Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 28th, 2011

[Richard Clair]

They're very sturdy structures. Let's put it that way. I think most will probably become permanent. We call them transitional shelters, but compared to what they had before, they're much better built. They're much more sturdy. They're much more resistant than anything they've ever had before. They are 18 square metres. They're not huge, but they're as big as if not bigger than many of what they had before. They're very solid. And people are very happy with them. We have letters from people who have received them about the sturdiness and how well built they are.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

I appreciate that. I'm just looking at those pictures, though, and I'm thinking about hurricanes. In your earlier remarks you were talking about their being unfortunate in Haiti. They are in the eye of a lot of nasty storms. And you feel that these shelters--they are certainly a big upgrade from where they started--would withstand the kinds of hurricanes Haiti has.

[Richard Clair]

We had them tested. SNC-Lavalin is the firm we hired. They did a study of the wind speeds in both Jacmel and Leogan, where they are most vulnerable. We built them to withstand higher winds in Jacmel than in Leogan. They are absolutely designed and built with engineers from Quebec. So we're very confident that they would resist it.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

There's a lot of frustration on the ground still, I gather, with organizational problems in a government that, first of all, as my colleague Mr. Dewar said earlier.... We can talk about the political challenges in another forum, perhaps. But there's certainly frustration with the government's lack of capacity to deliver operational capacity and essential services. The institutions really lack the confidence of the people. To what extent is that lack of organization in government capacity interfering with the ability of the Red Cross to deliver the services you're trying to deliver on the ground?

[Richard Clair]

Luckily, though, we have a privileged relationship with the Haitian Red Cross that can open doors for us. For example, last year we met with the Minister of Health to get the approval to rebuild the Jacmel hospital, and this was in the middle of the cholera epidemic and he was stashed somewhere. So we do have privileged access thanks to the Haitian Red Cross.

You have to remember, as well, that I think about 20% of the public servants were killed in the earthquake, and that has a huge impact on the delivery of services. And it was a challenge before then. Plus you have the interim commission, which is another organization that is drawing qualified people away from government, and there is competition there.

But, again, we have a privileged relationship with the Haitian Red Cross, which is able to open doors for us. We've been able to get things out of the port. We have been able to establish a logistical chain. Because of the relationships we have and the size we have, it's been a bit less difficult than for other organizations, I would say.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Well, I think one of the reasons why Canadians have a lot of confidence in the Red Cross—and the government certainly appreciates your good work—is the great model you have with capacity in the region, human resources in the region, and integration with local authorities, which certainly seems to be bearing fruit for you in that regard. And I think that's a model we certainly respect.

In regard to the building of the hospital, I heard some remarks in relation to that. Is that a hospital in Jacmel that we're taking about?

[Richard Clair]

Yes.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

I think I heard about a relationship with a hospital in Montreal. I'm wondering if you could relate a little about that experience. Where are we at in that institutional rebuild, and how does that work with the relationship with the hospital? And are you using local materials and local workers? How long does it take to rebuild an institution like that?

[Richard Clair]

It takes a while.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You can answer the question, but I just want to let Mr. Lunney know it's all of his time.

[Susan Johnson]

Why don't I just start with a little bit of the background? Then I'll ask Richard if he wants to jump in with some more of the up-to-date details.

We've been working for several months now with the Ministry of Health in the Jacmel area and with four organizations in Quebec, and those are the Sainte-Justine Hospital....

So what are the actual...?

[Richard Clair]

I forget. Is it USI?

[Susan Johnson]

USI of the Université de Montréal and the public health agency of Quebec and of Montreal. So there are four health organizations in Quebec we've partnered with, all of which are going to play a different role in this initiative where we're going to be rebuilding and rehabilitating the St-Michel hospital in Jacmel. The St-Michel hospital exists in Jacmel, but it's a debilitated structure and it needs serious work.

So we've been looking at that and looking at developing, in fact, the master plan for the rebuilding of the hospital. Our initiative to play that role has been approved by the Ministry of Health in Haiti. As I think Pam mentioned earlier, we've sort of ear-marked some of the funds we have for this integrated health initiative, which is going to include the rebuilding of the hospital, the building of probably three or four community clinics in more rural areas around Jacmel, and training for the professionals who will be needed to work in the hospital and in the clinics, as well as community basic public health programming that we'll be doing hand in hand with the Haitian Red Cross. It's an integrated program that's going to deal with basic health issues as well as provide tertiary care.

We've been constructing the partnership, essentially, and working with the Ministry of Health, as Richard explained. We are now in a dialogue with the Japanese government, which is also indicating interest in coming into the partnership with us to assist with the actual reconstruction of the hospital. We don't have the full plans yet of the hospital. It's still early days in terms of the design and everything else. We actually have a mission going from Quebec in March, so all of the partners and the Canadian Red Cross will be going to Jacmel to look at the site and look at the situation and develop further the detailed plans in terms of how all the partners come together to work on that.

