SAR office Closure - Protest Perspectives

With the planned closure of the search and rescue coordination center in St. John’s much is being said about lives being jeopardized as a result of the 12 positions to be cut there.

It goes without saying that the fight for adequate safety is a noble one, but are some of those who are opposed to the closure reacting out of concern for the public or for themselves?

This is not to say I agree with the closure. If there is any doubt at all about the level of public safety then the federal government has an obligation to err on the side of caution. What I’m questioning are the motives of some of the most vocal.

Could they have a hidden agenda?

The first out of the blocks to protest this closure were local politicians and union leaders, not fishers and oil rig workers as one might expect. With that in mind I wonder if they are solely concerned with safety or if their positions are tempered by the urge to protect the jobs that generate union dues, tax revenues and ultimately votes?

The answer to that question won’t affect whether or not safety will be impacted, which I believe it will, but it’s often wise to consider the potential motives behind a bandwagon before jumping onto it.

The first job of a union leader is to protect jobs and related union dues.
The first job of a City Councillor or Mayor is to protect the city’s tax base and the services dependent on those taxes.

The first job of a federal or provincial politician is to get re-elected and there’s no better way to do that than to be seen as protecting the public.

Taking a strong position on this particular issue serves each group equally well regardless of the safety concerns you or I might have.

Most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will remember the call to re-open the Gander weather office a few years back. Just as today, politicians and union officials lead the charge demanding that the office be re-instated because the local knowledge it would utilize was in the interest of public safety. The public jumped onboard and put the heat on government. Eventually the office and jobs were re-instated.

Has anyone seen a marked improvement in weather forecasting since that time? I haven’t.

The same argument is being made now.

A case could be made by the union that there are better places for cutting jobs than a search and rescue coordination center and they’d be absolutely right. Unfortunately it’s an argument they can’t make. A job in Nova Scotia or Alberta is just as important to the public sector unions as a job in Newfoundland and Labrador. Dues are dues, so it’s a self defeating position.

It’s a position local politicians might well make and, along with their stand on safety, some of them have in a far more muted sort of way.

A more honest approach for all involved might be to simply say they want to protect the jobs about to be cut, but they won’t do that.

That approach would be far less likely to whip up the kind of public outrage necessary to spur angry calls to MP offices and letters to news editors. In fact it might even backfire on them when people realize it’s their tax dollars paying for those jobs.

Saving lives, now that’s something that hits home and can easily be sold to the masses on a nationwide scale.

My point is that even with the public’s sincere concern over safety we need to be wary of the messengers leading the way. It’s a slippery slope so we all have to be leery of where they might eventually lead us.

We may not like this particular closure, and for good reasons, but that doesn’t change the reality that jobs need to be cut in the public sector and no matter where those cuts happen there will be union leaders and politicians pounding their chests in protest.

If the cuts were to clerical staff at Revenue Canada or clerks on Parliament Hill they would fight just as hard to protect those positions but remember, it’s us who pay for government bloat. In that light, whose interests are really being served?

As a cost cutting measure Ottawa plans to eliminate 6,000 employees from the payroll. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but when you consider that there are more than 365,000 federal employees in Canada it actually equates to a modest 1.5% of the federal workforce.

In a private sector company that type of cut would likely be considered a minor adjustment. Not even news worthy.

You and I may see the closure of the search and rescue office in St. John’s as a safety concern but the public sector unions view it as the tip of a much bigger iceberg and they will say or do anything to avoid it.

They are supremely focused on protecting their membership, as they should be, and it’s far easier to gain public support for saving lives than in trying to convince taxpayers to fight for a wasteful public service.

Nationwide (factoring in both federal and provincial staff) the number of public employees is approximately 3.6 million, one for every 10 people in the Country.

When you consider that the other 9 out of 10 who don’t work for government include infants, students, the unemployed and stay at home parents among others, it doesn’t take long to figure out that a very limited number of taxpayers are paying for a heck of a lot of public salaries and benefits.

Our collective taxes pay for those jobs, for the bankable sick time and for the generous pension plans that go with them and in the end it seems there is less and less left in our pockets with each passing year.

Government pensions alone far eclipse anything the average person who pays for them can ever hope to see in their own workplace if they have a pension to look forward to at all.

These are staggering figures and they point to the clear need for public service cuts on the federal and provincial level.

The test for any government rests in determining which positions are truly necessary and which are clearly excessive.

