Thank you, Mr. Aldag.
Yes, forest fires were a terrible issue last year. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of things that we are going to see with increased frequency because of the impacts of climate change. Certainly the prospects look very challenging in many parts of the country this summer.
The Government of Canada certainly acted last year. We have made significant investments in equipment for the provinces and territories to purchase additional firefighting equipment. There's over $250 million that was actually flowing through there. We set aside significant funds to train additional wildland firefighters, a lot of those in indigenous communities, which obviously are often very much at risk. They live in areas that often are prone to forest fires.
We also started a pilot project with the International Association of Fire Fighters, which was really about how you help to get municipal firefighters to help in that interface between community and forest. Many of those exist in British Columbia as well as in other provinces in this country. Certainly in my riding of North Vancouver, we're right up against the forest in the mountains. We provided some money to help them train their firefighters on how to do that. We just augmented that a couple of weeks ago with additional funds.
Certainly we are working very much with the provinces and territories, both directly on these funding arrangements but also through what's called CIFFC, which basically coordinates the resources across provinces so that if Nova Scotia doesn't have a bad firefighting year, they can help deploy people and equipment to Alberta or British Columbia if those places have a bad year.
Certainly there's a lot of work going on there, not just with NRCan but also with the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Minister Sajjan.