Candian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St. Laurent.
Photograph by: Handout, Postmedia News
OTTAWA — The Canadian Coast Guard lacks the training, equipment and management systems to fulfil its duties to respond to offshore pollution incidents such as oil spills, an internal audit reveals.
The audit paints a sobering picture of an agency that would play a key role in Canada's response to a major oil spill off the world's longest coastline. In the event of a spill leaking from a ship, as occurred in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska, the Coast Guard would be the lead federal agency in the cleanup efforts.
However, the audit found that Coast Guard employees are trained on an "ad hoc, regional basis," with no national training strategy. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard is relying on aging equipment — the operating status of which it is unable to track — and management controls are "either out-of-date, not functioning or not in place."
"As such, assurance cannot be provided that the conditions exist to enable (environmental-response) services to be provided in a national consistent manner," states the audit, which was completed just over a month before an explosion at BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico unleashed the biggest offshore oil spill in history this spring.
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