Yes. Absolutely. That's a wonderful question.
I'm going to refer, if it's appropriate, to a particular initiative of undertaking with my team and many of the first responders in the Kitikmeot Region of the central Arctic within Nunavut through a Kitikmeot search and rescue round table. Again, I'm reporting on behalf of some of these real subject matter experts, the practitioners on the ground, in identifying challenges.
What they're seeing, and this also relates to some of the COVID activities, is an increasing caseload of demands on the time of first responders. It relates to changing environmental conditions, loss of land safety knowledge, food insecurity, and hunters and fishers taking greater risks on the land. When I say land, I mean sea, ice and land, if we're speaking in an Inuit Nunangat context here.
They talk about gaps in training or coordination of training across different organizations that they belong to, and about some of the shortages in equipment that would enable them to do their jobs better. They have concerns about volunteer burnout. With the same group of people often being turned to and asked to come out, it eventually drains their energy. There is a lack of mental and physical health supports for responders. They talk about overly burdensome administrative requirements and reporting requirements for people who are volunteering, and about difficulty coordinating, co-operating and communicating across the community, territorial, provincial, regional and federal levels.
One of the other areas they often raise is slow response times from southern-based search and rescue assets. That begs the question of what types of assets, then, should be predeployed in the north in terms of federal assets? How much more can we go and build that resiliency and support capacity-building efforts on the local level to bolster that local ability or regional ability to respond to these as a solution that is made in the north and by the north?