July 23, 2024

Two “rights” make a “wrong” – support reinstating the CanBoat / CPS flare collection program with your letter to Canada’s Minister of Transportation. It’s urgent that the boating industry and Canada’s boaters together, push our government to come up with a solution for the problem of disposing of the expired pyrotechnic flares that many boaters are required by law, to carry.
 
Pyrotechnic distress flares are proven as the most effective way to summon help when a ship or a boater is in distress. Flares have proven their value time and time again. The government is right to require boaters to carry flares. The environmentalists are also right that these pyrotechnic distress flares have the potential to do significant environmental damage unless they’re disposed of properly. So, it’s “right” to carry flares and it’s “right” to dispose of them properly but it’s “wrong” that the government has not facilitated making safe disposal widely accessible across Canada.
 
Regular Boating Industry Canada News Week Digest readers know that we have been talking about this situation for several weeks now. What first prompted the discussion was when we learned that Transport Canada had decided not to renew the funding for the distress flare collection and disposal program that has been run through CanBoat / CPS-ECP the Canadian Power and Sail Squadrons in cooperation with CIL Explosives.

It was a very successful program that had been running for a decade and collected some 200,000 expired flares over that time.
 
Funding this program was clearly a “right”. About $100,000 of funding had been provided on an annual basis and that amount mostly covered shipping, 60% of the cost of disposal of flares and other operating costs like insurance.
 
It was certainly right to support CanBoat because as a national volunteer organization operating in both English and French, the many Flare Collection days that CanBoat held, made it much more accessible for Canadians to dispose of their expired flares than any other program. Boaters are not allowed to just fire these flares off without a genuine emergency, they cannot be thrown in the trash, and certainly not thrown in the water!
 
It should be noted that Federal regulations require the companies who produce these flares to provide disposal services, but the government’s requirements are not specific about how that is accomplished.
 
After an extensive program of outreach through all our publications and media, what we’ve discovered is that there is no consistent policy and no other widespread program in the country to collect expired flares except the CanBoat program.
 
Some marine chandleries do this for their own customers but those are localized solutions. CIL Orion is not the only source of distress flares in Canada. Other brands on the market include Comet and Paynes Wessex and as Canadian regulations require, these companies will also take back their own brand of expired flares for disposal, but you have to know where to take your flares and who to return them to.

The beauty of the arrangement between CanBoat and CIL Orion was that CanBoat volunteers would accept reasonable numbers of flares for disposal from any boater, without regard to the brand of flare being returned.

Here’s what we ask you to do: click here to print out the attached letter that is addressed to:

The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Transport.

TC.MinisterofTransport-MinistredesTransports.TC@tc.gc.ca

We need as many industry members and Canadian boaters as possible, to let them know how important this program is and that it should be reinstated as soon as possible. After several weeks of investigation and discussion on the part of this publication, we have not located any other national source for recycling expired distress flares and the problem grows every year.

Our thanks for your support!

Andy Adams – Editor