Evidence of meeting #32 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 capacity.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Mr. May.
That brings us to a close.
Before I let you go—and you may or may not have an answer to this question—the price per hour of a helicopter is staggering. It's absolutely staggering. I don't think the public has any real feel for that. This is probably an unfair question, but I ask it all the time. Do you have any recollection or an estimation of the price of sending in a helicopter on a per-hour basis?
As an Individual
I don't. I'm sure the military could tell you.
As I was saying to Ms. Mathyssen, part of the issue with costing for the military is that, because of the preoccupations of Parliament over the years, the costing is utterly and completely comprehensive, taking into account all repairs, all upgrading and all facilities.
Going back to your question, if you're dealing with a private sector helicopter, you don't have all of that. They want to make a bit of money on the use of the helicopter for this time frame, so they'll charge you whatever they are charging you and it will be a lot less than what the military is charging.
As an Individual
I was responsible for it as the deputy minister and I can't say that I mastered it entirely. It is very complicated.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Mr. Fadden, once again, you have provided an intelligent and articulate analysis of this issue. I, particularly, appreciate it, and I know the committee does.
With that, we will suspend and repanel in a minute or two. Thanks very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Colleagues, I call this meeting back to order.
Our second hour is with witnesses from the Red Cross.
Mr. Sauvé, welcome to the committee.
Amy Avis, general counsel and chief of recovery services, welcome to the committee.
Mr. Botha, assistant deputy minister of the emergency measures organization of Manitoba, welcome.
We just had our first taste of somebody in the flesh in the committee. It was positively exciting, but we're back to virtual representation.
With that, I'm going to ask the representatives from the Red Cross for a five-minute presentation. We'll then move to Manitoba for another five minutes, and then we'll go to rounds of questions.
Go ahead, Mr. Sauvé.
Conrad Sauvé President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for having us here to speak today.
My name is Conrad Sauvé. I am the CEO of the Canadian Red Cross and I'm joined today by my colleague Amy Avis, who is general counsel and lead for our recovery, risk reduction and resilience programming. We are joining you from Ottawa, which is on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe people.
I would like to start by thanking committee members for your leadership in the timely study of Canada’s domestic response capacity. My presentation is in English.
I can certainly answer committee members' questions in French.
Each year with increased frequency and severity, we're seeing the growing impact of climate change on Canadian communities. In the last two years alone, the Canadian Red Cross has responded to floods and fires in B.C. and to an annual flooding in northern Manitoba in indigenous communities, and our teams are currently on the ground supporting those impacted by hurricane Fiona in Atlantic Canada.
Unfortunately, these events are not isolated incidents. What once was a once-in-a-lifetime disaster is increasingly an annual event, stretching Canada's emergency management system to its limits.
When I started with the Red Cross, our emergency operations were almost entirely international. Today, 90% of our efforts are focused on assisting Canadians at home. At the Red Cross, we believe the time has come to stop treating these large-scale events as exceptional, and we must do more now to prepare ourselves for a new normal.
This must include seeking new ways to adapt, enhance and modernize Canada's response capacity and reduce the current strain on governments and response organizations, including the Canadian Armed Forces. While the Canadian Armed Forces have always been there to help in times of disaster, they must remain the force of last resort and should not be the only permanent national surge capacity in times of emergency.
As we seek to address gaps in Canada's emergency management capacity, we can point to a few critical lessons that we've learned during the past two years in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to unprecedented funding from the Government of Canada, the Canadian Red Cross was able to build the first-ever humanitarian workforce comprised of thousands of Canadians across the country who were eager and willing to lend their skills and expertise. These efforts began in the spring of 2020 as part of a highly successful effort to relieve the Canadian Armed Forces in long-term care homes in Quebec and Ontario. The highly collaborative effort saw the Canadian Red Cross and the CAF personnel sharing skills, experience and lessons learned to ensure that Canadians were well supported throughout the transition. In fact, prior to our deployment, the Canadian Red Cross helped to train hundreds of CAF members in epidemic prevention control measures.
