National Defence Committee on Nov. 9th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Good afternoon. Let's start the meeting.

We have Mr. Klaus Buchmüller, head of the international division of the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief, with us.

Sir, you have five minutes for your opening statement, and then members will ask questions.

I appreciate your co-operation. I'm not quite sure what six hours is at this point, but I guess it's around nine o'clock your time. We thank you for making yourself available.

Sir, you can begin your opening five minutes.

[Klaus Buchmüller, Head, International Division, Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW)]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon. My name is Klaus Buchmüller. I have been the head of the international division of THW since 2006 and a member of THW since 1986. Thank you very much for the invitation to discuss Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief, THW.

I know that, in a previous session, Eva Cohen, a former THW member and our liaison to Canada, already explained that the German government has a disaster relief mechanism that allows the German armed forces to be the asset of last resort, and THW’s unique structure as a government agency based on unpaid citizen volunteers.

There are 85,000 trained volunteers, including about 15,000 youth volunteers, in about 700 detachments across the country, with only 2% being paid staff, one of those being me. Most of them are located on the regional level. In the fire service, there are 1.1 million volunteer firefighters, and only 20,000 paid firefighters. There are approximately 400,000 volunteer paramedics and about 40,000 paid paramedics.

In my position, I have witnessed a steady increase in disaster impact over the last 15 years, as well as an increase of the requirements for effective disaster relief and the technical capabilities that go with it, both within Germany as well as globally. The collaboration of civil protection actors across borders is increasing for heightened efficiency, with the EU mechanism being a very good example. Currently, the ASEAN countries are examining a systematic approach to capacity building and co-operation that is similar to the EU mechanism. Aside from that, we are now supporting a growing list of countries that have decided to strengthen their disaster response systems and that have recognized the benefits of a citizen-based or citizen-supported approach like ours.

Climate change and the resulting increase of extreme weather events have led to an unprecedented level of THW deployments within Germany in recent years. Most notable is the Ahrtal flooding in July 2021. I'm sitting about 10 kilometres away from the Ahrtal.

We were heavily involved in supporting all levels of government with pandemic response, with tasks such as the installation of test and vaccination centres; the transport of personal protection equipment, medications, etc.; as well as international civil protection, capacity-building missions in Jordan, in Tunisia, in northern Iraq, in Algeria, in Morocco, in Ukraine for the procurement and transport of equipment for different stakeholders, in Lebanon for urban search and rescue after the explosion at a chemical warehouse, and in Mozambique for water purification and drinking water supply after the cyclone.

Catastrophic flooding occurred at the Ahr river due to severe rainfall of more than 300 litres per hour for 25 hours ongoing. It was, more or less, 48 hours. This resulted in the biggest deployment of THW in its 70-year history. Alongside all other actors—the NGO sector, spontaneous private supporters and the German military as the asset of last resort—THW volunteers from all 700 detachments across the country were rotated as surge capacity, and all of our 25 technical all-hazards capabilities from urban search and rescue, water purification, blasting, bridge building, and emergency infrastructure repair were required. The operation lasted about 16 weeks, with more than 15,000 volunteers from our organization plus a lot of the other organizations. THW operated for about 2.4 million hours in this scenario.

Although you can imagine that many new lessons were learned, it was also a strong confirmation that our system works very well and can easily adapt and scale up to any demand on a catastrophic level.

It’s an honour to be here today, and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, sir.

With that, we'll turn to our first round of questioning.

Ms. Gallant, you have six minutes.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all, I'd like to thank our witness for the help and leadership he gave in our county back in 2018. We had some flooding. Your paramedics, led by a crew, conferred with our paramedics, led by Chief Mike Nolan, and it really helped out.

You have a citizen-supported system. How do you recruit your volunteers for this paramedic volunteer system?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

May I correct you a little bit? It's not paramedic. We are the technical organization. We do have paramedics, but not in our organization.

How do we recruit? Of course, the volunteer system in Germany is a quite traditional system. With THW, you can start at age six years. It's like the Boy Scouts. They start with playing, using the tools, building up comradeship and so on.

