National Defence Committee on May 2nd, 2022

[Michael Fejes]

Let me just start by saying that I'm a firm supporter of the CAF not being the lead element in domestic crisis response. The CAF should be there and available when called on and it should be there to act decisively when called on. That is why I think a military response in many cases is just simply not going to go away. It's culturally accepted by Canadians that when they call, the Canadian Forces will respond to the public. This is why I'm calling for almost the institutionalization or re-evaluation of the terms and conditions under which a reserve soldier would serve. A reserve soldier is not as expensive as a professional or regular force soldier, but Canadians should be able to call on their part-time military to respond in a lengthy and decisive manner when all other means have failed.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you.

Colleagues, we're going to have to suspend at this point. We have 15 minutes. I just want to canvass the witnesses.

If we came back in half an hour, would you still be available? We have this slot until basically six o'clock. If it took us half an hour to go vote and come back, we'd be able to start shortly after five o'clock. That would still give us 45 to 50 minutes, but then we would not to be able to do any committee business. The clerk and I need some direction with respect to future business, and maybe that's it.

[A voice]

Could we do it on Wednesday?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

The trouble is that then we're running up to the budget issues.

Again to the witnesses, I apologize for starting late and being interrupted and running late. That's just the way things are in May and June when the government in particular is trying to get its budget passed. There are lots of interruptions with all the starts and finishes. I'll leave it to the clerk to take you out and bring you back. Thank you for your patience.

The meeting is suspended, and we'll see you back here as soon as is practical 10 minutes after the vote is read.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

I call the meeting back to order.

Colleagues, it's a quarter after five. We have until six o'clock. Our witnesses have been very gracious and have stayed around. Before I call on Ms. Mathyssen, what I'm proposing for this week is that committee business be moved to next Wednesday. Hopefully, we'll have some sort of consensus as to what we want to do with the various items on committee business.

I'll remind you that a week from today, in the final hour, we have the Swedish delegation coming. I'm not quite sure where we are with the invitations to the embassy, but it is what it is.

With that, Ms. Mathyssen, you have six minutes, please.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you to the witnesses.

Before we had our pause, we were talking about bringing in the idea of volunteers, whether that's through specifically named NGOs...how we support that and how it would work out. My concern in that conversation is we're dealing with very stressful situations and moments of crisis, and they can spin out of control very quickly. Before, we were talking about how we figure out that very specific strategy of who has control, who manages that, who takes over at what time and how we delve into that.

Another thing that was said was about those who can fill sandbags and help with flood mitigation or what have you. Maybe that is something that volunteers could do, but the evacuation of a city is very different. I would even argue that.... When we sent our troops into long-term care facilities, some of them contracted COVID, and we don't know the long-term impacts of that and what's required.

Ideally, everybody remains safe, but what would the government's management role be in all of that if something should occur? What are the backups or the procedures that need to be put in place if something like that were to move forward and something truly bad happened to volunteers who aren't necessarily fully trained, like a member of the armed forces?

That's for all of the witnesses.

[Josh Bowen]

Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen.

If I can just touch on Madam Normandin's question from before the break, I think it dovetails quite nicely.

Having personally helped draft requests for federal assistance in 2016, we shifted the emphasis of those letters from requesting specific CAF assets to requesting desired effects. Public Safety Canada has a federal capabilities list and it's Public Safety Canada that determines which federal department or agency has the most appropriate assets for achieving whatever that desired effect is. Often that comes from the CAF, but often it doesn't. Given that these desired effects vary, depending on the location and the type of disaster, establishing a dedicated disaster response force within the CAF would necessarily draw on all other elements of the CAF. Therefore, we would only be adding additional bureaucracy and overhead, instead of streamlining it.

As Mr. Fejes pointed out, reservists deploy only when they volunteer to do so. When they do put their hands up, they get paid, which registers an incremental cost to government. This takes us back to the option of enabling our disaster NGO community to do what they do best—what they're purpose-built to do—and respond to disasters and support Canadians.

By establishing provisions to enable employers to grant leave for a week or two, as they do with some reserve deployments, people can then volunteer and we can build a robust and resilient capability that costs orders of magnitude less than establishing new capabilities in the CAF or cannibalizing existing forces. That frees up the CAF to fill their role as the force of last resort.

To the question of who's in charge, it's always the local authority that's in charge. Once a local authority—the municipality, the county or whatever it happens to be—declares that state of emergency, they can then request provincial support. If the province declares either a localized or a provincial state of emergency, they're the organization that would then request federal assistance, whether that's CAF or not.

In a lot of the provisions that are put in place to support volunteers and to enable volunteers who go to support a disaster response, the mechanisms are already there. Just as we ensure that we build out legislation and a framework to enable employers to let their people go and volunteer for a week, we need to extend occupational health and safety legislation, so that we can protect the people who are volunteering.

[Adam MacDonald]

These are always provincial requests, so they are responsible. The provinces have a big role in this. A lot of what they focus on now is management, which is about the coordination of existing resources, and not so much about developing and building services themselves. That's where we're getting this kind of skip at the local end, and then we have the federal and provincial ends—it depends on different provinces.

There is a bit of a gap there, and some of it has been a function of the increasing reliance on being able to draw on the CAF and other federal resources. Sometimes the provinces pay those back, but again, sometimes they won't have to. The CAF isn't going to go around asking for money from provinces. I think that's a big problem.

