Good evening, Mr. Chair. Thank you for having me here.
My name is Conrad Sauvé. I'm the president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Red Cross. I'm honoured to be here today to update you on the important work, as outlined in the documents provided, that the Canadian Red Cross is carrying out across Canada to support individuals and communities and to help the municipal, provincial and federal governments respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While we've been gradually increasing our responses to this and our responses to natural disasters here in Canada, it goes without saying that the size and scope of this response is unprecedented in our history. We have been responding from the first days of the outbreak by providing support to the Public Health Agency of Canada in helping some 1,200 Canadian travellers and crew members who were quarantined in Trenton and Cornwall in the early days, as well as providing psychosocial support in Japan for the more than 50 Canadians who were in 40 different hospitals in Japan.
It's important to note that we had the ability and the expertise to do this because we have been engaged internationally, thanks to the support of the Canadian government, in deploying both cholera and Ebola clinics in the last number of years. We reassigned our international health experts to help with the early stages of the response to the quarantine, in setting up, with the public health agencies, the appropriate protocols to ensure for our staff, our volunteers and those we helped that it could be done safely.
We are also in partnership with Global Affairs Canada in supporting the shipping and receiving of international donations and protective equipment.
The Red Cross is also continuing to provide assistance in a variety of ways to seniors or vulnerable people here in Canada.
In Toronto, for example, we distributed over 5,000 food hampers to seniors or vulnerable people who couldn't leave their homes.
In Ottawa, we launched a home support program and we visited almost 3,000 seniors to make sure that they had what they needed.
Together with Indigenous Services Canada, we created a virtual operations centre to provide mental health information, assistance, guidance and support to indigenous communities across the country.
For several weeks, the Red Cross has been providing support to seniors' centres in Montreal, particularly in the West Island. Our support is focused on three areas: personnel recruitment, which is a major concern; the training of personnel and volunteers who enter the facilities; and the deployment of personnel to different facilities to ensure that infection control measures are being properly monitored. We started with eight health care facilities and we're now at over 40. The demand keeps growing. With the Ontario government, we're even looking at the possibility of deploying similar teams in that province.
Our work with Employment and Social Development Canada is another very important part of our activities. From the start, we've been talking about the importance of providing training and protective equipment, not only in the various facilities, but also in the community.
We now have a support program that includes personal protective equipment for the community and training. The program targets about 5,000 organizations. We also have a funding program for non-profit organizations that don't have charitable status. This program has just been launched.
As you can see, there's a large-scale increase in our operations throughout the country, but just because we have COVID-19 doesn't mean there are no longer natural disasters. We're active, of course, in many places presently. Again, with flooding in Fort McMurray, we are there. Following the request of the Government of Nova Scotia, we're raising funds for the victims of the terrible tragedy that happened there, which we were talking about a little earlier.
These events are a reminder that there are factors we can plan for in our response, but there are also many risks we cannot plan for. I'm not going to get into all of the types of responses that the Red Cross has had, but when we're looking ahead, there are really three areas that we can continue to invest in regarding our response.
One is the focus on vulnerable populations, not just in institutions but in the community. We're doing work in Toronto and Ottawa, going door to door in some communities. We need to map out and understand where vulnerable people are, not just during these events but also on an ongoing basis. We are also doing friendly calls throughout the country, again to ensure that people are safe in these communities. We're seeing that the outreach, what we're doing around Ottawa for example, is essential.
In the case of COVID-19, we've deployed some of our [Technical difficulty—Editor] we have purchased. We have an expertise globally in this area. This has been funded by Global Affairs Canada, so we can do work internationally. We've deployed field hospitals in many parts of the world, from Nepal to the Philippines to Congo. As I mentioned earlier, we're managing Ebola clinics and cholera clinics as well.
It is the first time we've deployed this equipment in Canada. We've deployed part of our field hospital in Vancouver and Montreal, and we have been supporting communities in the north with mobile capacity. Obviously we need to again look at building up a stronger capacity for a national response as well. We're looking to work with the provinces on what the needs are moving forward.
We have been increasing our operations throughout the country. Again, we're dealing with a combined issue of the pandemic and natural disasters. This will require us to think about how to increase our base capacity and what new level of base capacity we must maintain to support municipal governments, provincial governments and the federal government with moving forward.
I'd be happy to answer questions.
Thank you.