Talking about emergency management is one of the very emotional spaces for me as a minister, because what we're talking about—and many of you may have experienced some climate-related emergency in your own life, a flood at home or relocation—is significantly disruptive to communities.
In the past, while communities were in the chaos of trying to manage crisis, there was a fairly restrictive approach to getting money to them. What communities would say frequently was that they needed flexibility in those times. What they needed was the ability to have some form of advance payment so that they could, on the fly, decide how to protect people, protect property, deal with the ongoing emotional crises that inevitably swell up in the time of an emergency, and the many other things that we can and can't imagine.
In fact, the department has been able to do that. We've pivoted from a “show us your receipts” approach to a “here's an advance” approach to supporting communities through crisis management, which then enables that community to act much more rapidly. They don't have to worry about whether or not they will be reimbursed for a particular expense.
Some of the stories I heard were incredible, like the Tsilhqot'in protecting their community in the middle of a forest fire raging around them and being able to, very quickly and rapidly, mobilize to keep the fire away from their perimeter using historical knowledge of fire management.
Those kinds of things are enabled when people don't worry about the money they're going to need to rent specialized equipment, to support volunteers or to do the kinds of activities that sometimes we can't imagine unless we've done that ourselves. This approach has been a real success story over the last year and a half.
We learned a lot by supporting communities through COVID. If you remember, in the early days of COVID the federal government needed to make money and resources available to communities so they could enable measures that would protect them from COVID. It proved to be very successful. In fact, we had reports from first nations communities that talked about the ability to protect life using that flexibility and honouring the knowledge that communities have.