Since that time, this investment has resulted in more than 7,500 Red Cross personnel deployments to respond to more than 180 requests for assistance from federal, provincial and territorial partners. Even today, the Canadian Red Cross continues to deploy health human resources into communities to support COVID-19 outbreaks as well as ongoing vaccination clinics across the country, particularly in the north. While our country must be hugely grateful to the Canadian Armed Forces for their effort in responding to COVID-19, we have learned that, with strategic foresight, a continued investment in the development and maintenance of emergency health support is a role that organizations like the Canadian Red Cross can and should be trusted to play.
In addition to the gap in humanitarian service delivery early in the pandemic, we are also increasingly seeing gaps in civil protection capability, such as the critical work the CAF is supporting in Atlantic Canada. The Canadian Red Cross has recently studied a number of emergency management models internationally, including through discussions with our Red Cross counterparts in Germany, Australia and the United States. What we have seen, in terms of best practices for Canada, is an emergency strategy that clearly articulates predefined roles, responsibilities and capabilities for each actor. These are further strengthened with appropriate funding and coordination structures to ensure effective readiness and deployment of these resources.
While these models all include a mandate for civil protection capability, they also recognize and define an auxiliary role for their national Red Cross Society on the provision of humanitarian services. As we look at potential options for such models in Canada, we also caution that any model must be built for purpose, considering the unique risks, peoples and geography of this country.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Mr. Sauvé, I apologize for interrupting, but I'm running a hard clock here. Maybe you could work in the balance of your remarks in responses to questions, if that would work out for you.
Let me turn to Mr. Botha for five minutes.
Again, I apologize, but the clock is the enemy in all of these hearings.
Johanu Botha Assistant Deputy Minister, Emergency Measures Organization of Manitoba
It's no problem, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much.
Good day, Mr. Chair and committee members.
My name is Dr. Johanu Botha. I am the assistant deputy minister responsible for emergency management for the Province of Manitoba. I'm joining you from Winnipeg in the vast traditional territory of the Anishinabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis nation.
I'll give a quick bit about me within the five minutes. I have practical emergency management experience as an army officer and overseeing emergency management in Manitoba. On the academic side, my Ph.D. focused on emergency management. My textbook on the role of all governments and the military in emergency management in Canada was published by the U of T Press earlier this year.
I think I'll skip to the end of my presentation just to capture the nuts and bolts, and then I can go back to the comments during questions.
While the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces prioritize their vision around national defence and the maintenance of Canada’s sovereignty, backed by force if need be, multiple iterations of DND and CAF strategic documents have acknowledged CAF’s ongoing humanitarian role in domestic disaster response to natural disasters.
This acknowledgement has, at least up to now, reflected the current reality, as provinces across the federation repeatedly call on the federal government for military support during large-scale responses, mainly to provide a pool of labour that can organize and maintain itself while executing an array of response actions. I should stress “labour”, because boots on the ground is by far the bulk of the need identified by receiving jurisdictions over assets like helicopters and specific expertise.
The last decade and a half have seen CAF successfully integrate into the provincial-municipal-indigenous response systems on the ground during, again, large-scale disaster responses. Numerous events, including wildfires, floods, rains, hurricanes and, of course, the pandemic, have seen CAF provide crucial capacity, while ensuring overall domestic disaster response remains under civilian direction and control.
The reality, at least from the research perspective of all large events, and again I stress large events since 2007, is that Canada simply does not currently have a large response capacity without significant heavy lifting from the Canadian Armed Forces. This does reflect an ongoing and growing trend to use military forces to augment national disaster response across comparable countries, including federal states like the United States and Australia.
From the research perspective on large-scale events since 2007, continued success in Canadian disaster response will likely require that the CAF, without, of course, undermining its primary mission of protecting Canadian sovereignty, be ready to deploy domestically to save lives and property from disasters.
The research is clear that, while some aspects of military expertise and organizational capacity can absolutely be transferred to civilian aspects of emergency management, the large, well-trained and, again, self-supported labour force that comes with a military deployment has no obvious replacement in the Canadian context at this time.
In reality, we work with our Red Cross partners all the time, and they're phenomenal. However, the volunteer organizations do not come close during large-scale disaster response, in part because military personnel accept and understand that they are subject to being lawfully ordered into harm's way under conditions that could lead to the loss of their lives.
While I'm not here to weigh in on any policy decisions, the emergency management research points us not to the question of whether or not to use the military in large-scale disaster response but to the question of whether the military has the ongoing support, capacity and, indeed, the morale to continue to support domestic disaster responses while achieving its primary objective of national defence.
