VICTORIA — The crew aboard a cargo ship believed to be carrying Tamil migrants to British Columbia has told the Canadian Coast Guard there are at least 450 people from Sri Lanka on board and they are happy to be coming to Canada.
A crew member on a neighbouring fishing vessel has been listening in on radio transmissions and told The Canadian Press people on the MV Sun Sea have been peppered with questions from the coast guard.
“Just asking 10,000 questions, about how many sick, how many dead, how many women, how many children — many, many, many questions,” Rory Smith, the chief mate on a fishing vessel that was positioned several kilometres from the ship early Thursday afternoon, said in an interview over satellite phone.
“It was 490 people on board, then it was 480, then it was 450. No dead, they had one that was probably sick,” he said, recalling the answers to those questions.
There have been reports that one person aboard the cargo ship is dead.
Smith said the ship in communication with the coast guard shows up on his vessel’s navigation equipment as the MV Harin Panich, which is the name of the ship before it became known as the MV Sun Sea.
The fisherman said the ship’s crew indicated they are from Sri Lanka and eager to reach Canadian shores
“They’re very happy to be here, they’ve suffered all their lives and they’re very happy to be in Canada,” said Smith.
“I’m from Florida, so this is a daily thing down there,” Smith added, pointing to the flow of migrants from Cuba and Haiti.
Just after noon Thursday, the cargo ship was located about 50 kilometres southwest of the Vancouver Island community of Ucluelet.
The ship was expected to sail through the Juan de Fuca Strait before landing in the Victoria region, and preparations appeared underway at nearby Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt
Smith said his radar indicated the ship was being escorted by navy vessels, although he couldn’t see the Sun Sea through thick fog.
A federal government source had previously told The Canadian Press there could be about 300 people on the ship, but added officials weren’t sure of the exact figure.
Calls to the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency, and the Canadian and U.S. coast guards were all redirected to the federal Public Safety Department, which was not providing any information Thursday.
Two Vancouver-area jails have been told to make room for a flood of new inmates this week and a news helicopter has broadcast footage of tents and portable toilets set up at CFB Esquimalt.
Thursday morning, a flotilla of at least five RCMP vessels carrying armed personnel left Esquimalt Harbour, although police wouldn’t confirm their departure was related to the migrant ship.
Legal aid officials have called in immigration lawyers to act as duty counsel for the migrants once they arrive, and members of the Canadian Tamil Congress were travelling to B.C. to offer any help that is needed.
The Vancouver Island Health Authority was setting aside a space at Victoria General Hospital to treat anyone aboard the ship requiring medical care.
“(Vancouver Island Health Authority) has been asked by federal and provincial authorities to plan for the potential delivery of humanitarian health-care services to passengers and crew if and when this ship arrives on our shores,” the health region’s director of emergency management, Norma Jones, wrote in a memo to staff this week.
“At this point, we do not even have official confirmation that Vancouver Island is a potential landing site for this ship. However, as is the case in any emergency response plan, we are planning for the worst case scenario while hoping for the best case outcome.”
Jones said any passengers from the ship will be isolated from general patient population.
It would be the second ship carrying Tamil migrants to arrive off the B.C. coast in the past year.
Last October, a vessel carrying 76 Tamils arrived in Victoria on a vessel called the Ocean Lady, with all of those passengers subsequently making refugee claims.
Some were accused of having links to the Tamil Tigers, the militant wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the military arm of the Tamil separatist movement and a banned terrorist organization in Canada.
But all have since been released and their lawyers have noted immigration officials found no evidence linking any of the men to the Tigers.
The Sun Sea’s arrival has been marked by the same speculation that members of the Tamil Tigers will be among the passengers, with the Sri Lankan government insisting the ship’s arrival is little more than an illicit human smuggling operation and not a humanitarian exercise.
One of the migrants aboard the Ocean Lady told The Canadian Press he paid C$45,000 to travel to Canada to escape the violence of Sri Lanka. The country is still recovering from a bloody civil war that spanned a quarter-century before government forces crushed the Tamil Tigers last year.
The passenger, a man in his 20s who asked his name not be published, denied having any involvement with the Tigers and said he knows first-hand why ethnic Tamils would want to flee Sri Lanka.
“It’s safe for me to say that I know what they’re feeling, what they’re going through, because I’ve been through it,” said the man through a translator arranged by the Canadian Tamil Congress.
“I think they are civilians just like me coming on the boat and looking for a better opportunity.”
An estimated 300,000 civilians were detained in camps for months following the government’s defeat of Tamil Tigers rebels in the middle of last year, and about 33,000 remain in those camps. The Sri Lankan government says they are allowed to freely move out and come back.
A Sri Lankan government-appointed commission is looking into the civil war with hearings that began Wednesday, but human rights groups have said the commission is aimed at deflecting calls for an international probe of alleged war crimes.