Mr. Speaker, at this time I would like to review some of the events that have led the minister to make the decision and announcement he has made in the House today.
Make no mistake, the minister would not be making these changes to the Coast Guard if fatal accidents had not forced him to take a closer look at the irresponsible cuts his department made to the funding of our Coast Guard and its rescue dive operations.
On February 16, 2001, the then minister of fisheries cancelled the rescue dive team. Two days later, Paul Sandhu died after his car plunged into the Fraser River, only 400 metres from the dive team's home base. The dive team came to the scene but were ordered not to dive. Not long afterward, the minister of fisheries ordered a review of his decision to cancel the rescue dive team.
On July 19, 2001, the fisheries minister reinstated the dive team but not as a rescue dive team. Divers were only allowed to retrieve someone floating on the surface. As a result, those trapped in submerged fishing vessels were to be written off. The divers protested. They wanted no part of it. They claimed that the rules now meant that the only person they would be able to rescue would be someone who had fallen off a dock. Divers were told to follow orders and shut up.
An internal directive on the new no dive policy dated September 3, 2001, stated:
...procedures have been written to comply exactly with the Minister's announcement...Penetration of submerged...vessels is prohibited, exactly as stated in the signed off Fleet Safety Manual...
This is not open to interpretation, Mr. Speaker. It continues:
I would expect...divers to support our efforts to meet the requirements of the Minister's announcement as quickly as possible.
On August 13, 2002, when the Cap Rouge II went down with the loss of five lives including a mother and her two children, the minister said that the dive team ought to have known they could have dived.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. First, the directive of September 3, 2001, made it abundantly clear there was to be no diving because the minister had ordered that there be none. Second, our Coast Guard divers could not have safely dived because their surface air equipment had been disposed of. They were forced to rely on air tanks which ran out of supply shortly after arriving at the site.
The Coast Guard talking points on the Cap Rouge II incident made it very clear that the Coast Guard did not believe in rescue diving. They state:
Resources must be put where they will do the most good. --It's absolutely clear that a dollar spent on prevention or surface rescue activities will do more, by far, to save lives than a dollar spent on diving.
I hope that is not the message to the next person who is trapped in an overturned fishing vessel.
Today, the minister does not want to be held to account. He claims we should only look at his latest promises for the future. The truth is that after those two tragedies the government would have us believe that this time it is actually going to reinstate the rescue dive team.
Well, it is not so; not yet anyway. The fleet safety manual has been partially changed, but it only allows rescue dives to submerged vessels when divers have been given surface air equipment to do those dives and have been trained to use it.
While the surface air equipment has now arrived, training will not be completed for at least six months. We do not yet have a rescue dive team that is back in the business of doing rescue dives. We only have promises.
When the rescue dive team is called to the scene of an accident, our divers must have the training and equipment to make the dives and must have the authority to make that dive. I am not sure we are there yet. I pray we will be soon.
The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans did not offer in his statement an apology to the families of those who died aboard the Cap Rouge II as a result of the funding decisions taken by his department. There was no apology offered to the divers who were ordered not to dive and who the minister publicly claimed could have dived if they had known the rules.
In closing, lives have been lost and the Coast Guard's rescue divers have been tortured by memories of events. It is high time the government once again put a priority on saving lives.