There are only so many tax dollars to go around and whether public service employees get their pay cheque from a federal, provincial or municipal government, there is only one taxpayer ultimately footing the bill.

Personally I’m glad federal downsizing is on the table and I’d love to see the provinces do the same. My primary concern is that the cuts are not deep enough and that a less than intelligent approach is being employed to determine where the axe should fall.

Truthfully, Ottawa might be the best place to start the cutting rather than in a province that already has a lower than average share of federal presence. A good target to start with would be the job of the bureaucrat who recommended this office closure in the first place.

Since I believe safety is a valid concern I’m fully behind saving the St. John’s office.

To be fair, I’m also for saving it because the numbers tell me that Ottawa has already stripped a disproportionate number of jobs out of Newfoundland and Labrador over the past 20 years. My problem isn’t with saving the search and rescue office, it’s that I don’t like being led around by the nose or played for a sucker to serve a hidden agenda.

When it comes to a choice between cutting a dozen assistants to the assistant to the deputy ministers (as an example) I’d much rather see that than witness the last few people at a search and rescue center turn out the lights and lock the doors behind them. I wonder if the union leadership and politicians leading the charge today are willing to publicly state the same.

Peter Mackay "Happy" about NL Search and Rescue Services

Just two months after 17 offshore oil workers tragically lost their lives in a helicopter crash off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Federal Minister of Defence, Peter Mackay, said last week that his government will not be looking into changing the way Search and Rescue activities are conducted in Newfoundland and Labrador and that he is, “happy with the current configuration”.

I’d like to suggest to Mr. Mackay that perhaps he should pull on a survival suit and have someone drop him off about a hundred or so miles off the coast on a chilly spring day. After an hour or two of bobbing around, if he’s still breathing, the Minister should once again be asked if he is comfortable with the status quo.

Mr. Mackay’s comments came on the same day that former Chief Justice, T. Alex Hickman, the man who headed up the inquiry into the Ocean Ranger disaster, reiterated his concern about rescue services in the area and called once again for an improvement to those services.

Mackay's comments also came after a Cougar Helicopters spokesperson informed the public that Cougar, which runs the closest commercial rescue helicopters to the Province's offshore oil platforms is incapable of performing night rescues. A service that can be performed by Search and Rescue choppers which are not stationed near the oil fields and are not available for immediate response during the overnight hours.

Nobody is saying that any of the seventeen people who died during the recent offshore helicopter crash would have survived if Search and Rescue services had been faster but one thing is for certain. At the time of the crash there was not a single Search and Rescue helicopter in the Province. They were all away on training exercises in Nova Scotia.

The lone survivor was rescued by a Cougar Helicopter crew.

In my day one and one always equaled two.

In this case it's pretty clear that had that terrible crash happened at night instead of in the morning, the death toll would have surely included another name.

Luck and good timing are not the kind of "configuration" most of us would want to depend upon for our survival if we were the ones suddenly faced with a life expectancy of hours or even minutes.

For Mr. Mackay to say he's OK with the practice of allowing Search and Rescue to leave the Province without any service while conducting training is callous at best. To say it's acceptable that rescue crews are available "on call" after regular business hours (4 pm) while knowing full well that the private sector backup option cannot operate at night, is nothing more than cold hearted, disgusting and neglegence of the highest order.

The Minister's attitude is a slap in the face to the family of every person who has died at sea in recent years.

In the latest tragedy off Newfoundland and Labrador's shores nobody can directly point to an impact relating from the poor level of service being offered by the federal government but there are other cases where its been shown that even a reasonable level of service would have saved lives.

I’m sure in all these cases the people of Newfoundland and Labrador and especially the families of the victims involved, will find it hard to understand Mr. Mackay’s cold and callous position on this.

I began this article by suggesting that Mr. Mackay might benefit from spending a little time bobbing around the North Atlantic in a survival suit. I’d like to retract that statement and suggest instead that the Minister of Defence try it in February, without a survival suit, after dark, on a weekend while Search and Rescue crews are away on training.

In doing so he might actually accomplish something worthwhile for his Country, if only once.

Tradgedy at Sea Raises Rescue Services Concerns

UPDATE: Sunday March 15, 2:14 pm - From VOCM News

The Transportation Safety Board (TSB) has confirmed that they have located at least some of the victims from Thursday's Cougar helicopter crash. The TSB says they estimate 10-13 bodies are inside the downed chopper. One of which has already been recovered, and is on board the Osprey.

