Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the finance committee.
My name is Daniel Perron. I am a member of the board of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, division fire prevention chief for the regional municipality of Marguerite-D'Youville and retired chief of the Ville de Sainte-Julie in the suburbs of Montreal. I am joined here today by Dr. Tina Saryeddine, the CAFC's executive director.
My colleagues and I appreciate this opportunity.
In our August pre-budget brief, we offered four recommendations. I will touch on each of these, but first let me tell you about the people and organizations that make up the CAFC.
There are about 3,500 fire departments in our country—metro, large, small, medium, urban and rural, career and volunteer—and within them are about 155,000 firefighters. About 85% of both departments and firefighters are volunteer or paid on call.
When we talk about fire departments, flames might come to mind, but fire departments are “all-hazard”. Many have responsibility accorded from their municipality for emergency management, whether it's by formal mandate or informally, because of the expertise held within the fire department.
About 20% to 30% of a typical fire department's caseload is fire suppression, 30% to 50% is emergency medical response and 20% to 30% is all-hazard response. Why is this?
With roots in fire suppression, we've worked as a country to reduce the number of fires through public education and prevention. The skills needed for fire suppression and the culture of training within fire departments are transferable to all hazards, and the numbers and complexity of and demand for all-hazard responses are increasing. Remember, an effective response to fire, flood, dangerous goods or other adverse events mitigates further environmental and economic damages.
I recall my own department's experience during the 1988 Saguenay earthquake, the largest earthquake registered in Canada. It registered 6.0 on the Richter scale, the largest earthquake in Canada in the last 50 years.
Here is where I'd like to illustrate one of our asks. Today, the country's heavy urban search and rescue teams would most likely be called upon to assist in earthquakes. They are a source of national pride, consisting of multiple professions from fire to police, search and rescue, paramedics and medicine, nursing, IT and others, able to operate 10 days autonomously off the grid.
Four of Canada's six HUSAR teams are housed in fire departments. The federal and provincial governments provide significant funding to them. However, unlike in the United States, where all HUSAR teams are coordinated through the federal emergency management administration, FEMA, our coordination nationally still has gaps.
While Canada has agreements and has experts who, as one HUSAR leader said, operate easily on a “call us and we'll come” basis, we have no centralized emergency management agency to coordinate at the interfaces between policy and operations and between different levels of government, the fire departments and the public.
Our model, which consists of various acts, agreements and experts, has many virtues. It ensures that those closest to the emergency are responding unencumbered. However, consider FEMA's stated mission of helping people before, during and after disasters, making the linkage between mitigation, response and future planning.
The U.S. Fire Administration, under FEMA, also performs five functions: public safety information, including official messaging to the media; data; operations support; research; and, grant administration. These are intimately coordinated with the fire departments.
We need all of these in Canada. Through various initiatives at all levels of government, we have them. However, we don't yet have a whole-of-government approach. It could begin with a small investment. Consider that more than 14 federal departments have policy functions relevant to fire departments and are doing commendable work.
A national fire adviser secretariat linking all fire departments, the municipalities, and different levels and parts of government would further improve mitigation, response and resilience.
CAFC members can assist in scoping this out with a large cross-section of the country's fire chiefs and all of the provincial, territorial and national affiliate fire organizations at its national advisory council. Aside from this, we are also asking the federal government to consider a modified and improved form of the joint emergency preparedness program that was intended to provide aid to emergency response capacity in small and rural departments. The program had difficulties because of its execution, which can be improved. Remember, micro investments matter.
In addition, as a nation interested in innovation, we need to ensure capacity for emergency response involving innovations. Examples are electric cars and tall wood buildings. This is why we ask for a fire-driven research and innovation fund. It would allow us to match innovations with training on the emergency response side. It would also allow us to call the research priorities that will bring the evidence to bear on our experiential knowledge. Remember, federally funded research is driven mainly by researchers. Finally, we commend you and ask you to continue your regular efforts on mental health for first responders.
Thank you for hearing us today, and we look forward to your questions.