Imagine driving up the Sea to Sky Highway and seeing abandoned car after abandoned car littering the sides of the road.
If it weren’t due to a shoot for a doomsday movie, most of us would find that highly unacceptable.
And yet, effectively, that is what the coast of B.C. is like, with abandoned boats.
Why the difference?
Well, let’s say there’s an abandoned car on the side of Highway 99: there is a pretty quick and efficient path to having it removed.
“If the abandoned vehicle is in any part of a lane or in the way of snow removal equipment, it’s a danger to traffic and will be towed immediately,” reads the provincial government’s TranBC site.
Now, if that vehicle on the highway isn’t blocking traffic, police will post a notice on it, alerting the owner that it will be towed within 72 hours.
“If the vehicle is burned out, severely damaged or otherwise unsalvageable, it is towed directly from the road to a scrapyard, and the owners are advised that they are responsible for towing and disposal costs.”
Simple, right?
Of course, there are exceptions, like on the lot near Marine Estates, where cars sat for months, if not years, on a lot owned by the provincial government.
But generally speaking, abandoned cars in high-trafficked areas are dealt with tout de suite.
The situation with abandoned boats, as we have seen with the abandoned pleasure craft at Porteau Cove Provincial Park, is much slower and more complicated.
The result is unsightly and causes real damage to our marine environment.
There are layers of jurisdiction and bureaucracy; the result is that a derelict boat, possibly deliberately damaged and abandoned, went from being easy to retrieve from the provincial park beach, with zero pollution, to a broken-up vessel that was carrying fuel and other contaminants under the water for close to a month, under a pier visited by tourists, locals and campers. (It was removed July 15.)
We need the same urgency to remove these boats, given to derelict cars on the side of Highway 99.
Since 2019, with the passage of Bill C-64 it has been illegal to abandon a boat in Canada.
Some of the problem seems to be identifying who owns found boats, but there is also jurisdictional confusion at times, as local John Buchanan found.
The problem is also overwhelming. The Coast Guard has a list of close to 1,500 abandoned vessels.
We don’t have all the answers, but what is happening now clearly isn’t working well.
Thus, our shoreline is akin to a post-apocalyptic movie set.
None of us should be OK with that.