The TSB has changed their original recovery plan. At first, they had planned to raise the mostly intact chopper with the bodies inside. At closer inspection, it appears the aircraft is not in as good shape as they had originally thought. They feel the best way to ensure safe retrieval of the victims is to recover them before raising the helicopter.

END UPDATE

Once again this week the people of Newfoundland and Labrador find themselves facing a tradgedy at sea. This time the toll is 17 lives with one survivor in critical but stable condition.

When the news broke on Thursday that a Sikorsky helicopter carrying passengers from the Province to offshore oil platforms had gone down my mind immediately returned to the Ocean Ranger disaster more than 2 decades ago.

When the Ocean Ranger, the world’s largest semi-submersable oil rig, sank in 1982 it took all 84 lives onboard.

There were no survivors.

To this point nobody knows the reason for this latest disaster but as more news begins to filter out questions are being asked.

Newfoundland and Labrador has 3 major offshore production facilities. The people of the province have depended on the offshore and inshore fishery for centuries. There are ferry services between the island and Nova Scotia as well as between the island and Labrador. It is a Province that is directly linked to the frigid North Atlantic yet at the time this terrible incident happened there wasn’t a single search and rescue aircraft stationed anywere in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

This is not an attempt to blame the Coast Guard for the outcome of this tradgedy but questions have never the less been raised and they are quite valid.

The first aircraft to respond was another helicopter sent by Cougar out of St. John’s, the company that managed the down chopper as well. Search and Rescue aircraft did not respond until later, after the lone survivor and a single fatality had been plucked from the water by the Cougar crew.

The reason: All Search and Rescue aircraft had to fly in from Sidney, Nova Scotia where the crews were on training exercises. Not a single aircraft was available in Newfoundland itself.

When asked about the response time during a Thursday evening press conference Maj. Denis McGuire, who was leading the rescue mission gave a response that appeared to be an attempt to deflect criticism and soften the facts.

In his response McGuire said that the response aircraft were not dispatched from Gander because they were on training in Sydney which is in the Western region. As a result the response was about 30 minutes longer than would otherwise have been the case. He then said there is now way to know which area of the province's offshore would have an emergency, indicating that a crew could be in the opposite area (East vs. West) which was the case this time when the rescue call came in.

What Mr. McGuire did not say, but what is quite clear, is that these aircraft were not in the “Western” area of the Province. They were not in the Province at all.

Sidney, Nova Scotia is approximately 90 miles or 145 kilometres from the Western edge of Newfoundland. This placed the aircraft approximately 600 kilometres from the crash site rather than the 300 which would have been the case had they been at their base in Gander, which is centrally located on the island.

The esimate of the additional time it took to respond, 30 minutes, which was given at the press conference, was later modified from 30 minutes to 1 hour.

"In this case, it took approximately an hour longer for the aircraft to get on scene," McGuire told CBC News on Friday.

McGuire told reporters that the province had adequate search and rescue protection despite the training exercise.

Mr. McGuire may believe the service is "adequate" but I wonder if he would feel the same way if one of his loved ones was trying to survive in the North Atlantic in March. Knowing what he knows about response times how would he feel if he were the one being buffetted by waves in frigid waters offshore?

"I am satisfied that the persons of Newfoundland and Labrador had continued coverage for search and rescue," McGuire said. "The aircraft were on standby for this region, but they were doing it out of Sydney at the time."

Is this good enough?

Nobody is saying that a faster response time would have made any difference in this particular case, but what about the next time or the time after that?

In the past we’ve seen incidents of overturned or sinking fishing vessels that did not receive a response for hours because crew had to be called in “after regular working hours”.

The case of the Milinda and Keith comes readily to mind. In that case it was shown that a faster response time would have saved lives that were instead lost because of delays caused by not having a crew on duty and having to call them in after the distress was received.

Now is a time when the hearts and minds of everyone in the Province goes out to the families of those who lost their lives, as it should be. It's a time for communities to come together to offer whatever solace can be offered and that is happening across Newfoundland and Labrador. Never the less, in the coming days answers are required and issues need to be raised at the highest levels.

When, if ever, should there be an “after hours” period for emergencies to take place?

When is it acceptable for an entire Province, which is so dependent on the ocean, to be without a single search and rescue aircraft available?