National Defence Committee on May 2nd, 2022

[Adam MacDonald]

My big thing that comes from this is that it's the Canadian government and the Canadian people who decide what their military is for, and I think that members in uniform and generals can talk about competing priorities, and what they're doing is bringing up an issue by saying that they're having issues doing all of this, that they think it's going to be increasingly difficult and that they want a political solution.

I think there will be some who say that the military is about combat, it's about deploying overseas and it's about warfare. I think a military is whatever a government wants it to be and what the public wants it to be. I think we need to start thinking about it as political direction rather than letting, again, this mission creep.

My own feeling is, as I said, there is lots of expertise out there that my colleagues have talked about. I think the CAF has a really big role to play, and I think there's a way we can carve it down into something that's more feasible and doable in a better intricate web of organizations. I worry about this idea of super-CAF, the Swiss army knife of CAF, that can be deployed in everything and anything. I think that has huge problems for member retention, to be quite honest, for training and for misallocation of resources.

Again, I think we need to talk about this politically and not so much about this being a technical solution as to how do we build out this thing or that thing. We need a bit more of a political conversation about what we want the military to do and what it's for.

[Bryan May, Liberal, Cambridge, ON]

We've talked a little bit about the Australian model, the German model, the U.S. with the engineering corps they have there. I don't know enough about the German model to make this suggestion, but I'm wondering.... They have a mandatory service model once you graduate from high school into the military, but they also have...if you're a pacifist you can go into an NGO and support that way. Is this an extension of that, or sort of a spinoff of that, or does it have anything to do with their mandatory service after high school?

[Josh Bowen]

My understanding, as limited as it is, is that the German model requires mandatory national service. That doesn't necessarily mean the military. It could be working in a seniors' residence. It could be driving an ambulance, just to free up a paramedic to actually work on a patient—those kinds of things.

Yes, there are definitely people who volunteer for the Technisches Hilfswerk, the THW, which is the model we're discussing. Those people then continue to volunteer, many of them for the rest of their lives, doing different sorts of disaster responses.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. May.

Colleagues, we have a little over 10 minutes left, and if I do two-minute rounds we can get another round of questions in. We'll start with the Conservatives and Mr. Allison, for two minutes.

Welcome to the committee. You're a very pleasant addition.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's great working with you again as well.

Once again to our witnesses, thank you for what you do and your service to this country.

Since I only have two minutes, I guess my question would be to you, Adam. You've talked a few times about political issues, political will. What do you mean by that? Is it really more political direction?

I thought you made a great point. The army belongs to the Canadian people, so what you are saying, then, regardless of what it is, it has to be directed in terms of leadership. In other words, if the government says we should do a, b or c, that would be the political will to have that happen.

[Adam MacDonald]

My big thing, I think, is that when you look at the mandates of the CAF you see there are about eight of them, and a lot of them are domestic like search and rescue, guarding coastlines, NORAD. Then, domestic emergency response is a very specific one. However, there's no parallel about, okay, this is the mandate and we're going to generate these forces, and we need to have this many navy ships, this many soldiers.

It leads to this vagueness that there's no corollary about what the military does have to build in terms of forces generated to do domestic emergency response. I think that there, combined with this societal growing expectation that the military is going to be called in to respond every time there's a domestic emergency, it's really draining the organization a little bit. I think it's creating confusion.

There's a big debate about what a military is and isn't. I think the generals and others are talking about the need to have this political decision, and I think it does start from the top. We have to more clearly define what we want our military to do, what we want to focus on, what we want to build.

Do we have health care capacity, just a service in military, or do we decide, you know what, we're actually going to build up health care capacity in the military to service domestic emergency response?

We have an example of the DART, the disaster assistance response team, which is an expeditionary overseas capability. Do we want to build a domestic DART or something in the military?

I just think this has to get beyond the confines of DND and become more political and public as we enter the engagement about the defence review.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you.

Mr. Fisher, you have two minutes.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

If I'm talking very quickly, it's because I only have two minutes.

Mr. MacDonald, you spoke to this, so I'll go with you first, but I really wish I had the time to have all comments. Are any provinces building or preparing for emergency management or disaster response? Other than the obvious roadblocks like budgets and people, what stands in their way? Who has a better chance of building a volunteer group—a provincial entity or a federal entity? Will a province even consider doing that if they can already request help from the CAF?

I know I gave you an awful lot to think about there, but you have a minute left.

Thanks.

[Adam MacDonald]

First, I would say that the provinces are very different. They all face different challenges and some have dealt with them very differently. Newfoundland got rid of their emergency management organization and don't have anything. Then you have B.C. B.C. is a very interesting case. They've been worried about earthquakes for a long time and they've been building up earthquake management. Then, all of a sudden, they had the floods and fires last year, which really came as a shock.

Building on my colleagues' points, I think the best way of doing it is locally. I think we're missing that middle piece, which is the provinces. The provinces can do more in terms of coordinating, funding and guiding that pooling of resources.

The difficulty the CAF faces is that it usually goes to the CAF when it gets to the federal level, but those requests are based on the ground. We've already seen, during COVID, some requests that seemed very pitiful when they were answered. We only sent a couple of rangers, for example, to an indigenous community that was entirely under lockdown because of COVID. There was some blowback, but.... What information was it based upon? It was based upon the local and provincial request, because that's the way this works. It always goes to the provinces and then up, so I think the province is the level....

