One of the things we've seen in some of our most significant allies, specifically Australia and the United States, is moving away from having the military hold primary responsibility for responding to disasters. That's a recognition, both of the competing demands that are on those forces but also of the costs.
For 2017-19, the CAF incurred $17.5 million in incremental costs when deploying Operation LENTUS, with the average duration of those deployments being about two weeks. That roughly translates to $80,000 a day in additional costs.
When we look at building out and supporting NGOs, and provincial-municipal organizations, to have hyper-localized trained and equipped volunteer teams across the country, we see a dramatic reduction in time and costs. As an example, I know that Team Rubicon's incident management team and their debris management team costs were $3,000 per day. Overall, that's an order of magnitude reduction in costs.
If we're able to empower NGOs, provide a little bit of funding, and then empower provincial and municipal organizations to take on that role, when we do require the CAF to come in, they are truly that force of last resort.
One of the key things that need to be done—and this dovetails quite nicely with Mr. Fejes' comments—is to build systems in place, so that small businesses aren't penalized when their employees want to volunteer. We need to build systems in place, so that employees aren't penalized, when they want to volunteer to help Canadians.
As has been done in some of the provinces, employers can get tax breaks, or access to funding, to allow their reservists to go and deploy overseas, or deploy on disaster response operations. If we could put a similar mechanism in place, when Canadians want to volunteer their time to support fellow Canadians, that will dramatically reduce the costs associated with deploying people to support disasters, and increase that local knowledge and participation to reinforce, rebuild and support communities at the local level.