The Public Review Panel on Tanker Safety and Marine Spills Response Capability (PRPTSMSRC) was created in June 1989 as an independent, public, three member review panel largely as a response to public outrage and concern over the grounding of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska and the resulting environmental catastrophe. The panel paralleled and built upon the efforts of a federal government reivew launched a month earlier. Under the terms of this latter initiative, Environment Canada, the Canadian Coast Guard, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans were to reivew the federal government's spill prevention programmes and its response capabilities. Specifically, the panel's role then, was to study, in an entirely public forum, the measures already in place that governed the movement of tankers through Canadian waters, to assess the country's ability to respond to a variety of spills and Canadian and international shipping regulations governing the transportation of chemical and oil products.
The information garnered and utilized by the panel is contained in forty-nine boxes of material. Designed primarily to give Canadians an opportunity to express their concerns in a public forum, the records produced by the PRPTSMSRC contain the correspondence produced by and to the panel members, the internal review papers, transcripts of the proceedings of hearings held across Canada, briefing books prepared for the panel members, commissioned studies, and the submissions offered to the panelists during the course of their investigations.
Also included in this body of material are approximately twenty-four boxes of semi-published, "grey", reference material produced by the Coast Guard, Environment Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and other similar agencies. In addition, there are eight cubic feet of miscellaneous materials; these would appear to be reports and publications produced by other government departments, and by provincial and foreign governments, by a variety of private companies and private sector associations, and by a number of national and international consultants in the area of marine safety and oil spill technology. Finally, two boxes of video tapes collected by the Panel, describing oil or chemical spills, or demonstrating new clean-up technologies, were transferred to the Cartographic and Audio Visual Archives Division.
