First, was the Federation of Canadian Municipalities consulted during the process of this legislation?
Will there be any change in funding for this part of the department, and have there been any cuts in the department, either in the last budget or in the cuts that occurred last week?
Ms. Wong, on ministerial responsibility, all ministers clearly have to develop these plans, but unless I'm missing something in the legislation, I don't see any mandate for either the Minister of Public Safety or anybody else to monitor those plans to make sure they are complete and updated on an ongoing basis. If I'm right about that, maybe that's happening somewhere internally.
Mr. Baker, you described the drills and testing we do of the systems. From some of the reports I read on FEMA, they did the same thing, and if we'd asked them the questions before Katrina they would have been satisfied that the drills were successful and effective. So I'm just wondering what we do to test the tests and drills we're conducting--if they're real to real-time situations.
Because of my experience during the blackout in Ontario, Mr. Lesser, I have this picture of the minister sitting here in Ottawa not being able to communicate with anybody. I think you said that's been taken care of, but I'd like specific confirmation.
Along the same lines of communications--Ms. Wong, you may need to answer this--one of the problems we had in Windsor at that time was that the local CBC station went off the air. It's both an English and a French service. It was crucial that communications go out in French because between 5% and 7% of our population rely on that as a tool, and they didn't have a backup generator. They were off the air for over an hour. Of course, there was some panic as a result of people not being able to get any communication in their language.
Is there some follow-up for crown corporations, rather than just departments? Are we going to monitor the emergency preparedness plans of crown corporations? I'm thinking in particular of not just the communication industry but the nuclear industry.
The other problem I ran into at that time was I had no idea what I was supposed to do as an MP. Since then I have made several inquiries of our local emergency preparedness people--the head of them is a friend of mine--and they can't tell me what I'm supposed to do. So I'd like to know if there are any plans to give instructions to all MPs or their offices, and I'm talking about their constituency offices rather than their offices on the Hill.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.