Heritage Wreck legislation, revisions to the Canadian Shipping Act
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Heritage Wreck legislation, revisions to the Canadian Shipping Act
What is the general consensus of the revisions to the Canadian Shipping act with respect to the Heritage Wreck legislation? I curious too how it's been received in other parts of the Country and outside.
Looking for answers to the two following questions
1. Is this a good thing YES or NO?
2. What country are you from?
The Heritage Wreck regulations have not been formulated yet. Transport Canada and Parks Canada have put out a discussion paper and are looking for public consultation. *IF* anything gets decided - it won't be until next spring and the regulations may not be formulated until 2006.
Correct you are. I just came from our meeting in Nova Scotia this morning and wanted to see where the rest of the country and other countries stood on this subject.
JK
Canada is making changes to its Canada Shipping Act which controls most maritime activities, including salvage laws. One of the changes its to adopt federal standards for heritage wreck management. Many provinces have laws protecting wrecks but there is no country wide standard.
It sounds like a good starting point to me. The government is finally trying to clarify it's roll in deciding who can dive what, it makes an attempt to embody some kind of definition for certain wrecks and it mentions both explicitly and in intent that they want to get along with divers.
If you ask me this is long overdue but in practice it probably won't differ significantly from the defacto situation today. As it is the Canadian government claims ownership of everything underwater and in principle you need to ask to dive and/or salvage it.
On the positive side this legislation protects sites with possible archeological value until they can be reasearched. Furthermore, it allows for either prohibiting or allowing diving depending on the intrinsic value of the site. So let's face it. Some sites need protecting and the ones that don't aren't going to be a problem.
On the less than positive side it makes some blanket definitions that could encompass much more than the spirit of the hertitage act intends and/or exclude things that really should have been included. The Edmund Fitzgerald, for example, wouldn't be considered a heritage site by this definition even though it's one of Canada's ship-wreck icons..... To me the definition is too sloppy to be of much use in practice.
An on the really negative side the permit system won't work in the long run because of the overhead it creates and the costs it will entail to hold a permit. This need a serious reworking for a real-world solution.
All in all. Nice idea. Not much real change as compared to today and a sloppy bit of work on definitions and the permit process.
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