Evidence of meeting #21 for National Defence in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was caf.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:20 p.m.
NDP
Lindsay Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
I'll return to my other question, and if you could answer it within a minute, I would appreciate it. It's about an environmental proactive and reactive situation.
4:20 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Governance, Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, St. Francis Xavier University, As an Individual
In terms of what the CAF does, I'll highlight again that it's not doing the mitigation, prevention, preparedness and recovery work. That's a severe limitation to our current set-up. Our disaster workforce is solely focused on that one part of the continuum, and I do not see the Canadian Armed Forces playing roles in those other parts of this spectrum. That's a major challenge that needs to be filled by other capacities and other capabilities.
I'm not sure that's getting to what you're asking. I'm sorry.
4:20 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, As an Individual
If I understand your question correctly, ma'am, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence have a huge role to play in terms of emissions reduction, understood as climate mitigation. The majority of the Government of Canada's real estate portfolio is owned by DND. DND runs an air fleet. I mean, these are hugely carbon-intensive activities. There is a very significant scope for greening the activities of the Canadian Armed Forces in all manner of ways. I think a perhaps really underappreciated part of that is responsible stewardship of the land, which is controlled and maintained by National Defence.
4:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
I'm trying to prevent Ms. Mathyssen from turning her one minute into two and a half; it's succeeding, I can see that.
Mr. Motz, you have two minutes.
May 9th, 2022 / 4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Thank you, Chair.
This is a 30-second question and a 25-minute answer, I'm sure.
In terms of the principles of emergency management, how do you see a separate civilian agency being used in response, recovery, preparedness and mitigation of national disaster emergencies, as opposed to CAF being used, or even using the reserve, the concept that we talked about?
I'll start with Professor Kikkert.
4:25 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Governance, Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, St. Francis Xavier University, As an Individual
I think a civilian emergency response force could be, again, a mixture of full-time employees and part-time employees. They could be mobilized during disasters. They have the benefit of being able to rapidly deploy if they're part of this force. More importantly, they can focus—especially the full-time employees—and be used for other tasks during periods of the year when there are not so many hazards being posed to communities. They can be used for things like prevention mitigation, whether it be forestry management or reconstructing dikes or whatever it might be. They can play a wide variety of roles that the CAF and the reserves can't because of their training that's focused on their war-fighting role.
That's where I see the value of a civilian emergency force and it being able to slide in and cover the rest of that emergency management spectrum, with the support of local teams, of course.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
4:25 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, As an Individual
I was just going to say that final point as well. I think such a national resilience corps would probably work best if it were well supported by locally based community entities of some sort or another. That would open up this question about whether or not local authorities, municipal or provincial, or potentially regional as well, would be able to call upon those lower levels, however they were structured, before invoking the national level of response. We might actually be able to locate the authority to invoke this capability in the communities that are immediately affected before then calling in the feds.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
Jennifer O'Connell Liberal Pickering—Uxbridge, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Maybe in my two minutes, I will just ask a question where we left off.
If the ideal is to have local authorities train up and kind of own that training and own that initial response, but the way the system is now.... I mean, if you look back historically, famously, when there's too much snow in Toronto, the military is called in.
How do we as a federal government position the local authorities to actually build up this capability so that CAF really is brought in for organizational assistance or specific assistance that they can offer as kind of that last resort? How do we get to that place, or how do we incentivize that sort of establishment?
That's for either of you.
4:25 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Governance, Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, St. Francis Xavier University, As an Individual
Very quickly, I think a good climate change response for this country would be to ensure that every municipality had an emergency manager. In Nova Scotia I think eight of 40 municipalities have full-time emergency manager positions. I think that's too few.
I think ensuring that municipalities have emergency managers who are well trained and who have standardized skills and professional abilities that they've been taught can be the building stone. Then you have the local response teams who the emergency manager can assist in training and preparing, who have national standardized competencies and who maybe can be used regionally as well and not just focus on the local community. That's one step.
I do think that given the hazard, given the disaster, you are going to require that next level, which is that federal response—or the provincial response as well, right? That needs to be there as well and can deploy quickly to these scenes. I'm not sure you're ever going to be able to get out of needing to have that other level of response outside the local, but there are certainly ways in which we can strengthen that local side of things moving forward, and relatively inexpensively, I would argue, with the emergency managers and these local teams.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Unfortunately, we are going to have to leave it there. I want to thank Ms. O'Connell for her final question.
On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank both Professor Greaves and Professor Kikkert for their contributions to our study. We seem to have had uniformly excellent presentations, and you both have certainly lived up to that standard.
Colleagues, I am going to adjourn this meeting. We will have to re-empanel.
Those who are online will need to sign off and then sign in again.
I'm hoping we can do it quickly. Thank you.
With that, this meeting is adjourned.