Of course, we have advertisements, but mostly people join our organization because of friends, neighbours and others telling them about it. When they come to a local detachment, it is like a family for them. You don't need to do too much advertising to bring people to THW. We don't have a problem getting young people into our organization right now. We had a problem a few years ago, but not anymore.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

You mentioned that you have a technical aspect. Would you have professionals who volunteer, engineers, people from civilian society who would have the expertise to put into force preventive measures or to use their talents to mitigate when disaster does strike?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

No. There's a big range of different occupations, so there are a lot of tasks they can fulfill. There are engineers. There are lawyers. There are truck drivers. There are installers, plumbers, joiners, whatever. There is everything you can find within these 85,000 people. They are all in the data bank. If we need them for bigger missions, we can see in the data bank what kind of knowledge they do have.

When they work in the local detachments, they are working within a unit. They come with their professional skills, and they get added training for civil defence and civil protection. They know and learn, in addition to their normal job, how to use the skills from their normal job, from their normal profession in disasters, so they are adding.

We also do technical training, such as bridge building. We have bridge-building engineers among the volunteers, but they also need support. They get trained in how to build these mobile bridges, temporary bridges and so on, for example, in our training centres and in the local detachments.

The people we send out to missions are 99% volunteers. The operational job is done by the volunteers.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Obviously, these people have jobs. How do you get the employers to allow the people the time off when they may be critically needed at work?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

It's a federal law. It's called the THW law. The employers have to release the people when we need them. Of course, they get a reimbursement for the time they spend with us—two days—and couldn't go to their normal work. The employer can charge us for this time.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

How do you call up your volunteers when disaster strikes? What method of notification do you send out so that they can come?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

We have beepers. We have our own messenger service, which is a purely THW messenger service. They get a call. The fire brigade or the police station can push a button. Their beeper goes off, and then they know where to go.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

We might have a hard time in Canada getting volunteers in the beginning because it's a brand new concept, besides badges when they're Boy Scouts or maybe credits in high school. Besides the reimbursement for time lost from work, was there any other type of incentive that was needed in the beginning when you first stood up this corps?

If there was a time of war, obviously there may be volunteer military people within your ranks. How would you ensure that you had enough people? Would the military and civilians coordinate in this type of situation?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

To answer the first question as to whether they get incentives, they wouldn't have incentives in the form of money or whatever. Of course they get a medal when they do something special. Of course they get recognized by the media, and they have a social status within their communities because it's quite a tradition, as I said before. It's common to be a volunteer with the fire brigade, with a sporting club, with THW or with the paramedics, and it raises your social level. The media is doing a good job of supporting it as well, but there are no other incentives. They've been discussing this for 10 or 15 years already, so I'm not sure if this will come through.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave the answer there. I apologize for that. Ms. Gallant is a bit past her time.

Ms. Lalonde, you have six minutes.

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to say thank you for joining us. As mentioned, it's very late where you are, and I certainly really appreciate the fact that you took the time to share some of your perspective on what's happening.

I think you know that we have not been immune ourselves to climate change and its impact, and certainly this summer here in Ottawa—I'm a proud resident of Orléans—we had wildfires all across our country and here. It was terrible. We had a lot of smog due to those wildfires. We had flooding and tornadoes. Ottawa is now designated a tornado area, and we have been relying on our military.

I appreciate Mrs. Gallant's perspective on volunteering. Volunteers have come forward, and we sometimes need the extra help.

I was wondering, beyond the military, how NGOs like the Red Cross assist regarding recovery and support efforts. Are they complementary to the military efforts that you are seeing?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

The military in general in Germany is really the last resort. If there's a big disaster like the Ahrtal, the military comes to support, or if there's a big flood like in 2013 in eastern Germany, but there is a very well-balanced coordination system between the federal government and German Länders about when and how the coordination starts and which organization has to fulfill which task, and they train together. They do exercises together, the Red Cross, St. John, THW, the fire brigade and even the local police and the border police. The federal border police do exercises together on a broader scale.

