USQUE AD MARE
A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton

The Task

The modern concept of marine search and rescue, using both ships and aircraft in a complex network of communications, covers the entire country. When disaster strikes, whether it be at a long liner missing in the Atlantic, a pleasure boat in the Great Lakes, or a West Coast halibut catcher, the system is designed to provide the best possible help in the fastest way. Operating always in the provision of emergency services, often with uncertain information on which to base decisions for search and rescue, and sometimes under weather conditions among the worst in the world, it is not to be though that success is easy to attain. At all levels endless vigilance, much patience, some frustration and a never failing capacity for perseverance in the face of difficulties, precedes the successful conclusion of many incidents. On the technical side, a high level of professional skill, and the use of first class equipment, is essential.

Apart from emergencies in a marine environment, misfortune may happen anywhere in the land mass of Canada, far outside the reach of helping agencies such as police, fire departments or medical aid. As the use of fixed-wing aircraft and continental communication is implicit in covering this range of possibilities, both marine and landward sides of the organization are combined under one co-ordinator, the Department of National Defence which, since July 1951, has been the principal agency for co-ordinating all search and rescue services. This responsibility was shared when, in 1961, the Canada Shipping Act was amended to empower the Minister of Transport to designate marine co-ordinators to organize search and rescue work on the high seas and on the coast of Canada.

Apart from a purely national responsibility, the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea, to which Canada is a signatory, obliges participating countries to assume a protective attitude for shipping in waters adjacent to their coasts and, both by statute and tradition, all shipmasters are obliged to help one another in time of trouble and distress.

Historically, the rescue service may be divided into four periods, ranging from pre-Confederation to the present day. Before Confederation the Province of Nova Scotia maintained a station on Sable Island with provisions and stores for shipwrecked seaman, as they did also on St. Paul's Island and, in a smaller way, at Mud and Seal Islands, a short distance west of the southern tip of the Province. In this period the Sable Island station was the largest, having a staff of a superintendent and fifteen boatmen by Confederation, while St. Paul's station, although generally similar, had a superintendent and four boatmen. The establishments at Seal and Mud Islands, and another at Scatterie, were maintained by the lighthouse keeper who provided his own boatmen.

In the second period of rescue activity, coinciding roughly with the rise and fall of the Canadian sailing ship, the Department of Marine and Fisheries, which had inherited the Nova Scotia Humane stations, provided numerous shore based lifeboats, complete with crews and boathouses in the areas where experience had shown that ships were most likely to drive ashore. These stations, numbering over three dozen all over the country, reached a high degree of efficiency in the days before the first world war but, with the subsequent decline in the schooner traffic, their usefulness diminished until, with the advent of the second world war, the lifeboat men went to sea in national service and the boathouses were, of necessity, allowed to fall into decay.

The third period, from 1946 until the early nineteen sixties, marked a low point in our search and rescue organization. True, the number of government ships available for such work was on the increase, but the lifeboat stations had been reduced to three, one in Nova Scotia and two on the coast of Vancouver Island. With the demise of the sailing ship and schooner there were considerably fewer casualties in merchant shipping, but a rising awareness of the age-old risks of the fishing industry gave increasing cause of concern.

The fourth and present period is marked by an additional risk which hardly existed in any of the previous phases, the presence of large numbers of pleasure boats, sometimes in places which had previously been almost bereft of vessels. It is in this last decade that the shore-based lifeboat service is once again fulfilling a necessary function and that offshore search and rescue, more than ever a necessary aid to the fishing industry, is being reinforced by the construction of ocean going rescue cutters able to maintain the sea in all weathers.

Organized rescue services, which have been a government marine activity for over a hundred years, originated on Sable Island and were greatly helped by private enterprise and philanthropy.