John Cummins, M.P. Delta-South Richmond

News Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 19, 2001

Body Recovery Priority Rather Than Rescue

VANCOUVER--"Dead body recovery has replaced rescue as the priority for the Coast Guard," said John Cummins, M.P. (Delta-South Richmond).

"Politicized bureaucratic bean counters are making decisions that should only be made by mariners."

When a car and driver ended up in the Fraser River near the Coast Guard's Sea Island Station on February 17th, it's "rescue team" arrived 3-minutes after being called and 13-minutes after the event occurred.

"Instead of immediately going into the water to save the drowning man the Coast Guard dive-team was forced to hold lights rather than proceed with a rescue," said Cummins. "If the dive-team had been used to rescue rather than merely retrieve a body, a life might well have been saved."

Only hours earlier, the Coast Guard was forced to disband it's crack dive-team. The Coast Guard has an annual budget of about $540 million. The dive-team had worked on a shoe-string budget of $50,000 per year, less than the cost of employing Herb Dhaliwal's chauffeur.

The Auditor General, in a February report to Parliament, noted that in some cases scarce dollars designated for the Coast Guard fleet appeared to have been siphoned off by DFO regional managers and in other cases the Coast Guard was forced to fund DFO fisheries management work out of its own budget.

o "We found that it was not possible to trace budgetary amounts transferred to regions to ensure that they were, in fact, spent on fleet activities. This was because the [DFO] regional directors...have the authority to reallocate funds intended for the fleet to other regional priorities."

o "We also noted examples at the regional level where the Coast Guard has absorbed the cost of services, provided to fisheries management and science, within its own marine programs."

"The men of the Coast Guard's highly trained dive-team should never have been forced into the position of holding lights when they could well have been saving a life. "

"B.C. residents must not be left in the water to drown so that the Minister and his senior bureaucrats can skim-off precious dollars from the Coast Guard to fund their favourite schemes," said Cummins.

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For more information, please contact:

John Cummins, M.P.
(613) 992-2957
(604) 970-0937 (Cell)