First and foremost, I would say that building hyper-localized, trained and equipped volunteer teams across the country is going to drastically reduce the time and cost that it takes to mobilize during a disaster. If we look to my earlier comments about the typical daily incremental cost for a CAF deployment being about $80,000, NGOs can respond for less than $5,000 or $3,000 a day to do similar tasks. Leveraging those organizations that rely on volunteers who are unpaid who are there to be able to support their fellow Canadian is something we should be looking to do.
More importantly, they already have mechanisms in place for coordinating the deployment and the employment of those volunteers, so rather than just having a federal agency or a provincial organization respond and then deal with an influx of volunteers who continue to show up and donations and all of those kinds of things, having an overarching federal coordination mechanism, where we're able to say, “Samaritan's Purse, you have these skill sets, Red Cross, you have these skill sets, Team Rubicon Canada, you have these skill sets. These are what we need, these are the effects we need to achieve, can you support?” Then they say they can, with localized response capabilities, which drastically reduces the cost and the time required to mobilize.