I'll leave it there. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
With that, we'll go to the six-minute rounds, starting with Mr. Allison.
Conservative
Dean Allison Conservative Niagara West, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our guests for being here today.
My first question is for Mr. Sauvé. Thank you for being here.
I know the Red Cross has obviously a great reputation around the world. You guys are always seen as an honest broker that can be trusted. I know that when I chaired foreign affairs, we talked about you guys getting into Syria with the Red Crescent. It was one of the few trusted NGOs on the ground that could actually get in there.
Let's bring it back home here. Talk to us about the size. You said you have thousands of people. More specifically, are those volunteers, and is the size of your operation more specific to certain provinces? Do you have an overall breakdown of what you have in terms of numbers of volunteers and/or organizations provincially, and how easy is that to transfer, based on what's happening on the ground?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
Thank you for your question.
Actually, I heard a little bit of the last participant, Mr. Fadden, as he ended. If we take the COVID experience, and in some cases the volunteers and staff, it's all about what we are building the capacity for and what we are planning for. When COVID happened, we were asked to replace the military. We didn't have that capacity, but we built it to what was required. We built a partly permanent capacity to that response—it wasn't all volunteers. To this date, we have volunteer capacity throughout the provinces.
Throughout the provinces, we have presence everywhere. We have some interoperable capacity, so we can bring it from one place to the other.
I think a lot of this conversation here is—and my ending point actually to my presentation was this—understanding what the risks are that we're looking at and what capacities we need to build. Right now, we're using the military consistently for lack of being prepared in other aspects, like lacking trained local capacity and having that objective.
I'm not saying that in every case you don't need the military—in some exceptional cases you do—but it seems to be the only tool in the tool box. What risks are we facing and what capacities do we need to support and train locally? That's a mixture of staff, of course, and volunteers.
We're looking at the fire after the fire starts. We're not spending a lot of money building the fire station in the civil protection area.
Conservative
Dean Allison Conservative Niagara West, ON
You talk about capacity and maybe expanding what you have capacity for as time goes on.
Would you just share with us the different levels of what you're involved in? We see taking money, obviously, for people and getting money deployed. You talked about fire. Talk to us about some of the capacities that you guys are involved in domestically.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
Our major role domestically is in supporting. We're seeing that in the immediate phase of the emergency, such as in sheltering, which is at different levels with local and provincial governments. We've seen our role grow in providing immediate assistance, including cash assistance, to people who are being displaced. There's housing and then, of course, the recovery programs. To give you a bit of an idea of the scale, in the last five years, we've supported over 700,000 Canadians who have been affected.
The Red Cross is concentrating on the individuals who are impacted and supporting them in their situation. Of course, it's also bringing us into the challenges of recovery and supporting people who have lost everything during the months, and sometimes years, after an event.
Conservative
Dean Allison Conservative Niagara West, ON
You have Red Cross emergency response units. Talk to us about whether you've used them and how often. Obviously, we've talked about a greater need in the future, potentially. Talk to us a bit about your Red Cross emergency response units and what they've done or what they are capable of doing.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
Our main role right now is, again, supporting sheltering. Depending on the situation, not every population requires shelter. Some people will go to family and friends who are supporting them. It's that presence and that training in terms of that side.
What's been new during COVID was to provide support on the health side. This is where the military was asked to intervene. That was everything from vaccinations to the ICU nurses we deployed to our field hospitals that we built for international. We deployed four field hospitals, so we have a number of capacities there. Then, of course, we helped with the quarantine of Canadians and different situations.
We have an expandable capacity and we have a present capacity, but it's looking at what the risks are. In terms of our role, we're seeing the need to better prepare local communities in terms of what they're going to be facing. There's a need to better prepare Canadians in terms of the risks. There's a need for better intervening and having the systems to support them in terms of evacuations and whatnot, and better helping with the recovery, the mitigation and the early warning systems, etc. The Red Cross is involved very much on the people side.
Part of the conversation here has been about the boots on the ground and heavy machinery, which we're not involved in. However, our experience has been that there is often local capacity in the private sector. To give you an example, when we're talking about Manitoba a few years ago, we chartered over 250 small planes to support the evacuation of over 10,000 first nation members of different communities in the north.
