Coast Guard says cutbacks are costing lives

The union that represents Canadian Coast Guard workers says more lives could have been saved in a B.C. boating tragedy last week if not for government funding cuts.

Five people died when the fishing boat Cap Rouge II capsized near the mouth of the Fraser River.

Ever since the tragedy, there's been intense criticism that rescue divers on site were prohibited from entering the vessel because they didn't have a back-up team.

On Thursday, the Canadian Union of Transportation Employees said funding cuts have come at the expense of safety.

In an interview with a Vancouver newspaper shortly after last week's tragedy, a relative of the five people who died said the skipper of the fishing boat is haunted by how the rescue effort went.

For 90 minutes Coast Guard divers waited in the water beside the overturned vessel. They were prevented from swimming underneath and looking for survivors until military divers arrived as their backup.

The reason, says union representative Michael Wing, is that managers cancelled the funding for a full compliment of Coast Guard divers.

The head of the Canadian Coast Guard has spent much of the days since the tragedy justifying the decision to abandon a pilot project that at one point had 12 fully trained rescue divers based on the West Coast.

John Adams says in six years they had rescued just one person from an underwater entrapment situation.

"In the six years, we proved quite conclusively that it's only in rare and quite exceptional circumstances that rescue diving is going to be effective," said Adams.

Nonetheless, the debate over whether rescue services are adequate continues to rage and now there's another concern.

One of the Coast Guard's two hovercraft on the West Coast is too rusted and unreliable to keep going past October, so it's unclear whether crews will still be able to respond to emergencies 24 hours a day, seven days a week.