The first one speaks to the strength of the military education training system, which is focused on producing individuals, men and women in uniform, who in the end can think on the spot. That's what we're moving towards. Where we're moving towards and where we have moved is that, clearly, education has become very important. Why? Because with education we can take our men and women in uniform, as we've seen in Afghanistan, put them in the most complex and difficult situations, and they can come up with solutions that work.
That speaks also to the second component, which is working with other federal departments, other whole-of-government departments, which we call in some cases a combined or whole-of-government approach. Also, in Canada that's important. Education and training very much touched on much of that, how to work first, who are the different federal, provincial, territorial, municipal partners, how do we work together, what do we need to do to work together? For example, they do have a course that's conducted in the spring every year at the Canadian Forces College where we bring in all different individuals from federal departments and agencies and provinces and territories for two weeks to talk about these types of issues. Also, on our training we invite representatives from different federal departments and agencies in the provinces and different organizations, be it the OPP and others, to actually come and join.
It speaks to the training being focused in part on this issue of a whole-of-government approach, which is what I would throw out to the committee, that this will be demanded and needed more in the future. Why? There is no one department, federal agency, territorial-provincial agency, or municipal agency that has all the authorities, mandates, or capabilities to deal with any of these issues. They need to all come together very much in a coordinated and combined effort, quickly, to be able to do it.
What helps us here federally is the emergency response management committee, which comes together to be able to discuss these issues. They'll look at them, what's happening. For example, prior to the flooding in Manitoba, we'd already sat down as a committee with 36 different agencies and departments to talk about what was upcoming, the flooding. What are we going to do? How are we prepared? So we talked through what we would need to do in those cases. We very much focused on the education, and focused on what is working with whole-of-government and other government departments in the future.