Regarding your special report “Battling for Burton” (Dec. 22).
For a so-called “expert” on search and rescue, Mr. Clarence Peddle seems to know remarkably little about the subject, notwithstanding his “nearly 30 years” of coast guard experience.
He offers nothing but a long, rambling opinion, which seems not to be shared by anyone else with any knowledge of the subject.
From the very title, “Facts vs Government Fiction,” it is clear that Mr. Peddle has his own agenda.
He makes many biased statements, such as stating there is “absolutely no chance that the federal government will ever shine the light into the dark corners of its search and rescue operations,” offering nothing to back it up, other than his own opinion.
Mr. Peddle says he “wrote (his report) with the same rigour and attention he gave reports during his years with the coast guard.”
If this is typical of the quality of report that the Canadian Coast Guard produces, I’ll eat my mortarboard.
It contains neither an abstract nor an executive summary, nor is it broken into sections, as a professional report should be.
Mr. Peddle fails to provide a timeline of events; instead, he throws out facts like buckshot in an apparent attempt to confuse and bamboozle the reader.
He glosses over or ignores facts that don’t fit his agenda.
Furthermore, the document is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, some so serious that his meaning cannot be deciphered.
I have worked as a consultant with the federal government for many years.
Not one colleague that I have worked with over the years would ever submit such a badly written, poorly organized, agenda-driven document as a rough draft, let alone as a finished product.
William R. Lorimer
Conception Harbour
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
