Madam Chair, I'll make the opening presentation.
Thank you, because it's a great pleasure for me to address the committee this morning. It is my pleasure to speak to you today on behalf of the more than 5,000 Canadian Red Cross personnel, including 2,000 volunteers, who have and continue to work tirelessly to support the Red Cross's COVID-19 response across the country.
The work we have accomplished with the federal and provincial governments, as well as with First Nations communities, has been a very important moment of partnership for us.
I wish to take this moment to acknowledge the incredible effort of Canadian Armed Forces personnel, who we have had the great privilege to work alongside at multiple points during this past year, including helping repatriate Canadian travellers and augmenting health surge capacity of long-term care. This is part of a long-standing experience for the Red Cross of working alongside the Canadian Armed Forces.
To put the Red Cross intervention in context, I would like to give you a little background. There are two important aspects that lead us to intervene within the framework of COVID-19. First, we have developed, with the support of the federal government, a capacity to respond to international health issues. The Canadian Red Cross has three field hospitals and 10 clinics. Over the past 10 years, we have been involved in more than 55 international operations, including the management of cholera and Ebola centres. This is an important part of our expertise, which we have leveraged in these operations.
Therefore, on the one hand, we have worked internationally, and we have expertise in infectious diseases. On the other hand, over the last 10 years, we have increased our interventions in Canada in support of municipalities and provinces. On a larger scale, we have responded to national emergencies, from forest fires to floods to Fort McMurray, among others. We are present across the country and have responded in both capacities.
Madam Chair, I'm placing this in context because this was the capacity we were going into, and I might say as well that the Canadian Red Cross trains over one million Canadians every year in first aid response. These were the capacities that we brought in.
Early on, the Public Health Agency and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development called on us to support the repatriation of Canadians at CFB Trenton. The CAF were quite involved. We worked with them on the bases to provide support. We also deployed a mobile health clinic in that situation, and we deployed personnel to support the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development in Japan with the Canadians who were hospitalized there and who needed some social support.
In the months following, we brought the whole capacity of the Red Cross to bear here in our largest domestic response in our history.
I'm going to give you some of the highlights of this, and of course, we can exchange more in questions.
We pursued the work that we did at CFB Trenton in different airports around the country, and we supported more than 3,000 Canadians who were isolated. This includes five active sites.
We set up a virtual operations support centre for first nations, thanks to the support of the federal government here, and we supported over 244 indigenous communities with health and emergency guidance. We did this in English, French and five indigenous dialects.
In Toronto, we made more than 40,000 food deliveries to isolated seniors.
One of the most important parts of the operation, of course, was in epidemic control training. We helped in Quebec in over 157 long-term care facilities, working with the Quebec government in deploying some experts in epidemic control. We'll come back a lot to that aspect because it was one of the more important parts of the work in supporting institutions and stabilizing the situation in terms of the infection in the institutions.
We also trained over 10,000 of Quebec's provincial personnel in epidemic control, and provided support and training to over 1,000 members of the CAF who were deployed in the facilities.
Following this, we were asked to provide direct assistance to help the CAF transition out of of the long-term care centres in Quebec, which we did. We recruited and trained over 1,000 personnel in six weeks and deployed in 51 long-term care facilities. We've maintained capacity there, and we're still in 12 sites.
Currently, we're working in one site in Ontario, five in Manitoba, as well as in Nunavut, so we've managed to support the transition out in terms of the CAF while maintaining our capacity there.
In terms of the lessons learned in this operation, again, the expertise we developed internationally—in managing cholera and ebola treatment centres—was critical here and in understanding how we brought practical, tangible support to institutions that were in crisis by deploying our epidemic control experts and working alongside the personnel in the institutions to stabilize the situation and prevent the propagation of the infection within the institutions. That's been very critical in our operations.
The second part of the Red Cross' capacity is its ability to surge; the recruitment of 1,000 additional personnel in six weeks is testimony to that. I have to say that we've done that thanks to the availability of many Canadians who were temporarily out of work and who were very competent in the HR and service areas, so we managed to build that.
The other part, in terms of all these lessons learned, is the importance of collaboration and real-time sharing of information. Again, we really appreciate the support that the CAF gave to us in the transition from their work in long-term care settings to our presence there with regard to the profiles that they deployed that helped with both the recruitment and training we did.
In closing, Madam Chair, we are of [Technical difficulty—Editor] capacity, and we are working again with the Public Health Agency, with Public Safety and with provinces. We are still present and growing that capacity to support in this time of need. We also have an eye on next spring with regard to making sure that we are building capacity to respond to other events, be they fires or floods. I think that we have been quite fortunate in all of this challenging time to not have faced a major domestic emergency as we have faced in the past.
All of this speaks to the need to heighten our capacity.
Madam Chair, this concludes my presentation.
We are now ready to answer your questions.