News Article Archive
Open for the World’s Business
Kathleen Sibley, Securing the Nation
September 2008
With Asian ships beating a path to its door, the Port of Prince Rupert has developed a 21st century model for port security in Canada.
Situated about 1,500 km north of Vancouver and about 40 km south of Alaska, the Port of Prince Rupert offers the shortest Asia to North America sea-land link. Containers shipping from Asia arrive at Prince Rupert two to three days before they would arrive to Vancouver, for example, a huge advantage for companies looking to shorten their time to market.
To capitalize on that capacity, in September 2007 the port launched the $170-million, 59 acre Prince Rupert Fairview Container Terminal, the first dedicated ship-to-rail container terminal in North America with the design capacity to move 500,000 20-foot equivalent units per year.
Funded by New Jersey-based Maher Terminals and the federal and B.C. provincial governments, as well as CN Rail and the port itself, the terminal has virtually eliminated the need for trucks, as containers are loaded directly onto CN Rail cars and whisked to their destinations via freight train.
The port, which boasts the deepest natural harbour in North America, also manages the Northland Cruise and the Atlin Cruise terminals, as well as Prince Rupert Grain Ltd. and Ridley Terminals Inc. But a port has to offer more than just top-notch facilities to be successful in this post 9/11 world. It has to also offer the assurance that the goods and the visitors moving in and out of its waters pose no security threats.
“Prince Rupert is no different from Vancouver or Montreal or Seattle or Los Angeles,” says Gary Paulson, director of operations and security for the Prince Rupert Port Authority. “It all has to do with the fact that you are handling cargo worth millions of dollars and cruise ships are arriving with passengers from all over the world. There is a fundamental exception that it’s going to be a safe, efficient and secure place to do business whether you’re dropping off containers, picking up grain or coal or bringing in tourism. That’s really our responsibility as a world-class port – to ensure we can do that – and the only way to do that is be having good fundamental security.”
In 2004, just after the port opened the Northlands Cruise Terminal, Transport Canada introduced enhanced marine transportation security regulations that required a higher level of security for cruise ship terminals and passenger screening. The port conducted a security audit on its facilities and decided that it required outside help to meet those new standards. Although most terminals in the port are run by independent operators responsible for their own security, the Port Authority establishes security standards and protocol, and provides both general security to the port and detailed security to the cruise terminal it runs.
The Port turned to the B.C. Commissionaires. The organization already had a presence at the B.C. Coast Guard, so it wasn’t an unknown entity. Currently, there are about a dozen Commissionaires providing security services to the port, although not all are full-time. Paulson sees the potential to hire 10 more a year over the next five years as the port enters the second phase of its expansion plans.
The port provides the Commissionaires with security equipment, as well as the training, to operate that equipment. But the Commissionaires come equipped with the right background for the job.
“They have to have a fundamental standard in terms of security training,” says Paulson.
“Then after that we’re looking for reliability and a sense of team work, that they’re co-operative, that they show initiative, are able to react to an emergency and are responsible; that’s why we use them. We could use other security folks who are cheaper, but we stick with them even though the price keeps going up.”
The Commissionaires perform a full screening of the facility prior to the arrival of vessels coming in. When the cruise ship is in and the passengers have disembarked and cleared customs, they ensure that only authorized persons return to the ship. They also screen identification and baggage for as many as 2,000 passengers in less than two hours.
As the port has expanded, the Commissionaires have taken over other security duties, such as providing roving patrols of the recently built 24/7 control and command centre and the new access control point at Ridley Terminal.
Have the Commissionaires prevented any major security breaches? “Who knows?” says Paulson.
“The Israelis have discovered that having a security person physically standing guard has been successful (in deterring terrorist attacks) in Israel. We have had no major security breaches in the last couple of years. We have the best port security in Canada.” The advantage to building a new container terminal post-9/11, he adds, is that the port has the most modern scanning equipment in North America. For example all incoming containers are scanned for radiation.
The B.C. Commissionaires, says Doug Stuckel, the firm’s senior vice president of operations and security solutions, is part of a nation-wide organization with about 18,000 employees in 17 divisions. The B.C. division has about 1,600 employees that provide security for more than 400 sites in B.C. It has a main office in Vancouver and a regional office in Kelowna.
“Our mandate is to provide employment for military veterans and retired RCMP,” says Stuckel. “However, in the past years we’ve expanded our employee base to include a wide variety (of backgrounds) because we can’t rely just on retired military, so now we have a diversity of people.”
The Prince Rupert Port Authority has contributed to that increasingly diverse pool. It recently sponsored four First Nations youth to take the B.C. Commissionaires security training as part of an initiative to provide opportunities to local First Nations.
“The port paid for their training, they wrote their exams and then joined the Commissionaires,” explains Paulson.
Federal departments and agencies are eligible to hire Commissionaires under the federal national master standing offer, which gives the Commissionaires the right of first refusal for the work. The organization wins contracts such as the Port of Prince Rupert, says Stuckel, because its employees have levels one and two of basic security training.
The B.C. Commissionaires, however, requires a mark of at least 70 percent before it will hire you. Maturity and experience also count for a lot, he says. The organization provides specialized security services for organizations such as CSIS and CATSA, as well as bylaw enforcement for a number of the province’s municipalities.
According to Gary LeRoux, executive director of the Association of Canadian Port Authorities, while the Port of Prince Rupert might feature the latest in security services and technology, Canada’s ports in general are “90 percent of the way there” in terms of improving security post 9/11.
In fact, he says, Canada has some of the strongest marine security in the world, thanks to a number of steps the federal government has taken over the past few years.
For example, when the federal government updated the Marine Transportation Security Act after 9/11, says LeRoux, all of the country’s 400-plus marine facilities had to submit their five-year security plans to get their certificate of compliance from Transport Canada.
Ports now also require highly detailed 24-hour notice of all containers and their contents bound for their port from a foreign dock. And as of last December, workers at the ports of Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver, Fraser River, as well as the control centres of the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp., were required to undergo background checks under Phase 1 of the Marine Transportation Security Clearance Program. Additionally, Transport Canada has called for the establishment of restricted areas. To meet those requirements, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority has issued more than 30,000 photo ID cards that provide workers with different degrees of access to those areas depending on their security clearance. The cards, called PortPass, identify authorized personnel and synchronize with the port’s vehicle access control system. And while such measures have contributed to a much higher level of security at Canada’s ports, there is still room for improvement, says LeRoux. For one, it would be more efficient to have a single port worker identity card, rather than each port authority developing one on its own.
“The U.S. has a (single) port identity card,” says LeRoux. “In Canada, we don’t. At some point we’ll have to put in place a common ID for truck workers, so those things still have to be sorted out.”
Other challenges relate to the sheer complexity of managing security at port facilities. In addition to the numerous facilities they manage, ports tend to be sprawling complexes spread out over large, often in urban lands.
The Port of Vancouver and the Port of Montreal are in the middle of cities, which mean port authorities have to work with municipal governments, as well as local police and private security companies.
“In managing those various entities it is a struggle to make sure the conductor and the whole orchestra are working in unison,” notes LeRoux. “We can have 100 percent security if we build a brick wall and have no trade, but that’s not what we’re doing; we’re increasing trade.”
© CLB MEDIA INC., 2008
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