I'm happy to be here. I'm Deryck Trehearne from the government operations centre.
The minister is correct. Those decisions were made by the incident commander, and there was a unified command that was set up there with the municipality, the province and Parks Canada as well. They make those calls. There were no shortages of water bombers or equipment across the country this summer. We had a very significant fire season, which I'm happy to speak about at length, but there were no major gaps in availability of either firefighters or equipment.
We saw fires across the country, starting in the east and moving west. The west obviously got 60% or 70% of the fires this year, but Alberta, Saskatchewan, B.C. and others have some of the strongest emergency management agencies in the country and have significant assets at their disposal.
Those are decisions that are made on the ground, but we never saw any shortages during the season.