Environmental Response

Environmental Response manages the Canadian Coast Guard responsibilities as the lead government agency for all the ship source and mystery spills of oil, and other noxious materials, that occur in Canadian waters.

The Canadian Coast Guard is responsible for ensuring the clean-up of all oil, and other noxious substance spills, in Canadian waters.

Canadian law places the onus for responding to pollution incidents on the polluter and the Coast Guard's role, through its Environmental Response Division, is to monitor the polluter's efforts.  If a polluter is unknown, unwilling, or unable to respond to an incident, Coast Guard will step in and manage the response.  However, this does not lessen the polluter's responsibility.  Through legislation, the Canadian Coast Guard can seek compensation for costs incurred when managing or monitoring the response to an incident.

The Environmental Response Division is tasked with response planning, training, exercise activities, maintaining specialized pollution countermeasures equipment in a state-of-readiness, and managing research and development projects.  The Environmental Response National Training Program has developed training courses - Basic Oil Spill Response Course, Marine Spill Response Operations Course and On-Scene Commander Course - and publications on spill response for government, industry and the public.  In addition, Coast Guard participates in a variety of exercises with its partners and other stakeholders to practice and verify Canada's readiness to respond to pollution incidents.  Research and development projects are a key element in finding new, innovative ways and technologies to prepare, respond to, and remediate marine pollution incidents.  Coast Guard participates regionally, nationally and internationally with other stakeholders to improve response readiness by laboratory- and field-testing existing and new pollution response equipment.

Furthermore, in regions that have contiguous waters with other countries, the Canadian Coast Guard maintains joint response plans and agreements to respond in a collaborative manner to incidents that threaten affected countries.

In the Newfoundland and Labrador Region, Coast Guard maintains an inventory of specialized oil spill response equipment and has a team of skilled, professional staff ready to respond to marine pollution incidents.  The Environmental Response Division has a staff of 13 people with extensive expertise and experience in responding to marine pollution incidents regionally, nationally and internationally.  Using the National Response Plan as a framework, staff have developed Regional Response and Area Response Plans for the region.  An Environmental Response duty officer is on standby 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week to investigate or initiate a response to pollution incident reports that are received at the 24-hour spill report telephone number listed below.

Environmental Response
Spill Report (24-hours)
1-800-563-9089
(709) 772-2083