I guess maybe I will start off by answering your first part. I don't believe that CAF should be the first call. Let me just say that.
Let me explain the uniqueness of what occurred in Alberta.
This wasn't just one crisis point. Many of you are aware that, in the past, we had the Slave Lake fires and the Fort McMurray fires. I think we had nearly a hundred different crisis points occurring all throughout Alberta, which made this unique. That is why we had to declare that state of emergency.
We relied upon the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which is a great organization. Obviously, from an emergency management perspective, we have the Alberta Emergency Management Agency. It is not necessarily the primary agency. What I mean by that is the local jurisdiction—the local municipality—is essentially the one fighting the fire, along with Alberta forestry. They work in collaboration with them. They have incident commanders. As the Alberta Emergency Management Agency works with them, if the incident commanders require extra resources, as an example, they will be tasked with finding them.
Sometimes very quickly within the fire season we had used most of our resources, I would say, throughout Alberta. We then relied on many other provinces.
This is the great country we live in. Through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre we were able to ask for and get firefighters and incident commanders from other jurisdictions within Canada. As the fires continued to grow and more issues started to arise, this is where we started to bring in international firefighters with specific expertise.
I think it's very important to know that as much as we love our armed forces, they have very basic training when it comes to firefighting. Certainly, it's by no means at the same level as a structural firefighter, as an example.
What we're talking about here is holding the—