Kevin Patterson is a Canadian novelist and internist based in British Columbia.
Chris McGreal, writing in The Guardian Tuesday, expresses astonishment at the speed and competence of the community response to the Leviathan II sinking off Tofino. The five deaths that resulted were tragic, but that number could easily have reached 27 had local boaters – largely First Nations people, from the Ahousaht First Nation – not responded so quickly and with such competence.
Coastal British Columbians share his gratitude but are a little less astonished because this is a story we have heard before. When the Queen of the North ferry collided with a reef off Gil Island shortly after midnight on March 22, 2006, the Hartley Bay First Nation responded almost en masse and succeeded in bringing 99 of the 101 souls on board safely to shore. The local winds reached 75 kilometres an hour that late winter night.
For a time, a proposal circulated to name the Queen of the North's replacement after Hartley Bay, but the idea was rejected by BC Ferries. The best and most sincere reward for heroism is their sincerely felt gratitude – this seems to have been the thinking of the city-dwelling businesspeople who run the corporation.
And from glass-enclosed offices in cities, it might seem equally reasonable, even inevitable, that meaningful search-and-rescue resources be controlled from there and mostly based there. So it is that, when air assets are necessary for search and rescue in the Arctic, the call goes to Canadian Forces Base Trenton in southern Ontario.
The military's ongoing presence in the little communities of Northern and Arctic Canada is confined to the under-funded Rangers – mostly indigenous men and women who patrol the coasts and hinterlands of the emptiest parts of the country. Contrast this to the U.S. Coast Guard and the other branches of its military, which is omnipresent along its coasts, even and especially in its Arctic territories.
Here's a proposal, made in gratitude and in recognition of the competence and courage of the people who live on the edges of our country: Let prime-minister-designate Justin Trudeau assign formal primary responsibility for search and rescue to the First Nations communities on the edges of the nation.
Every coastal and Arctic community could have a paid Coast Guard squadron. Its members could receive extensive first aid and paramedical training – and the most promising of them could be encouraged to become nurses and physicians. Those with gifts for navigation, seamanship and airmanship, could be encouraged to play more prominent roles in the Coast Guard's and the Hydrographic Service's major vessels.
The money, albeit too little, is being spent anyway, but in the south, where jobs are plentiful; the assets are kept far from the most dangerous and isolated parts of the country. Canada's major naval bases are in Esquimalt, near Victoria, and in Halifax. There is almost no ongoing professional search-and-rescue presence in the Arctic Ocean.
Let prime-minister-designate Trudeau declare that the abandoned Nanisivik deep-water port be rebuilt as a year-round Coast Guard base, with a polar-capable icebreaker and aerial search-and-rescue capability. Let the men and women staffing it be drawn mostly from dozens, even hundreds of local Coast Guard detachments in Hartley Bay and Ahousaht and Prince Rupert and Naujat and Rankin Inlet and Nain and Happy Valley.
This could all be seen as gestures of gratitude. But it could also be seen as nation building.