Our Organization

The Canadian coast guard

Our mission is the excellence in marine services

• Special Operating Agency
• Fundamental Responsibilities
• Our clients
• Diversified Resourses
• Main Areas of Activities
• Future Prospects

Special Operating Agency

The Canadian Coast Guard has become a Special Operating Agency (SOA), while remaining an active member of  Fisheries and Oceans Canada. As a SOA, it will help maintain, for the benefit of all Canadians, a safe,  accessible maritime transportation system that is both secure and sustainable. The Canadian Coast Guard is a national institution found on the creativity, commitment and innovation necessary to ensure excellent services and to visibly attest to Canada's influence over its waters and its coasts.

The legal foundation of the Canadian Coast Guard's is provided for in the Oceans Act and in the Canada Shipping Act.

Fundamental Responsabilities

The Coast Guard regulates shipping movement along the St. Lawrence; provides, operates and maintains fixed and floating navigational aids; and provides icebreaking and flood-control services. It also undertakes marine search and rescue missions; responds to pollutant spills; and monitors the channel of the St. Lawrence waterway. As well, it provides commercial shippers with essential information such as the presence of shoals and ice conditions to ensure their safe transit. Finally, it ensures boaters safety, protects the marine environment. It shares several of these mandates with numerous partners, such as Transport Canada, the Transportation Safety Board and Environment Canada.

These activities are all closely tied to the St. Lawrence, which crosses the entire Quebec Region and contains 225 km of dredged channels, dotted with many natural obstacles and subject to tide and sometimes unpredictable currents. Although covered in ice from December to April, the St. Lawrence, stretching 1 600 km from the Atlantic to Montréal, remains passable 12 months a year. Some 20 000 ship movements are recorded each year between Sept Îles and Montréal. More than 55 000 pleasure craft ply the waterways of Quebec, and the Coast Guard receives 1 300 calls for help every year. There is also intense harbour activity.

Our clients

The Canadian Coast Guard serves a broad clientele, one that has varied and at times competing interests. When planning its services, it must take these diversified interests into account so as to ensure that each of its clientele is adequately served. Our clients include:

• the general public
• the commercial marine community (carriers, port authorities, pilots)
• ferry operators
• commercial fishers
• recreational boaters
• shoreline communities
• federal government departments

Diversified Resources

In the Quebec Region, the Coast Guard has a variety of equipment reflecting the diversity of its activities, in particular:

• three river icebreakers
• one light icebreaker/buoytender
• one buoytender ice strengthened
• two inshore patrol boats
• three survey vessels
• one coastal trawler for scientific research
• two hovercraft
• a number of other craft fitted out for search and rescue, fisheries patrols or inshore scientific research missions
• eight helicopters

In addition, the Coast Guard is present throughout Quebec:

• a base in Québec
• a base in Sorel
• a hoverport in Trois Rivières
• four Marine Communications and Traffic Services centres (in Rivière au Renard, Les Escoumins, Québec and Longueuil)
• a marine search and rescue co-ordination centre
• five rescue stations
• six seasonal rescue stations strategically located between Trois Rivières and Valleyfield
• there are also pollution control equipment depots in a number of municipalities along the shore, depending on the assessed risk, in addition to its private sector partners’ depots

Main Areas of Activity

The buoyage of waterways, including the Saguenay, Richelieu and Ottawa Rivers, involves installing and removing nearly 2 000 summer and winter buoys each year, maintaining a system of visual and electronic aids on shore and operating land-based reference centres deploying a satellite based differential global positioning system (DGPS).

Helicopter and icebreaker patrols, as well as video images from cameras, radars or satellites, enable the Ice Management Centre to supervise the movement and concentration of ice from Cabot Strait right up to Montréal.

Icebreakers clear ice as necessary to prevent flooding due to ice jams, which could form at any time, in particular on Lake St. Pierre and in the Montréal and Québec regions. They also facilitate the passage of commercial ships, escorting vessels if necessary.

Marine Communications and Traffic Services centres manage ship traffic as far as Montréal and are constantly monitoring distress frequencies. They broadcast information on weather and navigation conditions as well as safety notices. In an emergency, the Secondary Marine Rescue Centre in Québec co-ordinates search and rescue operations. In addition, the five rescue bases and six summer sub-bases, which have specialized watercraft, remain in readiness.

As marine accidents may occur and lead to pollutant spills, the Coast Guard develops standards for environmental emergency planning and approves private companies’ plans. It also monitors spill response operations and takes action when shipowners fail to take the appropriate measures to limit the damage.

The Coast Guard is also active in promoting boating safety for pleasure boaters, and establishes partnerships for that purpose, in particular with the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Conseil québécois du nautisme. Futhurmore, the Coast Guard promotes new regulations for boating safety to be phased in until 2009.

Future Prospects

Throughout its long history, the Coast Guard has been able to adapt to many technological and socioeconomic changes while continuing to provide quality service to the marine community. It will continue to do so, in particular by implementing new, state-of-the-art ways of providing services, relying on partnerships and taking maximum advantage of new positioning and data transmission technologies. In particular, in partnership with a number of scientific institutions, the Coast Guard is developing a new area of activity: research support aimed at optimizing its current fleet profile. This new activity will not however affect its ability to support the economy by facilitating the shipping trade.