Yes, ma'am. I think it's a very important question.
The best example I can cite for you—where it was the first resort, because we were in a full-blown emergency—is when we deployed the Canadian Armed Forces into long-term care facilities in both Quebec and Ontario. That was a situation in which people were dying. It was a situation in which the people who normally work in those long-term care facilities either weren't able or weren't willing to.... People were significantly at risk. We went to the Canadian Armed Forces and asked for their help. We learned almost immediately that it wasn't necessarily the best use of those very limited and valuable resources.
We went right to work. I hope Minister Sajjan will have the opportunity to speak more at length about this. We started working with a number of different NGOs—the Canadian Red Cross, primarily, but also St. John Ambulance, The Salvation Army, the Search and Rescue Volunteer Association of Canada and others—to create what we called a “humanitarian workforce”. We worked very closely with the provincial authorities, Quebec in particular, to get military members out of the long-term care facilities and to replace them with trained volunteers. They were primarily trained by the Red Cross.
That situation was perhaps characterized as “first resort”, but we were in a full-blown emergency. People were dying. We moved quickly to get the Canadian Armed Forces in there to stabilize the situation, then worked just as quickly to get them out of there and to replace them with the appropriate resources.