We have the logistical capacity to use that, but in order to use the private sector, you need to understand what the risks are. You need to organize your inventory of capacities and you need to have them ready. The challenge is when you do that—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Unfortunately, again I apologize, Mr. Sauvé. Your answers are quite thoughtful, but Mr. Allison's time is up.
I will now go to Mr. Battiste.
You have six minutes. Welcome to the committee.
Liberal
Jaime Battiste Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for having me at the defence committee.
First of all, for the Red Cross, Conrad and Amy, I have to say thank you. Thank you for all you're doing.
On September 24, as a Cape Breton member of Parliament, I woke up to damage that I can only describe as overwhelming, with trees blown down over power wires, telephone poles down, buildings with their roofs ripped off and other buildings that had bridges run into them from the flooding and the high tides that just made the damage unspeakable. All we knew was that we needed help. We didn't know where that help would come from. When you wake up to that disaster, you have all levels of governments trying to figure out where to go.
For any leaders who have woken up to this kind of disaster, I'm wondering if you could give us this very compactly: What is the role the Red Cross plays in comparison to what the defence department does?
If you could do that in about two minutes, I would really appreciate it.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
In exactly that situation, our role is to support the individuals. What we're looking at in Atlantic Canada is that we're registering people. Why we're registering them is to have a direct relationship with those who are affected and to be able to provide financial or other assistance—including psychosocial, in some cases—to the people who are impacted. It's very much in that sense.
Of course, in the case of any kind of disaster, a number of people will be evacuated to shelters, and we, among others, are supporting municipalities in sheltering and supporting that.
Hopefully, the situation won't be too long for most people, but for some, they will be away from their homes for a longer time. In many of those cases, we will be supporting them with temporary or interim housing for the months and years ahead, and looking at how we can support the gaps in financial assistance that will be there as well. That's why we're raising money as well. It's very much about supporting the individuals in that situation.
Liberal
Jaime Battiste Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
It's my understanding—we heard a bit of the testimony—that the Canadian Armed Forces were able to do things such as using power saws to cut down trees. Can you give us a little sense of what you understand to be the role the Canadian Armed Forces play during these disasters?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
In terms of what we've seen in the last year, that's why I've given the example: Is it the appropriate tool, the armed forces, for all these situations? Are there other capabilities on the ground—local capacities—that can be trained for this? Our experience is that there are always other capabilities—not in every case and sometimes the military is necessary—but because we haven't identified what those risks are, and we haven't looked at who can help in those situations, we're caught unprepared. Then we need a rapid response, which the military has. I think the other speaker from Manitoba said that very well.
The question is whether we have other existing capabilities. In order to understand that, we need to understand the risks and do that inventory. A lot of civil protection response is around looking at the capacities, because the first response is always in the community, the local community. Have you prepared them properly? Have you trained people properly? Have you prepared them to face their risks properly? Then, after that, you have the response. I think we have to heighten that side of our response in Canada as a civil protection and look at civil society in that respect.
Liberal
Jaime Battiste Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
Thank you, Mr. Sauvé.
One of the things the federal government said is that we would match dollar for dollar all the funds raised for Fiona. Can you tell me what we've raised so far and what the people in my riding of Sydney—Victoria can expect, for the next little while, the Red Cross to be able to do?
I know that the Prime Minister announced $300 million for the long-term recovery, but for the short term, for the people who are throwing out the food in their fridges, for the people.... Eight per cent of the people in my riding still don't have power. What is it that the Red Cross is doing and how many dollars do you have currently?
I have about a minute for your answer.
October 4th, 2022 / 12:25 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
Okay. I'm going to go fast.
I think we've raised, to date, $15 million. We're in the process of raising that. We're asking everybody to register with us to look at their needs exactly and to see how we could use that money the most efficiently, again, complementing what the provinces are doing. We're looking at that right now. All monies raised will be there to help individuals and to also help local organizations.
The registration helps us—exactly to your point—understand what those needs are. Again, with the sums, we will distribute them to those who need it the most.
Liberal
Jaime Battiste Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
With the last 30 seconds, if there are fundraisers taking place in Cape Breton, until what date do they have to get the Red Cross the dollars in order to be matched by the federal government?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Red Cross
I'm sorry. If we receive donations, when will they be matched? Is that your question?