Mr. Chairman, following up on the question from my colleague on my right who is ordinarily on my left, I also attended many of the committee meetings on the west coast. I wonder if my colleague from the Alliance would comment on two different aspects of the information we received.
We were told that funding was so short that regular maintenance was no longer being done at the remote radar sites. The only time a site was serviced was when it went down. These sites are remote. Consequently, when they went down, accessibility was always a problem, especially in winter and during bad weather. When they got to the site, if they did not have the right parts to fix whatever was wrong, quite often a second or third trip had to take place. If it became dark, they had to get out of there before the work was finished and the situation was further aggravated.
We heard horror stories of what happened in the interim, including a fisherman who got a jigger in his eye and there was no way of hooking up to a hospital to receive guidance as to what to do.
The committee also visited the coast guard set-up in Seattle just across the border. I wonder if the member would compare what he saw in Seattle with what we saw along the Pacific coast in British Columbia specifically.