Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
I will give my presentation in English, but feel free to ask me questions in the official language of your choice.
Scholarly thinking on environmental security and the role of the military in the American and Canadian Arctic has identified vulnerabilities of communities and Canadian sovereignty in light of the capacity to respond to large-scale civilian disasters. Much of the training and focus is conducted by agencies and organizations other than the Canadian Armed Forces, including civilian academics and American security agencies.
A recent CAF paper suggested that climate change will precipitate varying degrees of unprecedented activity in the north, with the CAF having to prepare to defend Canada's interests. This understanding of the importance of the armed forces' response to civilian disasters is arguably more developed in Canada's north than it is in its more southern military culture.
Based on Canada's experience with wildfires and climate change, particularly in northern and remote communities, assessments of security and safety over the past decade foresee a rise in challenges that require an integrated CAF response as part of a more comprehensive approach. The chief of force development notes that “successfully implementing Government policy in the North will mean setting the conditions for human safety and security as increasing economic development takes place”.
However, the Canadian Armed Forces has a distinctly ambiguous attitude towards domestic deployment. They have no plans to develop specialized units or military occupations to deal with humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. On the one hand, the CAF seems quite content in the belief that general-purpose combat training provides all the capacity that's required. On the other hand, the armed services seem to believe that humanitarian relief and domestic missions threaten their combat role. There is little factual basis for this belief. While there have been large, recent demands for assistance because of wildfires and flooding as well as the pandemic, demands have been even greater in the past. Requests for assistance have grown in number, but they've required only minor quantities of resources for a shorter period of time.
We can sense a shift in thinking, even by the current chief of the defence staff, who, in October 2021, stated that, although it was an essential function of the CAF to defend the country, the pressure of domestic humanitarian relief operations had made it necessary to redefine “defend”. He held open the role of the reserves and the possibility that Canada needed troops dedicated to civil defence.
The army reserve maintains 10 domestic response companies and four Arctic response groups. This component, however, is plagued by high turnover and an inability to reach training standards and is available only on a case-by-case volunteer basis, so there are limits to how far the armed services can go in assigning a core policy role to the primary reserves without the government first addressing reserve problems with job security and availability. The armed services needs to ask itself whether a core role can be left without a permanent formation and occupational structure.
My submission then walks through how, among the eight tasks for the Canadian Armed Forces, the two that are left without a permanent force structure are assistance to civil authorities for law enforcement and the provision of assistance to civil authorities and non-governmental partners in responding to international and domestic disasters and major emergencies, which are dependent on retasking forces designed for combat or combat support, as in the case of the company-sized disaster assistance response team.
In the short term, the best option may be for the federal government to reprioritize, along with a slight formal expansion of the CAF, to support its domestic role by creating a combined capability of about 2,000 regulars concentrated on the Royal Canadian Air Force, which provides much of the regular force capability, and reserve soldiers, with an important Ranger component, to focus on improving infrastructure in remote first nations communities.
Some indigenous communities have gone on record to observe a fundamental need to engage in disaster response training that could be delivered as part of this liaison process. This combined force would spend most of the year liaising, planning and preparing to deploy to northern communities in the summer, but that could be postponed or rescheduled if they were called out to a flood or to a wildfire instead.
Such a dedicated domestic role has precedent. In the 1920s and 1930s and the postwar period, the Royal Canadian Air Force was tasked with mapping and charting Canada. During this process, the Royal Canadian Air Force generated skills and planes for bush pilots.