Evidence of meeting #6 for National Defence in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was capacity.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Christian Leuprecht  Professor, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual
Conrad Sauvé  President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
Amir Abdulla  Deputy Executive Director, United Nations World Food Programme

1:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Karen McCrimmon

All right, thank you very much. We'll take that.

Madame Vandenbeld.

1:05 p.m.

Liberal

Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON

Thank you very much.

I want to thank you, Madam Chair, for making sure we complete the round, but I know we're short on time so I just have one small question. I do also want to thank all the witnesses for being very informative.

I think you've covered almost all of the topics but there's one piece that we haven't addressed today. This is to the Red Cross.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the collaboration between the Red Cross and the Canadian Armed Forces in Operation Globe on the repatriation effort and the efforts at Trenton, when we brought so many Canadians home at the beginning of this pandemic?

1:10 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross

Conrad Sauvé

This is not the first time that we've done something similar. I think you have to put it in context.

I've been at the Red Cross for some time now. You have to remember when we brought in 5,000 Kosovar refugees some time ago. They were housed on a military base and we managed the services, the care there. We worked with the Canadian Armed Forces when we had a lot of people crossing the border in Quebec and the camp was set up. The military set up the logistics around the camp; we managed the services there. That's the type of complementary structure....

It's the same thing here. We deployed and took care of the people who were housed on the base in terms of everything they needed—the feeding and so on and so forth—and we expanded that to do it for anybody arriving in an airport who did not have a place to quarantine. We had a structure to put that in place.

The whole conversation here is that we began looking at what's specific to the military in terms of their capability and what can be delivered by civilian capacity, and where we're complementary.

If I may add, there was a question as well on the mobile stuff. I have to remind members, because we were mentioning the DART, that the Red Cross has three field hospitals as well. It has 10 mobile clinics. Again, on the civilian side, we have logistical and operational capability that can be put to use.

1:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Karen McCrimmon

All right, thank you.

We're coming to an end here. I would like to say thank you to all of our witnesses and thank you to our committee members. That was an amazing session with the witnesses and the questions from the team.

I would like to thank you for sharing your time with us today.

With that, this meeting is adjourned.