Federal Minister
Gary Lunn

Gary Lunn is the federal
Minister of State Respon-
sible for Sport and member
ot Parliament for Saanich-
Gulf Islands. Before becorn-
ing a lawyer and then an
MP in 1997, he worked in
the Arctic as a construction
superintendent in the mining industrv and was a
Journeyman carpenter as well as a safety officer
for Crestbrook Forest Industiies. He has taught
first aid for St. John’s Ambulance and cardio-
pulmonary resuscitation for the Canadian Heart
Foundation and was a member of the Canadian
Ski Patrol. He has also been both a volunteer fire
fighter in the Slocan Valley, B.C., and for five years
4 part-time paramedic with the B.C. Ambulance
Service in Cranbrook.

“L first had one course with the Justice In-
stitute five years before my involvement with the
Paramedic Academy. In the early 1980s, | was
with a mining company in Slocan City a little
community ot 300 people where the entire fire
department is volunteer In my mid-twenties, |
joined the department and the JI came in one
weekend and put on a course. At the end, we
went out to an abandoned house In a field that
we burned to the ground to do some great hands-
on training.

CR a eS Oa

frankly wasn't my skill set,’ Vertesi says. Williams— once a young musician
in the band of a fellow Welshman, the pop singer Tom Jones—had earned
a Master of Science Degree from the University of Oregon and taught para-
medics at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary.

The Institute’s 1980-81 annual report spelled out priorities for the new
EHSA: “The development of a distance and in-house educational delivery
system for Emergency Health Services personnel...the restructuring of the
Emergency Medical Assistant II program [and] the unique structure of
the Justice Institute allows ambulance, fire and police students to develop
common and cooperative skills together in controlled simulations...the
introduction of the Trauma Program [to provide] communities with ambu-
lance personnel trained in the skills necessary to stabilize a trauma victim at
the scene of an accident and en route to the hospital. ..a cardiopulmonary
resuscitation section for both public and Advanced Cardiac Life Support
courses.”

In its first few years, the program managed to weather government
restraint measures and survived what the 1983-84 annual report called
“ambiguity about the future of the Emergency Health Services Academy.”
That year, it became the first ambulance school in Canada to receive
accreditation from the Canadian Medical Association. Dr. Vertesi was the
founding Chairman of the CMAs accreditation committee.

In more than twenty years as Director of what became the Paramedic
Academy, Tony Williams helped make it a world-renowned centre for
emergency medical services training and development. Under his guid-
ance, for example, it assumed training for paramedics in the integrated
Air Ambulance Service—one of the largest such fleets in the world—that
now serves the rural and remote areas of the province from four bases. The
Academy delivers the provincial First Responder Program of basic first
aid and support training for police and fire personnel who may arrive on
an accident or injury scene before paramedics. In 1997, he spearheaded a
shift from traditional training within the Ambulance Service to a problem-
based system that blends face-to-face and e-learning technology to reach
health care practitioners in over 200 sites throughout the province. The
Academy’s international reputation led to major foreign sales of paramedic
training. An outstanding example is the ongoing partnership and personnel
exchange between the Justice Institute and the ambulance service of Hong
Kong. “Our hosts,” Williams reported in returning from a trip there in
1991, “were duly impressed”

In 1998, the Institute gave him the President's Award of Excellence.
At the same ceremony, the Paramedic Academy honoured the group of
nurses and doctors who instructed in the Advanced Cardiac Life Support
course, created under his leadership, The course—which enables a more
effective response to cardiac arrests in emergency rooms or at the scene of