Madam Speaker, I am extremely pleased to speak to this opposition motion. As a former Canadian Forces member and emergency and intensive care nurse, I have a good understanding of what happens during distress situations. That is why it is so important to me to express my thoughts on this issue.
This motion is about two factors that are critical to effective service: knowledge of the local situation and services and the ability to communicate in the primary language of the community served.
In search and rescue, in life or death situations, every minute counts. Three minutes can mean the difference between saving a life and recovering a body. This is very real. This is human life.
I will be more specific about the ability to communicate in the community's language. I would like to speak more about the Quebec City search and rescue centre, the only bilingual centre in Canada, whose closure could mean that people in anglophone regions will respond to emergency calls. As a result, even if these people are bilingual, if they live in an anglophone region, it is extremely difficult for them to keep up their language skills. For example, in Halifax, only 3% of the population speaks French and only 4.7% of the population does in Trenton. So it is very difficult for a person to maintain good language skills when living in an anglophone community, even if they start out bilingual or even francophone.
Members must understand that if people do not regularly speak French, they forget some of the common and colloquial expressions that people will use. That can be a problem because during a distress call, people do not speak properly. They panic. They use unusual expressions. They will say, for example, that their boyfriend is bleeding out—pisser le sang—and that they need someone there right away—au plus sacrant. It will not be proper French. I apologize if the words I used were not very clear.
It is also important to understand that, during distress calls, there may be interference on the line and people will have accents that may be very different. They may be ill or having a heart attack. Imagine a situation where a person is already just barely getting by in French and, in addition to interference on the line, the caller is speaking with an accent and is very out of breath because he is having a heart attack. It would be very difficult to understand the caller. That is why it is essential that a francophone centre be kept in a francophone region.
I would also like to specify that, even though I am bilingual—I am able to understand all of my hon. colleagues here—if one of my colleagues were speaking to me in English and was out of breath because he was having a heart attack and there was interference on the radio, there is a good chance that I would have trouble understanding that person and that I would have to get him to spell words because I would not be sure that I understood him correctly. There would thus be a delay in acting to save that person's life.
I would like to talk more about geography and knowledge of the local area. When people call, they are in a panic. They do not give precise directions. When people call because they are in distress, they rarely provide the ten numbers corresponding to their geographic coordinates. People use regional terms that can be hard to understand. For example, if I say that I live on the “rang de la Ferme Bordeleau”—the Bordeleau Concession—in Clerval, would any of my hon. colleagues understand me? No. But people in my region, in my community, would know exactly what I am talking about. Someone two or three provinces to the west would most likely have no clue and would have to ask me to repeat myself and be more precise.
In many cases, when people call because they are in distress, they provide information based on historical information. For example, they might say that they are close to where Mr. Faucher's boat sank five years ago. That will not mean much to someone from Trenton, but someone who lives and works in the community will remember the incident and will immediately know exactly what place the caller is talking about. That is more efficient and wastes less time.
Unfortunately, in other cases, children or teenagers call to report distress situations because the parent or grandparent they are with has suffered a medical emergency and is not doing well.
To begin with, if one does not understand the language well, and then, if the person trying to explain what is happening is an eight- or nine-year-old child, it could be a very difficult situation and precious time could be lost. Several factors must be considered.
I would remind all of my hon. colleagues that any time human lives are at stake, we cannot put a price tag on that. We are talking about human lives. In my opinion, there is no price on saving a life and I think that if we were talking about my hon. colleagues' children and spouses who were in distress, they would want previous governments that enforced the legislation and regulations to ignore the numbers and do whatever it takes to save as many lives as possible.