Question SCUBA, the self-policing industry

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So this begs the question (and I am purely playing devil's advocate here...) why the skateparks don't offer/require a cert? The companies that sell the rigging for kites? The National Park which hosts the rock formation which people climb, at their own risk? The mountain biking trail with advanced paths? Don't get me started on the "road cyclists" LOL
Yes, that disparity has long been noted.

I live in a rock climbers paradise, and several people are killed climbing each year. I have never heard of anyone calling for the cliffs they were climbing to be closed. Yet, as has been noted, there have been more than a few cases of caves being closed when a diver dies in one.

One major factor is that many and perhaps most of the dives in the world are done off of boats, and those boats are owned by operators who take you out and manage the dives for you. Those operators can be sued if there is a fatality. That leads them to do what they can to make sure that the divers they carry have the necessary ability to do the dives safely. It would be impractical to test everyone before the dive, so they rely upon certification, and for the most part, that certification will protect them in court.

Many people do not realize that the boat operators are governed by laws, and those laws require them to meet certain standards of protection for those divers. You will see many people post on ScubaBoard that a dive boat is just a taxi with no legal obligation to the divers they carry, but that is simply not true. We are seeing that these days in the cases of the burning boats, but it happens in other ways. For example, a few years ago a diver went into distress (likely cardiac event) on the surface, struggled there briefly, and drowned. The boat captain was cited and penalized by the coast guard for not being on the deck supervising while divers were entering the water and for not training the crew on standard lifesaving techniques. It turned out that a diver struggling in the water is a man overboard, and the crew is required to follow standard procedures for such an occasion.
 
France has various decrets and arrettes regulating diving, to the extend that a PADI certificate is useless.
There are many PADI dive centers in France. I dove all last summer as a PADI diver.

Diving in France is regulated under the Code du Sport. If you are a resident there is a license (46€/year) that includes dive insurance and requires a medical exam by a Dr knowledgeable about diving (Médecin de plongée).
 
Quebec....
 
To golf at the club we were members at I had to earn a "bag tag" which included a written test on the rules of golf, and to play supervised rounds of golf demonstrating my comprehension and displaying course/golf etiquette....

Could you imagine having golf police???
 
To golf at the club we were members at I had to earn a "bag tag" which included a written test on the rules of golf, and to play supervised rounds of golf demonstrating my comprehension and displaying course/golf etiquette....

Could you imagine having golf police???
They don't have marshalls where you play?
 
If you don't like rules and fun police, come to NZ. Up until Christchurch (one of our very few mass shooting), even our gun laws were extremely lax (not compared to the USA, but the USA is an extreme outlier in this respect). Even where there are laws, enforcement is a huge issue in a country with a low population density and difficult geography.

Lots of people don't repeat their mistakes: Beyond halfway: diver died on 100m-deep dream wreck.
 
Wasn’t there some big cave rescue with that Rick Stanton fella and he mentioned he didn’t have a dive cert?
I wonder if he’s allowed to dive in south Florida…
 
Wasn’t there some big cave rescue with that Rick Stanton fella and he mentioned he didn’t have a dive cert?
I wonder if he’s allowed to dive in south Florida…
In this DiverNet interview, he says his initial training was with BSAC.

In about 1967, Jean-Michel Cousteau was preparing for a week of diving in Australia, but the captain said no one could dive without certification--no exceptions. After a lot of arguing, he finally relented for Cousteau. As soon as he got to the USA, Cousteau got his PADI certification so that would not happen again.
 
To golf at the club we were members at I had to earn a "bag tag" which included a written test on the rules of golf, and to play supervised rounds of golf demonstrating my comprehension and displaying course/golf etiquette....

Could you imagine having golf police???
At the Atlantis resort in Puerta Galera, Philippines, I had to sit through an instructional video on buoyancy control for photography before I could dive, even though I was not a photographer.

Checkout dives are common on liveaboards and dive operations. I have had to do them on more than a few occasions. After one such dive in Australia, we were divided into groups. One was obviously intensive care. Two others would get increasing levels of independence. My friends and I were allowed to dive unsupervised.
 

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