Thank you, Chair.
I was referring to this article. I'll continue. It reads:
Jasper said yes. To resources. To help. They said yes early and they said yes often. They said yes to wildland teams and they said yes to municipal departments.
“We kept saying yes,” [Landon] Shepherd said.
But they didn’t say yes to everyone.
Unified Command did not immediately say yes to an independent fire fighting businesses seeking to access Jasper to perform structural protection services for a private company.
They did not say yes to a group of trucks and personnel who—while having had been deployed by the Government of Alberta—did not have prior arrangements for access.
They did not say yes to a self-dispatching team who had not signed an agreement to abide by the ICT’s rules of engagement.
And they did not say yes to a crew of mercenaries known as Arctic Fire Safety Services, the bulk of whose resources arrived the day after 350 structures burned in Jasper.
Mr. Chair, I'll go on. It later reads:
Fanning the flames of these politically-driven comments sows division, mistrust and hard feelings amongst Canadians in general, but among Jasperites in particular. The negative rhetoric is wearing on locals, many of whom were involved in the incident, and many others who lost their homes and livelihoods to fire and desperately want fact-based answers.
Even Jasper’s Mayor, now well-known to Canadians for his diplomacy, fortitude and tact, weighed in on the scuttlebutt.
“The present atmosphere of finger pointing, blaming and misinformation is beyond merely an annoying distraction, it delays healing”.... “It introduces fresh wounds at a time when we need a recovery and unity.”
Facts matter. What Arctic Fire Safety Services have said about their involvement in the Jasper Wildfire Complex is not accurate. Unified Command should not have to explain why they were not prepared to upend their established processes of deploying resources safely and effectively because some cowboys with big trucks wanted to act on “instinct.”
He goes on to say in the article:
...to ignore the bad actors trying to make political hay from our crisis....
But if we can put politics aside and filter out good information from bad, Jasper—the town and the park—has all the right ingredients to make its rebuild unprecedented, too.
That's what we should be focusing on—not politics and not bringing ministers to this meeting to lay blame, particularly when we had the former member of Parliament for Yellowhead acknowledge that what he said regarding actions following those studies was actually incorrect.
I would provide an amendment to the request to this. The amendment would simply say, with respect to the fact that in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, due to Harper's deficit reduction action plan cuts, which affected over 1,600 employees at large at Parks Canada and resulted in no burns and no mechanical thinning—no prescribed burns at all in Jasper—between 2012 and 2015; with respect to the fact that in 2016, a forest management strategy for mountain pine beetle was developed by our government under the leadership of the aforementioned Minister Catherine McKenna....
If we're going to go back in time to revisit all of these actions, Mr. Chair, then I would also ask that we ask ministers why they decided to eliminate funding to Jasper National Park. Those ministers would be the Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister Peter Kent and Minister Peter Kent's policy adviser at the time, who happens to be Melissa Lantsman.
If you'd like to have Catherine McKenna appear, those individuals can appear too.