There are two things. One, do we just need better coordination with the mechanisms to be able to find the capabilities to bring them together, or do we have to actually build capabilities at all levels with a bit more specialization? I think that's where we're really needed. Two, the coordination piece is super important, but when you get something like the pandemic on top of regular national disasters, there's a stress function that happens, and everyone is asking for help and support.

The trajectory of climate change is that places we didn't think were going to have climate change issues have climate change issues—in communities and things. I think that the B.C. floods completely took the provincial government by surprise. They couldn't believe it. They were basically saying that these were municipal level issues and they should coordinate, but it was clear after one or two days that this was a regional disaster and it needed major capabilities and coordination at all levels.

It's not just about the coordination piece, it's about building up...and specialization. Unfortunately, the CAF is being asked to do a lot of giving of the capability part and relieving some of the provincial responsibilities.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Okay. We're going to have to leave that answer there, Ms. Mathyssen.

Ms. Gallant, you have five minutes.

I am going to try to get a full second round in.

You have five minutes, please.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Mr. Chair, the foremost capability of the CAF, when it's relied upon in disasters, is its command and control system. Before the national emergency preparedness college was deemed unnecessary, it trained leadership at the municipal level for a state of readiness and marshalling a response locally before calling on our national defence force. There were exercises at the local level, graduating to more widespread scenarios, so that everybody knew how to work together in a state of emergency.

Do you think it would be a more effective use of our resources to re-establish an emergency preparedness college rather than calling in the military whenever it's a major weather event?

This question is to all of the witnesses.

[Josh Bowen]

I'm happy to jump on that one first.

One thing that's been done around the country and in multiple different post-secondaries is to actually establish emergency management training. We have diplomas, degrees and graduate level programs that exist. We also have professional development training centres. Whether it's at Algonquin College in Ottawa, or the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology here in Edmonton, or the Justice Institute of B.C. in the Vancouver area, we have places where people go to train and to learn from each other.

We host an annual event where we bring 400 people from across the country together to train and share experiences, and to share learning. Providing funding to the post-secondaries that are already doing this would be hugely helpful.

In terms of re-establishing that national emergency preparedness college, establishing standardized core capabilities and core competencies at the national level for emergency management would greatly help to standardize curriculum and training across the country. I think that's the focus. Rather than building a brand new bricks-and-mortar facility, it's better to leverage the capabilities that are already there in the post-secondaries and the training institutions, and it's far more cost-effective.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

As well, from the private sector, they can tailor-make a plan for a community.

The carbon tax was initially marketed to the Canadian public on the notion that the revenues would be directed to adaption and mitigation. In your experience, have the carbon taxes been directed to adaptation and mitigation, or simply to emergency response, if any goes to emergency response?

[Adam MacDonald]

I don't know the answer to that question at all. I'm sorry.

[Michael Fejes]

I'm sorry as well. I am not prepared to comment on that. That's outside the realm of my research and expertise. Sorry.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

To what extent do you think that infrastructure and mitigation measures and adaptation measures would help prevent some of these catastrophic events that we're seeing in terms of high water, for example?

[Josh Bowen]

While I can't speak directly to any budgetary allocations, what we do know from multiple studies is that for every dollar invested in mitigation and preparedness activities, we save six to eight on response and an additional twelve on recovery after a disaster, so if we're looking at a 20:1 return on investment, then focusing on mitigation measures is absolutely essential.

Focusing on the preparedness side—training, building plans, coordination and building out those mechanisms—is also going to be the most cost-effective use of our resources.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Would any of you be qualified to describe the harms done to the militia during the hook-and-ladder days of civil defence during the Cold War?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

If you are, that will be quite interesting.

Does anybody want to take that question or feel that they have any capability of taking that question?

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

All right. Let's go to another one. We can come back to that.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

You're down to five seconds, Cheryl.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

How do you view the use of the troops in strikes, the FLQ and the Oka crisis?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

That's an interesting question, but it's not going to get answered.

Next is Mr. Spengemann.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Chair, thank you very much.

I'd like to thank all three of our witnesses for being with us and for their service in uniform and out of uniform. Thank you for your expertise.

The debate nationally and internationally can be grouped into the cluster of the three Cs—climate, COVID and conflict—really sort of cross-fertilizing each other into crises that we have not anticipated and that we need to respond to. For us as parliamentarians, it's a question of making sure that the investments are being made into addressing them.

Is it fair to say that in Canada at the moment we have the expertise on DRR, on emergency preparedness and response, and it's just a question of restructuring that expertise into a more effective organization? Or are there still significant gaps in expertise that we need to address through recruitment on either the civilian or the military side?

That's for whoever would like to take that. I'll take all three of you if you have views on it or just one of you.

[Michael Fejes]

I'll jump in first.

I think that's almost a double-headed question, Mr. Chair.

First and foremost, the expertise for crisis management response will reside within the government: federal, provincial and municipal. There are varying amounts of expertise that reside within the Canadian Forces. It's the Canadian Forces, however, who remain responsive to government direction.

The Canadian Forces are prepared to respond to crisis management in any way that the government directs, so asking for the Canadian Forces to hold specific expertise is not necessarily the question. You would almost have to defer that to federal and municipal agencies before that could be responded to accurately.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

That's a fair comment. Thank you for that.

I'm interested in Mr. Bowen's mention of the German model—of which there are some champions here on Parliament Hill—the civil defence volunteer force. This is a process and a structure that really took decades to build. If Canada were to go down that road, Professor Bowen, what would be the three priorities that we really would need to be seized with to make sure that happens?

Then, maybe grafted onto that question, how much need would there be for civil-military coordination and co-operation if and when such a structure is built?