This week our marine community absorbed devastating news. A charter fishing vessel capsized off Steveston in Richmond, BC on June 28, with ten people on board. Four survivors were rescued from the water. Six people are presumed drowned, and RCMP have said the vessel likely went down in water between 150 and 180 metres deep, which is part of why recovery efforts have taken so long for the families still waiting for answers.
I didn't know anyone on that boat. But I've spent years in rooms with vessel operators, crew, and Ship Managers who look a lot like the people on it. When I read about this, I felt the same gut punch I think most people in this industry felt. It could have been any operator. It could have been any weekend.
RCMP have not determined a cause, and I won't guess at one here. What I can talk about is what a Safety Management System is built to do, regardless of what eventually comes out of this investigation.
An SMS is not a binder for compliance. It's a documented pattern for how a vessel and crew actually run, day to day. Pre-departure checks. Condition reporting. Maintenance schedules. Clear lines for how issues get escalated before they turn into emergencies. Under Transport Canada's MSMSR (SOR/2024-133) and TP 15566, commercial operators are required to have one, and increasingly, smaller charter operations are being expected to as well.
I know from doing this work that a lot of operators see SMS documentation as a hurdle to clear and then shelve until the next audit. I understand why. It's dense, technical, and time consuming to build properly.
But its purpose was never the paperwork. Its purpose is making sure that when something is wrong with a vessel, there's a system in place that catches it, records it, and forces a decision before that vessel goes back out.
I don't know if that would have changed anything in Richmond. Nobody does yet. But every time I finish a gap analysis for a client and find missing maintenance logs, undocumented operating limits, or unclear reporting lines, I think about how close a gap like that could come to mattering on the wrong day.
If you operate a commercial vessel in Canada and you're not fully sure your SMS documentation would hold up to real scrutiny, now is a good time to find out. Not out of fear, but because the people who step onto your boat are trusting you with something they cannot take back once it goes wrong.
My thoughts are with everyone touched by this tragedy, the families still waiting for news, and the rescuers who spent days searching cold water for people they had never met.
If you'd like a second set of eyes on your SMS, whether it's a first build or a review of what you already have, I'm always glad to talk through where the hard questions might come from before Transport Canada asks them.