Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the honourable members of this committee for allowing me this moment to speak to your committee on this very important issue. I really want to thank the witnesses as well for being present here. I commend each and every one of you for your work in this field.
I, myself, have experience in emergency management in northern Alberta.
I'll give a nod to Mr. Burns. I'm sure you're familiar with what happened in northern Alberta in 2019, which was the Chuckegg wildfire. It was a massive wildfire that threatened High Level and Paddle Prairie. During that experience, when I was the national director for Alberta's northern Métis, we had a huge fire called the Chuckegg wildfire, and this fire ultimately destroyed 15 homes. Today, unfortunately, that same community is actually being flooded. They've been evacuated and are continuing to evacuate as we speak.
I want to just back up to 2019. In my experience in that, there was a whole series of barriers, I'd say, to indigenous people and their access to emergency services. Ultimately, it did require the Canadian Armed Forces to send two planes to help us evacuate that community. We faced immense difficulty in trying to make sure that we had the logistics and the capability to do that work. Of course, we organized, as many of you will know, at the provincial level first. We had a PAC council called, a provincial organizing council. This provincial organizing council invited us to look at ways and means to support our indigenous communities in northern Alberta.
What I found was a series of unique problems. I think a member spoke about it, actually, the need to ensure that northern indigenous communities have access to support, and I think it was Christian Leuprecht who talked about what role the Canadian Armed Forces can play in supporting indigenous communities in particular, which, to date, lack the critical infrastructure, the critical support systems and the critical logistical centres, to actually tackle the crisis we're in.
I mean this in the full sense, that we're in the age of climate consequence right now. Each of our witnesses has spoken to that fact. By patterns we know that these crises, these natural disasters, are going to continue to get worse. Not only are they going to get worse, but they're going to get more devastating in terms of their impact to our infrastructure.
I have a series of questions, and I'll follow up in my subsequent rounds on this point, but to each of the panel members, you have the same experience I do, I'm sure, in organizing support for communities in the north, or at least some of you do. What can we do to ensure that we limit the barriers and get direct assistance to indigenous communities, maybe by way of a federal program, that may not require the consent of the province, which was a barrier to those indigenous communities during that time?
We can start with Mr. Burns.