and brought into operation here with its Marine Transport Security Regulations (MTSR), set out a plethora of specific security requirements and standards for ports and ships around the world. Failure to comply could result in ships from those ports and countries being refused entry into other international facilities.
Not surprisingly, by the time the ISPS came into force worldwide on July 1, 2004, all of Canada’s major ports had already put in place – or were in the process of doing so – any number of security measures, from the construction of perimeter fences and increased lighting and signage to the introduction of card-only access control points and round-the-clock security coverage and electronic surveillance of port terminals, roadways, railways and waterways.
Since then, several other security measures have been deployed, including advanced gamma ray container screening, radiation portal programs at container terminals, and 100-per-cent passenger and baggage screening at cruise ship terminals. According to Transport Canada, the federal government has spent more than $1 billion to bolster marine security – roughly $100 million of which has been paid to ports to reimburse them for up to 70 per cent of the costs of ISPS-required investments.
“The funds were spent and will be spent on projects and programs to improve marine security in Canada,” Transport Canada replied in an email on the subject, “including measures to protect marine infrastructure, increase surveillance of maritime traffic, improve Canada’s capability to respond to emergency situations, improve resiliency, minimize any disruptions to trade, and enhance interdepartmental co-ordination.”
Since 2007, the email continued, the department has also been leading a working group and consulting maritime stakeholders as part of a comprehensive review of the MTSR that has led to several amendment proposals and recommendations “to address issues and lessons learned since 2004, clarify regulatory requirements and, where possible, harmonize with the United States and other international partners.”
Meanwhile, the Marine Transportation Security Clearance Program, the program mandated to undertake mandatory background security checks on port employees who perform certain duties or who have access to certain restricted areas has been fully implemented in all ports under Transport Canada’s authority since Dec. 15, 2008, said Maryse Durette, a senior media relations adviser with Transport.
Transport Canada is committed to continuing to monitor and assess the effectiveness and composition of the program as it matures, she said.
According to Capt. Badger, one of the most significant developments in recent years has been a more collective approach to security in Canadian ports. “I think that’s been the most useful change,” he said.
Capt. Badger also lauded the development and teaching of specialized training courses – such as how and where to report incidents and suspicious activities – for all levels of port personnel, from security officers and senior management to terminal operators and dockworkers.
“You can have the best technology and security systems in the world, but it ultimately comes down to people,” said Capt. Badger, who credits the co-ordination “among everybody at all levels” for the success of three major pre-Olympic exercises – aptly dubbed Gold, Silver and Bronze – held in Port Metro Vancouver in 2009.
Michel Juneau-Katsuya agrees. A retired RCMP officer and one-time Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent who is now an ISPS-certified private contractor in Ottawa, he helped several Canadian ports to assess their security needs and to devise and implement plans to meet ISPS standards.
“When it comes to port security, training people to be observant provides the most bang for the buck,” he told Canadian Sailings. “The increased control and monitoring of ship movement in and between ports is also good.”
According to Mr. Juneau-Katsuya, the biggest fear in intelligence circles after 9/11 was the realization that cargo ships, cruise ships – “even ferries and bridges” – were vulnerable to attacks that could paralyze and even cripple the national economy of a sea-trading nation such as Canada.
“Fortunately, al Qaeda has not strategically engaged infrastructure using ships and containers,” he said. “Why? Likely because ports are semi-isolated from cities, and the damages from even a major bomb blast would be limited. It would also require a lot of knowledge to mount a successful operation like that.”
Instead, Mr. Juneau-Katsuya considers the biggest seaborne threat to be the use of ships to bring people and weapons into Canada – and to smuggle potentially dangerous or stolen materials out. “I think organized crime poses a bigger threat to port security than terrorists do,” he said.
For his part, Capt. Badger sees enhanced port security as posing a threat of its own: cutting off community access to cherished waterfront spots such as The Cannery.
“Part of the joy of being a port city is that people can be near the water and see ships come in,” he said, adding that Port Metro Vancouver has tried to set up small parks in areas that do not require port security. “Ships are fun.”
Though the money Canada has spent pales to the US$1 billion the United States has doled out for port security since 9/11, Mr. LeRoux said he is “pleased” with both the level of funding and the extent to which the federal government “has reached out to us” in an effort to get input.
“We’ve managed to nail the front door shut,” he said. “Our ports are now among the safest in the world.”
But Mr. LeRoux thinks more needs to be done to shore up waterside security. “The back door is banging open from time to time,” he said. “We need a national approach to solve that problem. We don’t want to have a situation where everything gets shut down like it did with mad cow. We don’t want port security to become a weapon in trade.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. has proposed legislation to “push out” its borders by submitting, within the next few years, all containers to X-ray screening before they are shipped into the country.
“The technology to do this on such a huge scale doesn’t even exist yet,” Mr. LeRoux said about the new measure, which would be proceeded by a data gathering and reporting system enabling risk assessments to be carried out even before goods are shipped from overseas to the U.S. and Canada. Trade experts predict Canada will adopt similar measures to stay in lockstep with its largest trading partner.
“But there is a lockdown mentality in the U.S. This is a concern we must be mindful and careful of,” Mr. LeRoux said.
For the executive director of the Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association, the bottom line on security is a question of dollars and sense.
“Security of people is a government’s highest duty (so) the screening and targeting of data, though expensive and time consuming, is not an unreasonable request,” Ruth Snowden said.
Ms. Snowden, who along with representatives of several of her association’s 238 member companies, has spent hundreds of hours on government-run working groups to develop initiatives designed to electronically link manifest information among all transport modes and submit it to customs.
“But 100-per-cent cargo screening is not feasible or reasonable,” she said. “It should be seen as a non-tariff barrier to trade.”