OTTAWA - Environment Canada has mothballed some of the world's most advanced equipment for dealing with oil spills, tracking submarines and monitoring Arctic sea ice.
Even as the auditor general's office chides the government for taking an antiquated, piecemeal approach to dealing with oil spills, officials have let their state-of-the-art technology languish in a hangar on the outskirts of Ottawa, former staffers say.
At issue are two airplanes equipped with lasers, radar technology and other remote-sensing tools that have been developed by Canadian researchers over three decades.
They haven't flown for a year, and in September last year Environment Canada quietly shut down the program that oversaw the planes.
"Environment Canada did an analysis and determined that it was more cost effective for us to lease the aircraft we need in order to do this kind of work rather than to own and manage our own planes," a spokesman for the department said in an email response to questions.
"There are other commercially available planes and equipment."
The mothballed planes are old, but it's not the planes themselves that are important for the government's monitoring of the environment, former staffers say. Rather, it's the equipment inside the planes.
"It's not the planes. It's the instruments that are in them," said Merv Fingas, who ran the program until he retired in 2006.
The aircraft serve as a platform for technology that has monitored oil, pollution, bug infestations, birds, ice and submarines, and served to support Canada's space and satellite programs.
One of the planes, a Convair 580, is equipped with radar that could map and measure even the smallest changes in the earth's geography -- helpful in mapping flood plains, predicting crop growth, and detailing rugged and remote areas, including the Arctic.
The other plane, a DC3, has a unique capacity to detect and confirm oil spills in any conditions -- in the dark, in the ice, on the shore, on land and on the ocean.
"It's just endless what these things can do," said Bryan Healey, the former head pilot for both planes. "You've got the best equipment in the world. And yet it sits in a hangar in Ottawa."
Healey tells of the time in 2006 when the Queen of the North ferry sank off the coast of British Columbia. Fuel oil was spilling out of the sunken boat, and Healey's team -- working nearby on an unrelated project -- figured their expertise could help in the cleanup.
When they arrived, they found two tugboats dragging a boom to scoop up spilled fuel. But the technology on board Healey's plane showed his crew immediately where the fuel was, and they could see clearly what the tug boats couldn't: they were cleaning up already-clean water.
"They had no idea where the pollution was and no support for doing so," Healey said. "We could have given them real-time information and provided valuable assistance in the cleanup, but (were) never tasked."
Both Healey and Fingas, as well as other former government insiders, say Environment Canada never fully appreciated how useful the technology in the two planes could be -- not just for environmental emergencies, but also for defence, Arctic sovereignty, space research, and a wide range of other scientific efforts.
"It is this lack of inter-departmental communication," said Ron Cleminson, the former head of the arms-control verification program at the Foreign Affairs Department.
"One department has the need, and the other department can solve the need, but they don't do it."
Cleminson knows the Convair 580 well, and values its potential to monitor the Arctic, in all weather conditions, for foreign intrusions and environmental risks. But he sees the federal government preferring a big splash, spending billions on a new Arctic strategy instead of maintaining and making use of the world-class technology they already have.
Healey also notes that the Convair is uniquely equipped with radar that can determine whether Arctic sea ice is the extra-thick multi-year ice that is impossible for ships to deal navigate through.
Fingas is concerned, too, that without maintaining the technology housed in the two planes, Canada won't be prepared to handle a major oil spill one day. The DC3 can detect and identify oil during the day as well as the night, on land and in the water -- unlike other instruments that only work in the day and can't positively identify oil, and don't work well over land.
Research and development also allowed researchers to use the DC3 to measure the thickness of an oil spill -- a discovery that Fingas says would have been the "holy grail" of oil clean-ups had it been properly funded and commercialized.
There's no question that if the equipment contained in the two planes were going to be made useful, more funding would be required, the former government officials say.
But Fingas points out that when he was running the program, it was self-financing. Deals worked out with other departments or foreign governments who needed the technology paid for most of the research and development.
And the amount of money needed to keep the two planes ahead of the curve is in the millions -- a pittance compared with the money Ottawa is planning to pour into Arctic sovereignty, said both Healey and Cleminson.
They reject the government's explanation that cheaper alternatives can be found outside government, by leasing commercial aircraft.
The equipment on board the two planes is specifically designed for those planes, says Fingas. It can't simply be plucked out and moved into a leased plane to save money.
