STEPHEN WEIR
Toronto Globe & Mail, Thursday, December 30, 1999
In a sport that is rife with regulations, divers, by nature, are slow to rile. Clear water. Blue skies. An interesting shipwreck to explore. That just about sums up the freshwater hopes and aspirations of most of the 50,000 active certified divers in Ontario. Divers are the last people one might expect to protest the provincial government, but newly proposed legislation has some divers hopping mad.
It probably came as a huge surprise to Toby Barrett, a conservative member of the provincial parliament, when divers from all across North America began organizing strategy meetings, faxing, phone calling and E-mailing criticism of a private member's bill that he wrote to protect shipwrecks. That bill has quietly received 2nd reading in the Ontario Legislature.
It is called The Ontario Marine Heritage Act, and is, in essence, an attempt to protect historically important shipwrecks from possible damage by divers. If this bill is passed, it calls for fines up to $50,000 for people swimming beside, on, or through these wrecks and $250,000 for registered companies (including dive boats) disturbing shipwrecks.
These measures are impossibly strict. If the bill is made into law it will become a crime to even disturb dirt in and around shipwrecks that have been deemed to have heritage merit.
Although the proposed statute has a laudable purpose -- "to enhance the protection and preservation of Ontario's marine heritage resources," wrote Beth Cromwell, president of the Ontario Underwater Council (OUC) -- if passed in its present form, this legislation would effectively terminate sport diving in Ontario.
There are some 100 dive boats operating in Ontario waters -- these boats escort paying scuba customers to and from shipwrecks and, in many cases, their staff accompany divers inside the shipwrecks. This type of chartered diving is a small but growing tourism industry that benefits the economies of several communities along the shores of the Great Lakes.
It is estimated that 8,000 to 10,000 new divers are certified in Ontario each year. The OUC says that the vast majority of these divers will make at least one wreck dive in their first year of certification; most of those dives will be made from a dive charter boat.
The owners of the dive boats, along with the OUC, dive clubs and individual divers are petitioning the government not to pass the bill. They are very concerned that if the wording isn't changed, most shipwrecks that people currently explore will be classed as heritage sites and thus off-limits to everyone except those that have special provincial permits. Getting a permit could well be a lengthy and expensive exercise in bureaucracy.
This month, the OUC met in Toronto with dive boat owners from across the province, dive clubs, marine archaeologists and individual divers. They have formed a committee to respond to the Marine Heritage Act.
Mr. Barrett's own constituency is on the east end of LakeErie, an area that is rich in shipwrecks. The non-diving backbencher says the bill came at the urging of the local Port Dover chapter of the marine archaeological society known as Save Ontario Shipwrecks (SOS).
Shipwreck research in Ontario is almost exclusively in the hands of clubs, associations and private individuals. The sometimes fractious SOS association and the Kingston-based Preserve Our Wrecks are currently the two most active discoverers and researchers of shipwrecks. However, they aren't the only divers studying wrecks. Authors, journalists, film and television producers, teachers, and history buffs fund legitimate expeditions every year. They are searching and studying wrecks in almost every lake, river, quarry and sea-coast region in Ontario.
In the past, the province has been inconsistent in its attitude toward wreck conservation. In the last five years, Ontario has put two shipwrecks off limits to divers in Mr. Barrett's riding -- a perfectly preserved 19-century Lake Erie schooner (dubbed Ship X) and the gold-filled Atlantic -- but, in the case of Ship X, the police have done nothing to enforce the ban.
On the other hand, when a group of elderly Americans who had lost relatives on the Edmund Fitzgerald came to Toronto to ask the province to consider declaring the Lake Superior wreck a grave site and off limits to divers, they were left to wait hours in a hotel lobby for a meeting that never occurred.
The only people policing wrecks on the water are the dive boat operators. They make it their business to make sure that Ontario sites are kept intact and that none of their passengers damage the downed ships. If legislation makes shipwrecks off limits to charter dive boats, the industry will end. Meanwhile divers, knowing full well that the province can't enforce this legislation, will use their own boats to visit these wrecks and their well-publicized locations.
Before this bill is passed it is important that government talk to the
dive community to design legislation that works. While SOS is a dedicated
organization, it doesn't speak for all sport divers, nor the dive industry.
Inclusive consultation is needed so that the wrecks that need protection
receive it and that divers in Ontario will still have places to dive.
Stephen Weir is the author of The Sinking of the Mayflower and is associate editor of Diver magazine in Vancouver.