Patrol pooch gets the boot
Despite an outpouring of support from colleagues who offered to forfeit a stat holiday to save her job, Bailey’s last day as a federal government employee came Friday.
The Canada Border Services Agency staffer is among some 12,000 public servants facing job cuts as a result of the last federal budget, but Bailey is not your typical employee, which might explain why more than 95 per cent of her colleagues signed a petition in the hopes she could stay.
Bailey is a seven-year-old, 60-pound chocolate lab.
She spends her days sniffing out firearms and narcotics hidden inside shipping containers arriving in Vancouver, though her biggest bust was at the airport a year-and-a-half ago when she discovered seven kilos of opium. She’s also good for boosting morale among her co-workers and serves as a proud department ambassador by posing with tourists arriving on cruise ships.
She spends her evenings at home with handler Rob Freer, a 17-year veteran CBSA detector-dog handler and trainer who thinks the government is making a big mistake by disbanding Bailey, her co-pooch in Vancouver Brodie, and a number of other canine teams across the country.
“The dog is the only way you can cover an area quickly,” Freer said Friday, hours before he and colleagues were to hold a farewell barbecue in her honour. “Knock on wood, every shipment I ever cleared, nobody else has ever gone out and found something later on. (With the machines), the opposite has happened. I’ve gone down and the machine said nothing and the dogs come down right away and hit on it.”
But not only are dogs more reliable than ion scanners and VACIS (Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System) machines, according to Freer who was fielding calls for inspections right up until Bailey’s final hours on the job, they also facilitate commerce.
For example, officers often have concerns about shipping containers that arrive at the dock. As it stands, if the K9 unit can’t get to the scene to conduct an inspection within a few hours, the load is tagged and sent to a warehouse to be inspected manually.
“The importer gets charged anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 for that and it adds another seven days to the process, so one of the major advantages that we keep trying to tell them is yes, 90 per cent of the work I do is just clearing containers off the docks when the officers aren’t sure,” he said. “You’re talking almost a quarter-of-amillion a month is what you’re saving real Canadian businesses.”
Freer, who will continue his job as a CBSA officer and is making plans to keep Bailey since she’s getting too old to find a new job.