Senator Rose-May Poirier

Senator Poirier: Mr. Cook, thank you for the presentation and for being here.

From what you have told us and from what I see, your organization is roughly made up of about 30 volunteers and like most organizations, you mention there are challenges in recruitment and retention and in the importance of getting the youth involved to be able to carry on. That’s a challenge we hear from different groups out there.

In contrast to a lot of other voluntary maritime SARs organizations, what’s different about yours is you don’t depend on any government funding whatsoever, from what I can see. You described that you’re doing fundraising and different things and I can just assume the costs of having an organization like yours. You’re looking at training. Do you have your own equipment? If yes, obviously you have maintenance and operational costs, insurance for the volunteers, I would imagine. And I’m just naming a few.

I’m asking if you can share the type of fundraising you are doing, what challenges you are facing. It is a contrast to a lot who we have heard from and talked to where they depend on some type of government funding, federally provincially or locally. So if you can share that, it would be great.

Mr. Cook: Over the last three or four years, we’ve had to expand our activities. We’re like the little engine that could, in a way.

For many years, we were a small society dedicated to supporting one boat or maybe two boats which belonged to our members. In 2013, we bought this very impressive retiring offshore lifeboat from the RNLI in the U.K., so now we have to buy our own boat, do the maintenance and upgrade and train to it. So that compelled our fundraising to be more imaginative. It’s still not as coordinated. We’re looking for someone who really knows fundraising and those are valuable qualities. We think we have a couple of people who might assist but a lot of what we do is personal contacts. Some of our senior members know people in the marine community, tug companies, stevedoring companies and import-export.

We get some funds from them, but it’s usually after an event and it’s simply paying for our fuel. So we just ask them for a donation, and it doesn’t cover our actual costs.

For the last four years, as with many other search and rescue organizations in B.C., we apply to lottery and gaming, so all B.C. citizens are supporting us, in a way, with that grant. That has helped us buy new equipment, to a certain extent. They have a component of their granting that is for specified equipment.

We all contribute vast amounts of time, which can translate into a dollar amount and is then used for us to go out to organizations and say, “Our people are contributing X number of hours, say at an hourly cost.”

We get some money from some service clubs. We will go and make a presentation, particularly if some of them are boaters and we have an in there: army, navy and air force organizations, as well as legions. You can usually ask for an annual grant at a legion. It’s not a great deal of money, but it helps us with our specified projects.

All in all, it means we have to prioritize our repairs, purchases and upgrades for better equipment.

I will say we’re proud of ourselves. We bought this boat from England, and we had a nine-year period to pay it off. Through our own efforts, we paid it off in three and a half years, which meant we could turn funds to repairs and maintenance. Fortunately, we get a considerable financial benefit from our own members who are good mechanics. They’re worth their weight in gold. We can do a lot of first- and second-line maintenance and repairs. Many times I’ve thrown something in my trunk and taken it to a repair facility simply to keep our costs down. We can’t go running to ship yards every time we have issues.

It’s a variety of fundraising efforts. I don’t believe we’re working as well as we should yet. We try to regularize what we do and reach out to any organization with an interest in search and rescue. Of course, every other search and rescue organization is making appeals to them as well.

Senator Poirier: When you say CLI is not dependent on government funding, is it that you’ve never applied, or you applied and—

Mr. Cook: No, we never applied. We took the model from RNLI in England, which, for 200 years — it grew out of fishermen and villagers helping themselves, rowing out to vessels in distress. Gradually, it grew into a national organization, and now it’s a huge corporation. We have people who visited them. We buy their boats on occasion. We’ve taken them as a model for our fundraising.

Some of our people have been in at the inception of the Coast Guard Auxiliary in B.C., which only started in the early 1980s. Until then, there had been nothing like that as an assist to the Coast Guard. Our people found once you get into an organization with those types of constraints, you may end up having to meet financial, administrative or other demands that you just don’t have the resources to meet. We always decided we would be our own boss as much as possible, but always trying to integrate, at least at a working level, with other entities.

Senator Poirier: Congratulations, because it looks like you guys are doing a good job.

Mr. Cook: I think we are right now, particularly in our reaching out to other groups like the Coast Guard, Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue, and federal entities.

Senator Poirier: We’re doing a study and the committee will be writing a report. We will be sending recommendations. Which recommendations do you believe are crucial and absolutely needed that you recommend be in the report to improve marine search and rescue?

Mr. Cook: As I said, I believe the Coast Guard on the west coast is an impressive entity — and RCSR. If you want to do evidence-based planning, if you get it from groups like that— where are the major sources of instance, who is involved — it can allow targeting for educational campaigns, navy enforcement campaigns and equipment purchases. I believe the Coast Guard has not received the kinds of resources on occasion they could use on the West Coast.

My recommendation would be to grill them but listen to them as real experts in the field. If they say they need a particular type of craft or equipment, I would say, “There is the evidence,” which can be checked out easily enough. You can compare with other coast guards, U.S. or the RNLI, to see what is necessary for this marine environment.

I don’t think those issues can be solved by centralized planning. They should be localized or listened to from where the events are happening. That would be my recommendation.

Senator Poirier: Thank you.