One of the reasons we've built the partnership with the organizations in Quebec is that in terms of longer-term sustainability, we wanted the relationship with Sainte-Justine and the other organizations in Quebec in terms of the training of health professionals. We see ourselves, as the Red Cross, as pulling these partners together creating sort of the impetus or the catalyst for all that to happen, providing a certain amount of resources for that for a period of time, but then over time stepping back. We are imagining the organizations in Quebec and the Jacmel Ministry of Health sustaining that partnership over a longer term, once we've done what we can with the resources we have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lunney.

Mr. Rae, sir.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

I'm very interested in the question of economic development in Haiti. In my one visit there after the earthquake, one just had an overwhelming sense that there really wasn't an economy, that there was almost no way for people to actually make a living, apart from the reconstruction. What efforts are you and others making to use the reconstruction as an opportunity to give people a chance to work?

[Susan Johnson]

That's an interesting observation, and absolutely true at a certain level.

I would say, though, that Haiti is an example of where you have a very rich what we would call informal economy. People are trading and doing business on a very active level. You can certainly buy and trade just about everything in the country. What it doesn't mean, though, is that an official economy is in place where you have a functioning tax system and things like this.

What are we doing? We, the Canadian Red Cross, are not ourselves experts in what we call “livelihoods work”, which is that sort of small-scale family-level or even community-level economic development. There are other national societies—Red Crosses—like the British Red Cross and a couple of others, who are more expert in that area. For instance, in the shelter work we're involved in we've been partnering with some other national societies to bring that sort of small-scale economic activity into the programming, but it's certainly not at the level of building a factory or a major economic input that's going to employ hundreds of people for a long, long term. That's not what we see ourselves in the business of doing.

We're probably not the best-placed people to have that conversation with.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

When you do your reconstruction, when you look at the work you're doing on the housing side, all that work is presumably done by local people.

[Susan Johnson]

Absolutely. For the time that we are engaging local people, which is, as we described earlier, a very deliberate strategy, we hire local people, engage local people, and offer them training so that they actually come out of the experience with upgraded skills. We do make those kinds of initiatives. For the time that they're with us, they will get paid a very decent wage. They'll be treated humanely and appropriately, and they will come out of that experience with upgraded skills.

We're making that contribution, but what I was trying to say is that we're not in that sort of macroeconomic development business.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Understood.

I have a completely different question.

The Red Cross system must plan for a certain number of disasters of a certain size every year, everywhere. Can you give us some insight into that in terms of what your overall sense of the world...? We have to stop being surprised by these events. They happen. They come. They have a huge impact. Depending on the poverty of the country, the impact can be more or less. We can see the recovery rates from the poorest countries and the recovery rates from the richer countries.

What's the scale we're looking at around the world? Do you have any sense of that?

[Susan Johnson]

We do have a sense of that. It's on the basis of that sense of that, the working assumptions we have, that we have decided to make certain investments, which are investments in preparedness, essentially. A working assumption of ours is that these large-scale catastrophic events will increase, that we will not see a diminishing of this. We will see an increase of this for two or three reasons. One is that a lot of disasters are water-related, which is to say hurricanes or cyclones, or the opposite, which is to say drought. Those are climatically affected disasters.

As climate changes there is an impact on the nature of hurricanes and cyclones and so on, that combined with more and more people living in densely populated urban areas. We have gone from being a rural population globally to being an urban population globally, so we see more and more people at risk in highly densely populated and at-risk situations in very poor neighbourhoods in cities. When you get that combination of the event and people living in extreme poverty, that is where you get disaster on a massive scale. We completely expect to see that. We have Haiti this year. We had the Pakistan super-floods, and those are at the mega level. Below that there are several.

For the international federation in any one year somewhere between 40 and 60 emergencies demand an international response. That could be anything from simply some relief goods being shipped, or some people being moved to organize the response. Certainly that is the level at which we're organized. It leads us then to have agreements between national societies in terms of having materials already pre-positioned and having what we call contingency plans with regard to, depending on the scale of the event, who will be called upon to respond, with what materials, and with what people. We have people trained to be the first responders, if you like, as part of the Red Cross system. We invest exactly because we have this sense of what the needs will be. As I said in my earlier remarks, we invest every day in preparedness, in materials being pre-positioned, in people being trained, and testing systems, so when there is a need to respond we know the system works.

[Richard Clair]

There is a good report called the World Disasters Report that's published every year by the federation and it gives you a good view of the overall emergencies and disasters across the world for that specific year. It is worthwhile for the committee to--

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Unfortunately, you haven't developed a predictive power yet.

[Susan Johnson]

You can look at the last 30 years of history, and the top 20 at-risk countries and the top at-risk cities are identified. There is a certain predictability of what we have been managing and what we expect to see over the next coming years.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Is that information available in this report as well, or where is it?

[Susan Johnson]

That information is available through other reports, which we could make available to the committee. Certainly, based on that, the international federation has established the hubs of Panama, Kuala Lumpur, and Dubai in terms of the physical proximity to where events happen and the logistics systems you need to have to move people and goods quickly to the places where they are going to need it.