National Defence committee  Thank you for having us.

National Defence committee  I'm afraid you'll have to ask the government. I have given many presentations. I have worked with governments across this country. I have written to every premier in this country 12 times. I gave up on them and wrote my position paper. I know there are many doctors who are extremely upset, because I've worked with them and briefed them.

National Defence committee  The simple answer is absolutely yes. I would put it to you that, when you look at provinces that have a very strong EMO—I'll give you British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as the prime examples—you see the Canadian Armed Forces used far less and called far less. Working in the operations centre, they can say what their special capabilities are, and normally we meet them by other means.

National Defence committee  First of all, I believe every province and territory is motivated. They simply have fewer resources. When you look at somewhere like Nunavut and compare it to Alberta, you can see the automatic difference. It's something like the Yukon to Alberta. That's where you need to ensure that there's mutual aid between bordering organizations.

National Defence committee  First of all, we need to hold a national inquiry that is not run by government. It has to be independent. We have to really look at what other places did, like Sweden. That's exactly what our plan said we were going to do. The lessons learned process is a real process. It calls for discipline, and there are experts in how to conduct it.

National Defence committee  To answer your second question first, definitely. It's available at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. It's been published since July 1, 2021. I'm sorry. I'll have to ask you what the first question was again.

National Defence committee  The pandemic is an all-of-government response. We went from the mission statement, which is to protect the province from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to protect the medical system. We needed to build a governance organization that covered all of the impacts of SARS-CoV-2 on the public.

National Defence committee  The largest piece of funding that's missing in our country is for mitigation. Preparedness, response and recovery have been built. Certainly there are some shortfalls, but the largest piece that's missing is mitigation, which is either moving the target from the hazard or the hazard from the target.

National Defence committee  Mitigation is a huge part of emergency management. There are four functions. It is the first, so mitigation is an actual science. There is a discipline and a process to it, and it is the most neglected. If you have a huge flood on a river and then you rebuild in exactly the same flood plain, you're not doing mitigation.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. Let me first of all comment on Ms. Cohen's concept. It is a concept that I know. As a soldier, I did three tours in Germany during the Cold War, and I counted on the civil defence organization of Germany to make sure that my troops could get from their barracks to the border when we were deployed.

National Defence committee  That's a very expansive question. Every performance indicator that's built has flaws. However, let's start with the fact that there's a daily relationship between a province and the federal government when it comes to the use of the Canadian Armed Forces. The liaison officer sat right beside me in my operations centre in Alberta, and I would only call them when I needed them, and only for specifically why I needed them.

National Defence committee  In my opinion, no. I believe that if we do mitigation properly at the provincial-territorial level across our country and fund mitigation properly—the first of the four functions—those types of activities belong within the purview of the provinces. They work directly with the municipalities, and I want to make it clear that each province defines “municipality” in a different way.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. Public Safety Canada is responsible for that plan, and every province and territory in our country has a generic emergency management plan and then specific plans for specific hazards. Remember how I talked about how we follow an all-hazards approach? There are subject matter agencies in each of our provinces and territories that look at the hazards for their specific province, such as a catastrophic earthquake in British Columbia and tornadoes in Alberta but not so much in other areas.

National Defence committee  Provincially, we held them routinely, annually, and it was very difficult at times to get OCIPEP, now Public Safety Canada, to participate in a meaningful way in those exercises. We always had a provincial representative in our POECs, both from DND and from Public Safety Canada, but for Public Safety Canada, after they closed the training school and after they stopped doing the regular annual exercise format to try to link elected officials into those exercises, we saw that completely collapse nationally.

National Defence committee  Ma'am, I could spend six hours with you on what happened in the pandemic. I wrote a position paper on it, “Canada's Deadly Response to COVID-19”. I believe emergency management principles were thrown out the window. Every province and territory in Canada had a written pandemic plan.