We have to figure out ways the federal government can help support funding and training at the provincial level to further enable those municipal lines. My sense is that, again, the reliance on the CAF is taking away from that.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you.

Madame Normandin, you have one minute.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Someone in another panel mentioned the idea of creating a group of reservists who would normally be used to improve the infrastructure in remote first nations communities, but who could easily be called upon to intervene in a crisis.

Is this an idea to explore?

[Michael Fejes]

The Canadian Forces have an overriding policy of not competing with domestic business and domestic economies. Calling in the military to conduct routine “economic development”, for lack of a better term, would probably not be well received domestically. Once again, you're taking resources away from the Canadian Forces, which—ideally—would be training, deploying, responding or doing something else.

Again, I've voiced my opinion on creating specific units of reserves to complete specific tasks, in which case they're not available or not trained to complete other tasks.

I want to come around to what I've been advocating for throughout this entire session: We want to figure out how to get the largest pool of military assistance to the greatest number of Canadians for decisive and enduring effects. That's the question we actually have to be dealing with here, and—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. I apologize.

Madame Mathyssen, you have one minute.

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

I think my questions arise, again, from that overall conversation. I know that Peguis First Nation in northern Manitoba is dealing with flooding year after year after year. If we're going to shift toward provincial jurisdiction or provincial answering of the call, that's not the first nation's primary communicator. They go to the federal government.

Can you expand on how a nation like Peguis would deal with flooding year after year in this model, which I think was suggested previously in Mr. Fisher's questioning?

[Josh Bowen]

May I jump in?

This is why we need to have federal coordination of both NGOs and federal-provincial response capabilities. The nation-to-nation relationship has to be protected and is so critical. First nations have the ability to reach out directly to the federal government and say, “We require assistance, and these are the things we require.” Then Public Safety Canada has the ability to say, “These are the federal assets we have that can support and respond, and here are the NGO capabilities that can support and respond.”

We could go one step further and do what the Americans do. They have a National Business Emergency Operations Center, where they leverage the capabilities of private enterprise so they can respond and support. Bringing the whole of society together at the federal level is actually going to enable us to respond more quickly and more locally than devolving it to the provinces.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

We're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately.

Mr. Motz, you have two minutes, please.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Fejes, you made a comment earlier in response to a question that was asked. I don't remember which of my colleagues asked it. It was whether volunteers can actually do the job that is expected sometimes of emergency management people.

I'm a duty director graduate from the Emergency Preparedness College here in Ottawa. I've been on a number of disasters in our community. I can tell you from experience that some of our best people were volunteering for those positions and did an admirable job.

I think all of you, to some degree, would certainly agree that having a civilian response at the municipal level and then the level of the province, supported by the feds as far as funding and training, might be the model we need to go to moving forward.

I want to go back to Mr. Bowen because he's closest to home for me. With one minute left, I'm asking my ideal world question again.

You want to make this happen. You articulated a plan today. What are the first two or three things we have to do to make that happen from the federal level to push it back to the provinces and municipalities?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

You have 40 seconds.

[Josh Bowen]

That's a very big question for one minute. Thank you for that, sir.

In that ideal world, the first thing we need to do is reach out to the provinces and to the NGO community and ask what capabilities they have. We then look at the long history of disasters we've had and ask what capabilities are needed.

Once we can identify those two gaps, we can fund appropriately and allocate funding towards the NGO community to be able to support and respond and develop those capabilities where they have the best expertise. We can also allocate to the post-secondary community, where they're able to build those training centres and that curriculum, so that we can actually have people employed and trained to the same standard.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

We're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately.

Madam Lambropoulos, you have the final two minutes.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Bowen, in my two minutes, did you want to finish your answer to that previous question? I thought it was a good one. If not, I can go on.

[Josh Bowen]

Actually, I was done. Thank you.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Okay.

I apologize if my major question has already been answered because it's late in the game at this point and we've been cut off a couple of times.

Mr. Bowen, because you've been a member of the armed forces and because you've gone on some missions within Canada to help in disaster situations, do you not think the CAF could have a second stream of recruits who are specifically there not to fight? I know there's the universality of service rule, but would it not be beneficial to move away from that and to have a sector within the CAF that deals specifically with emergency situations within the country related to the climate?

[Josh Bowen]

Thank you.

I think that's actually a really important question to sum up. When I was in the CAF, I was never trained in how to respond to a flood. I was never trained in how to respond to a wildfire. I did both. That was because it was residual capacity for more fighting training. It's the organizational structure and the logistical structure that the CAF brings that enables it to respond.

If we want to be able to respond to disasters in a way that is the most effective, we need to rely on the civilian capacity that already exists, so that we're not duplicating effort. When things do exceed civilian capacity, we're then able to bring in that force of last resort. The CAF would be that deployable and self-sustainable organized labour that we can then throw at the problem when we've exhausted all other options.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, that will have to bring it to an end. Thank you.

I want to, on behalf of the committee, thank all three of you for your thoughtfulness. You certainly have launched our study in the right direction. I also want to thank you for your patience. I apologize for the interruptions, but this is the way things operate around here, and we all get used to it.

With that, colleagues, we will adjourn this meeting and meet again this Wednesday, the Lord and the votes willing.

Thanks again.