What was evident and something that we haven't had to deal with necessarily in the past.... The only other time I can remember is after the shooting of Corporal Cirillo.
There is no memorandum of understanding between the federal government and the City of Ottawa in the federal precinct for how to deal with an emergency of this kind of scale. Even at the provincial level, there are mechanisms with their emergency operations and ours, back and forth, but there isn't a memorandum of understanding, any kind of documentation or pre-work that has been done to understand how we will come together to lead an incident that escalates and scales up so that we can quickly mobilize.
To his credit, Deputy Minister Rob Stewart called me after the first weekend and said that we should talk. I didn't know who Rob Stewart was. He became a key link for me into the federal government and brought the deputy minister of community together with us and the police chief, etc. Eventually it expanded to the RCMP commissioner, OPP commissioner, etc.
That became an ad hoc thing where we came together to discuss situational awareness and what other steps we could take to try to mitigate what was happening. To me, from a lessons learned viewpoint, I've been thinking a lot about these things as they happened. I think it's a pretty fundamental course of action that we need to have for the nation's capital.