Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to present this opposition day motion on behalf of my party, seconded by the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam, who has taken a great interest in this matter and of course is extremely familiar with the local circumstances in the area of Vancouver and indeed of all of British Columbia.
I am dealing with three different closures here, and we will have speakers going into detail on each of them. My riding of St. John's East is very near to the marine rescue coordinating centre in St. John's. There is one in Quebec City, and the member for Québec will speak to that issue a little later. In dealing with the Kitsilano Coast Guard station in British Columbia, we will also hear directly from the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam.
I should say that I am splitting my time with the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam.
I will take a moment to first of all to sadly acknowledge the deaths of two Coast Guard auxiliary volunteers who died on Sunday in British Columbia at the Skookumchuck Narrows in the Sunshine Coast, near the entrance to Sechelt Island. They were engaged in a training mission and, very sadly, lost their lives when their boat capsized. It is with great sadness that we acknowledge this and pass on our sympathies to the families and friends of those involved who, acting as volunteers, took great risks and unfortunately and sadly lost their lives in this incident.
What we are dealing with here underscores the great seriousness with which search and rescue should be taken and needs to be taken by the government. The motion is aimed at urging the government to recognize that the saving of lives has to be the top priority for the Coast Guard search and rescue services, and the closure of these three operations merely to save the cost of 36 jobs—12 in St. John's, 12 in Quebec City and 12 in Kitsilano Coast Guard station—is gross neglect of the top priority of the Coast Guard services.
Sad to say, the government and the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans have downplayed the importance of these operations when, for example, the issue of the marine rescue coordinating centre in St. John's and Quebec was talked about in terms of the vital necessity of having operations located where the coordinators of these rescues were engaged in local knowledge of the people at sea, the geography of the area, and in both cases, understanding directly the people and the communities they are dealing with.
In the case of Quebec City, the language is French, but it is not simply the French language: it is the language of French as it is spoken in that specific area. I am obviously not an expert in the French dialects of Quebec, but I am given to understand that people in Quebec do not all speak the same version of French or the same dialect, and it takes some experience, knowledge and understanding to get what is being said.
I do know that in my own province of Newfoundland and Labrador, not everybody speaks English the same way I or others do. We have been told by the marine rescue coordinators that it is very difficult sometimes to understand what is being said, even though they know the accents and the dialects and how people speak in one part of the province and another. They sometimes have to play the emergency tapes several times to catch what someone is saying, because they understand that in a rescue situation, an emergency situation at sea, people are panicked. They are worried about losing their lives and speak based on their panic and their need to get out what they have to say. Understanding them at the other end takes that kind of local knowledge.
They also know the coastline that they are dealing with. They know the geography. They know there are one or two dozen seal coves in Newfoundland. They use clues to figure out where they are. Understanding the place names is very complex in a place like Newfoundland and Labrador. They are people with that experience, and that is why they are there.
In the case of Newfoundland and Labrador, the marine rescue co-ordinating centre handles about 500 rescues per year. There are about 2,000 calls, 500 of which are actual at-sea situations of peril. They are the coordinators.
The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, incomprehensibly, kept referring to them as call centres, as if they were some sort of call centres that could be outsourced to Italy, or India, which is where unfortunately certain medical calls were outsourced after the centre closed in April.
It is not a call centre. It is a rescue co-ordinating centre with trained people who are mariners. They have experience at sea. They know the Coast Guard ships that are involved. They know what assets are available. They are dedicated to making sure that rescues are effectively co-ordinated.
In fact, when the defence committee was in St. John's in February 2010 as part of a study on search and rescue, we visited this marine rescue co-ordinating centre and were told directly by national Coast Guard officials the reason the centre was there. By the way, the Quebec centre and the St. John's centre were installed in 1977 for this reason. They are there because of the necessity of local knowledge, such as the circumstances of the currents, the geography, the people and the language. It was important enough to make sure those centres were there.
In the case of British Columbia, and my colleague from New Westminster—Coquitlam will talk about that in some detail, there are 12 people who provide direct rescue services 24 hours a day. They will be in a rescue cutter within one to two minutes of a call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. That is being replaced.
The minister said that we do not need to worry about that because the Coast Guard auxiliary are going to look after it. The coast guard auxiliary is miles away. I spoke to some of the individuals who work at this station. There are three on duty at any one time. They provide 24-hour service. They are in the water within one to two minutes.
To get to that very same point, the Coast Guard auxiliary would take about 40 minutes after receiving a call. There is another station on the other side of the peninsula by the airport, but it is 17 nautical miles away.
That service is being provided. My colleague will provide a lot of numbers. We heard them at a meeting in British Columbia last Thursday. We heard the passion with which people spoke. They said that lives would be lost. It is the same message we are hearing from Newfoundland and Labrador, from those who know the circumstances.
There was a letter to the editor written by a former minister of fisheries in the Conservative government, James McGrath, my predecessor in St. John's East. He was complaining about this decision, how wrong it is and how it will increase the risk at sea and possibly lead to the loss of life.
It is an extremely important issue in the communities of Newfoundland and Labrador where we rely on the sea to make a living, where we have ferry boats sailing all the time. There are half a million passenger trips between St. John's and Bell Island on a ferry boat. There is the gulf ferry service. People go back and forth to the oil rigs daily and hourly. There are thousands of fishermen at sea working on boats 24 hours a day all throughout the year.
This is an extremely important service. There will be a reduction of that service. With those three operations going, there were six rescue coordinators available to do the work for this huge area of responsibility, which includes Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. Now there will be three people to do the job. That is not enough. It is very complex. It involves life-and-death decisions being made all the time.
This decision has to be and ought to be reversed for the sake of the lives and safety of the people who need this service.
