The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority has released four episodes of a new podcast series that provides perspectives on the intricacies, infrastructure and innovations that connect Canada's business and communities around the world.  Episodes include trains, grains and snow, industrial land use, environmental performance, and collaboration.  To learn more visit: VFPA Breaking Bottlenecks page.

Several crew members onboard the Tropic Hope have been stuck on board for about 14 months. With the ship now headed to Halifax, an inspector is calling on Canadian officials to detain it until the workers are allowed to go home. The Tropic Hope is expected to arrive in port on Sunday. The Inspector raised concerns over the crew’s mental health after boarding the vessel on September 20. But despite Transport Canada noting a "deficiency" with the ship last month, it was allowed to leave and continue its route to Florida, Puerto Rico and back to Halifax. Transport Canada said it will continue to monitor the situation and has also informed the United States Coast Guard.

Shipyard workers and members of the Canadian Coast Guard have been exposed to lead paint for months, without any protective equipment, even as their employers had strong reasons to believe the vessels they worked on were contaminated with the heavy metal. The ships are a set of icebreakers, Jean Goodwill and Vincent Massey. The vessels were acquired, along with a third vessel, the Captain Molly Kool, from Sweden in 2018 as part of a $610-million icebreaker procurement. 400 workers have undergone testing to measure the lead content in their blood at a private clinic, in collaboration with the public health department and it has been reported that none of them had abnormally high levels of the metal.

This year, Transport Canada's National Canadian Marine Advisory Council fall meetings will take place over two weeks, from Monday November 2nd to Tuesday November 17th, 2020.  Registration is now open and can be done by accessing the Eventbrite link.

Today, Seaspan Shipyards officially delivered the third state-of-the-art Offshore Fisheries Science Vessel (OFSV) to the Canadian Coast Guard. The CCGS John Cabot is the third OFSV delivered by Seaspan Shipyards in the last 15 months and completes the first full class of large vessels under the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS). CCGS John Cabot will now join her sister ships already in service, CCGS Capt Jacques Cartier and CCGS Sir John Franklin.  The CCGS John Cabot will set sail soon to her home port in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador where she will support scientific research, search and rescue operations and environmental response.

2,700 Seaspan Shipyards employees, including the 1,200 employees who worked on the OFSV class, plus more than a dozen major partners and over 450 suppliers and their thousands of employees across the country contributed to these world-class OFSV vessels.  To date the National Shipbuilding Strategy has contributed $1.5 billion to Canada's GDP.

The Canadian Coast Guard is actively seeking a used icebreaker that could be converted for their use on the Great Lakes. They issued a request for proposals to acquire an existing light icebreaker in mid-September. However, the shipbuilding industry has indicated that this will represent a loss of domestic jobs and at least $250 million in federal spending that could have gone into the Canadian economy.

The US Coast Guard is testing unmanned surface vessels off the coast of Hawaii. The testing is set to run from October 7 through November 5 off the south shore of Oahu. Tests will focus on autonomous vessel systems from Saildrone and Spatial Integration Systems, in addition to a USCG owned autonomous research vessel made by Metal Shark. Testing will seek to evaluate each vessels’ ability to provide persistent maritime domain awareness, especially in remote areas of the oceans.

The US Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) has begun an inquiry into how ocean carriers assess fees, such as detention and demurrage, and whether they are incorrectly holding other transportation providers liable for penalties that should be paid by beneficial cargo owners (BCOs). Now at the beginning of the process, any interested party is invited to submit comments to the FMC. The deadline to submit comments for the inquiry is Nov. 6.

The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority has received Ohio Department of Transportation Maritime Assistance Program funds that will pay for half of the costs for a new forklift at the Port of Toledo’s General Cargo Dock and for building a retaining wall and other work at the Toledo Shipyard. $235,000, will go toward the Tier 4 heavy-lift forklift while $333,125 will be spent on the work at the shipyard’s drydock.

Maersk Supply Service A/S and Ørsted, have come together to test an innovative charging buoy that can bring green electricity to offshore wind farm service vessels and potentially to a wide range of maritime vessels. The buoy can be used to charge the smaller battery- or hybrid-electrical vessels and to supply power to larger vessels, enabling them to turn off their engines when laying idle. By substituting fossil-based fuels with green electricity, virtually all emissions are eliminated while the buoy is in use. The buoy will be tested in the second half of 2021.

Singapore’s first LNG bunkering vessel FueLNG Bellina, has been named, paving the way for FueLNG, a joint venture between Keppel Offshore & Marine and Shell Eastern Petroleum, to be the first to provide regular ship-to-ship LNG bunkering within the Singapore’s port. The bunkering vessel is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2020. FueLNG will also provide LNG bunkering from Singapore’s first dedicated LNG bunkering facility scheduled to be built by Keppel O&M on its Floating Living Lab. Shell will be supplying the LNG to the facility when it becomes operational at the end of 2021.

Ahead of the UK’s exit from the EU Customs union, the country’s government has launched a £200 million fund to enable ports to build new facilities and prepare for life outside the EU. The Port Infrastructure Fund is targeted at ports that have the space to build new border infrastructure on their current sites so that they are ready to handle new customs requirements under the new Border Operating Model. The funding can be used for a range of vital port infrastructure – from warehouses and control posts to traffic management systems.