I will begin, Darren, and then I would like to give the CDS an opportunity to opine. This is his profession, and I think we defer to his experience on this.
My experience as the former emergencies minister is that we always try to be very careful in how we deploy and use members of the Canadian Armed Forces, so perhaps I can explain how that works procedurally.
The province would encounter a situation in which their capacity to respond to an emergency may be exceeded, so they would then ask for help. The request would come to the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, and I understand that you're going to be hearing from him later today, but I had that job previously. When we received that, it would be received at the government operations centre. It would be passed over to the government operations centre, which works with the Canadian Armed Forces and other federal departments, and everyone would be able to contribute what they could and could not do.
It did take into careful consideration not only the capability of the armed forces but the appropriateness of their being the response. There were others who are part of that discussion, the Canadian Coast Guard, as an example, and the RCMP. There would be a very important discussion about how we could help the province.
However, it's important to acknowledge that there are some unique capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces, for example, the ability to airlift out of a certain area. They also have some people who are not necessarily on the front line of firefighting as level 1 firefighters, because most of them are not trained to do that. There is important work that needs to take place behind that front line, and Canadian Armed Forces members are well trained to do that and have been really important in doing that.
We've also had situations in the past year. I recall vividly a day when a number of Canadians were stranded on a highway just outside of Hope, British Columbia, and there was no way to get them off. There were landslides and mudslides occurring all around them. The Canadian Armed Forces swooped in in their helicopters, because they are the only ones who could do it, and they rescued those people and took them to safety.
By the way, that wasn't an RFA. They answered without our having to go through any government process. They came to help because that's what they do.
The process of determining whether or not it's appropriate to use Canadian Armed Forces members, I want to assure this committee, is done very much in consultation with CAF itself.