I've been in the government service for 35 years now, between the military and the Coast Guard, so I definitely understand your question.
If you look at the sites Mr. Gross had on his chart, you can see all the little radio sites. A lot of those used to be manned sites, and there were people there. Over the years the Coast Guard has consolidated in different places. Alert Bay used to be a radio site, and that was moved to Comox a number of years ago.
With redundancy we're talking about a large area with very low levels of radio coverage. Once you get north of some areas, there isn't even cellphone coverage.
With Prince Rupert, if it went out.... The Prince Rupert area itself is 77,000 square kilometres. When you add Tofino to it, there are another 30,000 square kilometres. If a tsunami hit Prince Rupert and knocked the centre out, you would lose radio coverage from Alaska to Washington State and along the west coast of Vancouver Island. That's not a small area.
You can have too much redundancy. On this coast originally there were only Coast Guard radio stations in Prince Rupert, Tofino, Comox, and Vancouver, and three vessel traffic centres. We actually went to five centres from seven when we merged.