PAM FRAMPTON
The Telegram

Every year in this province, there’s an influx of adventurers who show up wanting to cross the Atlantic in rowboats and dinghies in an attempt to break one world record or another.
And every year there’s debate about whether we should charge those brave souls liability insurance for the time and money and energy it costs us when we have to sail out into the ocean to rescue them.
But turn that idea on its head and consider this: what if you were the rescuee and the rescue went tragically wrong.
Would your rescuers be liable?
Could you sue them? Should you?
A man in Quebec is doing just that, and his lawsuit is sending chills down the spines of volunteer search and rescuers right across the country.
Perhaps no one is watching that case more closely than Harry Blackmore of Paradise, a retired firefighter who’s been involved with search and rescue for 42 years.
“It is a concern right across the country, definitely,” he told The Telegram Tuesday.
And Blackmore should know.
He is both the president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Search and Rescue Association and of the national group, Search and Rescue Volunteer Association of Canada.
He spent much of Tuesday afternoon on a conference call with search and rescue officials in British Columbia, where a couple of search and rescue groups have already withdrawn their services and a couple others are considering doing the same.
Gilles Blackburn of Quebec is suing the search and rescue team in Golden, B.C., the RCMP and Kicking Horse Resort, saying the three groups didn’t do enough to save him and his wife when they got lost in February while skiing in the mountains near Golden.
They were missing for nine days and Blackburn’s wife, 44-year-old Marie-Josee Fortin, died of hypothermia on the seventh day. Blackburn had stamped SOS marks in the snow using his skis, and the markings were noted and reported, and yet a search did not get underway for several days.
It remains to be seen whether the delay was due to a communication breakdown or some other factor.
An official with B.C.’s Provincial Emergency Program said the case is the first of its kind in British Columbia and he told the Canadian Press (CP) it is causing all search and rescue organizations to re-examine their liability coverage to ensure their volunteer members aren’t at risk of being sued while expending time and energy trying to save someone else’s life.
As the president of Kamloops Search and Rescue, Brad Russell, told CP, “They don’t want to lose their houses, families, all the things that they’ve worked for because of some litigation against a volunteer organization.”
Kamloops hasn’t withdrawn search and rescue services, but it is monitoring the situation.
In this province, with support from the Department of Justice, Blackmore said the executive members and boards of directors of search and rescue organizations are covered by liability insurance, since if any member of a rescue team was likely to be named in a lawsuit it would be the volunteers at the helm.
Individual volunteers are covered by accident insurance in the event that they are hurt while conducting a search.
The more than 1,000 volunteers in this province have been involved in evidence searches at crime scenes, human and animal rescues, high-angle rescues, helicopter retrievals and ice rescues and have always received thanks for their efforts.
Blackmore hopes things stay that way, and that the B.C. lawsuit won’t make volunteers here think twice about putting themselves on the line to help others.
“Luckily, right now we have our ducks in a row, here,” he said. “But there’s definitely a different shift in the way people think (about litigation). This puts doubts in everybody’s mind.”

Pam Frampton is The Telegram’s story editor. She can be reached by e-mail at 
pframpton@thetelegram.com.