There is no problem putting these organizations together in a big disaster so that they can work together. You do have more problems with what we call spontaneous supporters, citizens who are not in an organization where they have training and so on, and they just pop up when there's an event or a disaster, and they want to help.

With the structure we have from the federal government and from the local government, we have now found out how to work with these spontaneous citizen supporters and fit them in, because they want to do something. They need a structure and, without the structure, you can't coordinate them.

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

Thank you very much.

Yes, I would agree with you, and I think we have similar systems.

I'm interested in the financial component. What financial supports does your federal government have for local communities that have been affected by disaster, and is there a particular formula for cost-sharing between orders of government?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

It depends.

When we talk about how THW is financed, we get about €350 million a year from the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community as a budget for THW.

I have to admit I don't know how much money the local governments have for their organizations, like the fire brigade. If there's a disaster in the local community and it needs support from the federal government through THW, it depends. If it is small, like a truck accident, and the fire brigade is not able to support it completely and they need support from THW, there is a cost catalogue. We have to charge the local community or the local structures, but most of the time it's paid by the insurance company, which has to pay for the whole thing.

If it is a bigger disaster, like the Ahrtal flood, which I mentioned before, then most of the time the federal government says that the support from THW as a federal asset is free of cost to the requester for the communal services.

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

Here, it's very similar. Usually a provincial jurisdiction or a municipality would request federal support. Is this similar?

My last question is this: How much support have you received from international partners, either financially or in personnel, to combat the fires or assist with, for instance, the 2013 flood?

[Klaus Buchmüller]

Let's do the second question first.

When we have bigger disasters, of course, neighbouring countries like France or Luxembourg give us some offers of help. We had a lot of injured people, so Luxembourg sent paramedic cars, brought some of the injured people to Luxembourg and treated them.

Sometimes we get in-kind donations, but that is more of a political gesture.

Within the European civil protection mechanism, we are able to ask all the EU members and partner countries to support us. There's a big and very effective system within Europe, which is also available for the whole world, where we can request support. Offers can also be sent within this mechanism.

If a country in the European neighbourhood wants to offer something to Germany while Germany is facing a disaster, it goes through what we call the Brussels hub, which is the ERCC or Emergency Response Coordination Centre. Then we deal with them on how and what kind of—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, again, I have to leave the answer there.

Ms. Normandin, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Buchmüller, thank you for being here. However, I would like to apologize right away for the fact that my initial comments won't be aimed at asking you questions for one simple reason. For weeks, if not months, the government has refused to listen to the Bloc Québécois, which is asking it to hold an open and transparent competition to replace its multi-mission aircraft. As a result, last Tuesday, the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, and the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, joined the Bloc Québécois in asking the government to hold a call for tenders, which would allow for a transparent and fair process for the various aerospace manufacturers.

In that context, I would like to reopen the debate on the motion that we, the Bloc Québécois, put forward last Tuesday and on which the debate was adjourned. It reads:

That, considering the joint statement of the respective Premiers of Quebec and Ontario dated November 7, 2023, concerning the public procurement of CP‑140 Aurora by the federal government, the Committee is of the opinion that the government must proceed by way of a formal call for tenders before awarding any procurement contract to this effect. That the Chairman of the Committee immediately report this resolution of the Committee to the House.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

The motion is in order.

I had rather hoped, colleagues, that we could deal with this at the end of this first hour, since we have a witness. The time for the witness is at 10 o'clock at night. It does seem to me to be not treating a witness properly.

Is there an appetite to move Ms. Normandin's proper motion to the end of the first hour? She's prepared to do that. Okay.

[A voice]

Could we at least do one round?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Yes, we'll do one round of questions. Are you good with that? That takes us to shortly after four o'clock our time. We'll then release Mr. Buchmüller.

I apologize, sir, but you've probably appeared before a few parliamentary committees in the past, and you know exactly how this works.

With that, I'm going to turn to Ms. Normandin, for a further four minutes.