I can speak to what's in place during a crisis, which is that Global Affairs Canada, as the lead department for international emergencies, will establish an interdepartmental task force that would have all the relevant departments at the table. In the case of Afghanistan, we met daily. This started in early July, and it went into November. It was a very, very long task force from an emergency management perspective.
During the crisis in August, we had IRCC, DND and others embedded in our emergency response team at Global Affairs Canada, so we had a whole room, a situation room, where everybody was working collaboratively.
One of the big challenges was the velocity with which the crisis hit. We had been, of course, in contingency planning for a long period of time, and at the peak, the intensity of the requests we were getting was really significant. For our part, we have an emergency watch response centre that operates 24-7. At the peak of the emergency, we were getting 70,000 emails a day. While we had 200 staff in our operations centre, it was very challenging that week.
That said, the linkages between IRCC, DND and Global Affairs were certainly forged in the lead-up to the crisis and remained in place afterward. In the phase right after the air bridge, we were focused on doing our best to get Canadian citizens out, working collaboratively with Qatar and with other partners to do that. Then it quickly moved into a phase that was very focused on the SIMs, the special immigration measures program, and Weldon's team was very actively engaged in bilateral discussions with key partners in Doha, the UAE and others to be able to facilitate ways to get out. Again, it was very challenging. Documentation was a huge issue and has been a huge issue throughout the crisis. We have all been working collaboratively to resolve these situations.