Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Martin Joyal and I am from Public Safety Canada, in Ottawa. With me is my colleague Benjamin Gallant.
We're here to speak to you about subclauses 132(1) and 132(2) in the proposed budget bill. What is proposed in those two clauses is to provide the Minister of Public Safety with, first, the funding, and second, the authority to enter into an agreement to flow those funds to the not-for-profit organization named Shock Trauma Air Rescue Service, or STARS for short, which is based in Calgary.
The funding is to provide that not-for-profit with $65 million for the purchase of five new helicopters. STARS provides a critical emergency service, air ambulance services, in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and parts of British Columbia. The ministers responsible for emergency management met in January and approved a new emergency management strategy for Canada. Under that, we are working with provinces and territories and the full community involved in EM to look at where gaps, or potential imminent gaps, are in our EM posture.
With the aging fleet at STARS, they had started undertaking a capital-raising campaign to renew the fleet. With the funding proposed here in the budget, to be provided from the minister to the organization, this would allow the organization to accelerate its renewal process. It had been estimated that it would take another 10 years in order to renew the whole fleet. This will significantly increase it and they should be in a position to have 100% renewal in the next three years. That is what's proposed here.