IN the face of the planned closure of the Kitsilano Coast Guard station, the North Shore's newly re-branded marine rescue volunteers have become the unwilling focus of controversy.
Canadian Coast Guard officials have asked the unpaid Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue (until recently known as the Coast Guard Auxiliary) to take on more work and respond to more rescue calls in order to fill the gap left by the federal station's termination, announced recently as part of a wider program of cutbacks.
But a retired Coast Guard captain said the decision to replace professionals with volunteers is foolhardy at best - and at worst, dangerous.
"There's going to be blood on somebody's hands at the end of the day," warned Dave Howell, who worked at Coast Guard bases in Tofino, Salt Spring, and Kitsilano during his 37-year career.
On June 26, Fisheries and Oceans Minister Kevin Ashfield announced an extra $100,000 of funding per year for the RCM-SAR. The announcement was made following a roundtable meeting the minister held with groups affected by the decision to close the Coast Guard base.
The money will be directed to RCM-SAR's Vancouver-area activities, said president Randy Strandt. It will supplement the $1 million a year the B.C. organization already gets in federal grants.
Strandt said the society didn't ask for the extra money or the increased workload.
"We didn't ask for anything to be changed, and certainly never approached (the Coast Guard) to suggest that we could do more," said Strandt. "They came to us, asking if we could do more and offering some assistance in the way of more funding."
In the Vancouver area, the volunteer RCM-SAR has stations in West Vancouver, North Vancouver and Richmond. Strandt said the society had no plans to open a new base in Vancouver.
Members of the organization take turns being on call, and on-duty rescuers can't be more than 15 minutes away from their unit's headquarters, he said. In the past few years, the organization has also invested in high-speed rescue boats outfitted with first aid and search equipment.
But the volunteers don't provide the same response time as a staffed Coast Guard base, said Howell. They also lack the skills required to coordinate a response to a major accident where many different boats from different agencies may be on the scene.
"It's kind of like being a choreographer of a play," said Howell. "You have to use all this different equipment and these different people to get the best results."
Rather than accepting the money and the work, Howell would like to see the Vancouver-area RCM-SAR stations take a stand against the closure of the Kitsilano base. That's what marine rescue volunteers did in the '90s when the Coast Guard threatened to shutter the base on Salt Spring.
"The auxiliary stood up en masse and said 'The day you close the door on Ganges we quit, and you don't have an auxiliary here,' and if you don't have an auxiliary, you can't close the Coast Guard," said Howell. "That ended it."
In many parts of the world, said Strandt, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden, marine rescue organizations are completely voluntary.
"Those are busy waterways, and I suspect the people who travel those waterways don't feel unsafe," he said.
North Shore hikers rely on volunteers to rescue them if they run into trouble in the mountains, he added, and many communities depend on volunteer firefighters.
Retired Coxswain Howell is concerned the traditionally close relationship between the Coast Guard and the RCM-SAR is being weakened.
"If you were a search and rescue crewman at another (Coast Guard) station, how would you feel about going out and training the auxiliary crew in your area?" asked Howell. "Would you think you're just training somebody who's going to take your job for nothing? Because that's what they're doing."
