North Shore Rescue members were out on the coldest night of the year Monday in search of a snowshoer reported lost in the backcountry. She’d become separated from her group and called for help. Thankfully, she turned up safe – at home – where she later called from to say she was fine.
It’s a frustrating call, we’re sure, for the all-volunteer team of professionals who are coming off the busiest year in their history.
In 2016, the B.C. Liberal government put up $10 million in grant funding for the B.C. Search and Rescue Association, the umbrella group for the province’s 80 volunteer rescue teams, to be spent on training, equipment and education in the hopes that calls like the one on Monday could be avoided. With that two-year grant funding about to run dry, the B.C. Liberals are calling for the NDP to find more grant money, lest search and rescue funding fall back to the paltry amount they supplied rescue teams before.
Thanks to austerity budgets and an unprecedented windfall of cash reaped from the real estate market, the NDP inherited a tidy surplus. And they have certainly been making it rain in a lot of sectors that were badly hurting for funding – housing, transit, health care, social assistance. It remains to be seen where the province’s beloved search and rescue teams fit on the NDP’s priority list.
Of course, we think this funding should be restored, but we hope the NDP goes one better and finally provides the sustainable funding the teams need so that on the nights they aren’t out searching for the lost and the injured, they aren’t having to beg for corporate donations.
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