Green councillor wants $600K boost to restore Vancouver lifeguard service

A Vancouver city councillor is pushing to restore lifeguard service at three local beaches.

Green party councillor and mayoral candidate Pete Fry is putting forward a motion at Wednesday’s council meeting aimed at reversing cuts to lifeguard service at Spanish Banks, Sunset and Third beaches.

The park board moved to cut lifeguards from those beaches after Mayor Ken Sim’s ABC party voted to freeze property taxes.

But Fry wants lifeguards re-instated—at a cost of $600,000.

“I think it’s important to kind of recognize that lifeguards aren’t just out there swimming out into the deep ocean with a surfboard and plucking people out of the sea,” Fry told CTV News on Monday. “They’re actually doing a lot of preventative work.”

Despite some hard decisions related to the city’s property tax freeze, Fry insists council has options.

“There’s a free fireworks show for $2 million that (Sim) managed to find money for in the midst of a zero means zero, a zero per cent budget increase, so I think that this I believe is a more compelling priority than a free fireworks show,” Fry said.

While some of Vancouver’s most popular beaches like Kitsilano and English Bay will still have lifeguard service, Lifesaving Society is concerned about the elimination of lifeguards from the beaches highlighted by Fry.

“We know that fewer than one per cent of drownings occurred in lifeguarded areas,” Lifesaving Society B.C. and Yukon executive director Lenea Grace said Monday. “Which of course means that 99 per cent of incidents in occur in non-supervised areas. And we would hate to see even one drowning happen this summer as a result of no stationed lifeguards.”

The death of Vancouver Community College student Rahul Ranwa on Wreck Beach last year – a non-lifeguarded beach – highlights the dangers, says the park board’s chair.

“This is also an important season because we have FIFA ongoing and we’re expecting a lot of visitors from around the world,” Park board chair Tom Digby told CTV News. “Many of whom won’t know these waters.”

Beyond Wednesday’s council meeting, the union for Vancouver lifeguards has also started a petition which had gathered nearly three thousand signatures as of Monday afternoon pushing council to reverse lifeguard cuts.

CTV News did not receive a response from the mayor’s office before broadcast deadline.