Public Safety Committee on Oct. 5th, 2006

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

That wording does not require you to follow up. You do the initial...and then a year from now, two years from now, or four years from now.... I don't see that responsibility in those paragraphs.

[Suki Wong]

It provides us the background, with a framework to establish policies and programs to make sure we have a monitoring or evaluating auditing unit in place.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Do you have that now?

[Michael Baker]

Under the BCP process we have that mandate. This is just enlarging that BCP program into emergency plans.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

But do you have that now in terms of doing the follow-up?

[Michael Baker]

We do. The emergency management mandate is given to us under this act.

[James Deacon]

I believe you had a question on FEMA.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

It was to Mr. Baker about testing the tests.

[Michael Baker]

We go through various levels. We could start with a seminar, going right to a full-scale testing. It will involve that process. We document; we go from our lessons learned. So yes, we do go through that.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Did we learn anything from FEMA, in the sense that when they went back and looked and said they had tested this and thought their system would work...? And I know the system is different; I'm quite aware of that, Mr. Deacon. But did they learn anything? They would say yes, we had these drills, we conducted them in the abstract, and in the practice they worked, but in reality, when we got hit with this, they didn't. Did we learn anything from that?

[Robert Lesser]

Maybe I can quickly answer that one. One of the challenges was that those whom the feds would normally help were no longer available. By and large, a lot of the first responders were dead or gone. So you didn't have a state asking to assist its first responders, because the first responders were no longer there to ask for assistance.

No one had planned and practised that kind of event. The U.S. government is now taking a look at whether federally they would impose their assistance on a local jurisdiction if they saw this happen again. That is something they are dealing with.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

What about us?

[Robert Lesser]

We're not looking at that area, that I'm aware of. What we are doing, though, is making—

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

What I'm asking is, have we built that eventuality into our drill, that the first responders may be dead or may have been evacuated?

[Robert Lesser]

In the ones we've been involved in, just from an ops centre point of view, we haven't. But we have addressed that with the provinces. Most provinces have redundancy. They have regional offices, so that if one area went down, the rest could act.

I think New Orleans was a very unique area. If it had not been for the dikes failing, it would not have been that big a deal. But one of the things they learned from this was that they didn't exercise enough, and although they had a system in place that acted quite similarly to ours as far as its command system was concerned, the officials who were supposed to take the lead on it weren't trained. They hadn't done the training and hadn't done the practising. They found that where the people were well trained and knew the system, things worked well. Where people didn't know the system and hadn't been engaged in training and exercises, it tended to fail.

Another thing that failed was the communications system. They found by and large that the Internet system worked, but there was a real challenge in getting information from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where the joint field office was, and from Baton Rouge back up to Washington.

There were also indications of officials failing, individual failures of not responding, as was expected of them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Were there any other questions that haven't been answered?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

There were several more that dealt with the issue of communications.

[Suki Wong]

About whether or not our minister would have the responsibility to review or to ensure that there would be backup plans for crown corporations.... The answer would be yes, that “government institution” in Bill C-12 does include crown corporations.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

And in the system now, we're not going to have the minister sitting in the dark again?

[Robert Lesser]

In our operations centre we use the system on a regular basis to test the generators, so we have that. The phone systems as well have been upgraded so that the phones don't die. I think that was a major problem with the blackout.

As well, we have a site that, although not ideal, we will use as an alternate site—it is used to run major exercises from—in Gatineau. It is on a different power grid. So there are those kinds of backups.

Our minister has a variety of communication equipment with him that, as long as it is charged up, should work.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

The other one was what role there was for the member of Parliament.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Let's wind up with that. You're double your time already.

[Robert Lesser]

I can't remember the event when it happened, but there were special packages developed for members of Parliament that would give them information on the background. There are usually evergreen lines that are shared very quickly. Within the last two years there were packages put out to members of Parliament saying what they could do. Our role is to support, obviously, ministers and the Government of Canada generally. Usually, out of the communications group in Privy Council Office lead spokespeople are selected, and they are usually the spokespeople. I would think individual members would feed off the main government lines.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

I suggest we get out of town and let the professionals take care.