I'll start off with the visit.
When we became a new department, we inherited what was there. That didn't meet anybody's needs, so we just totally destroyed it. We have a temporary ops centre that's still there, but early November would probably be a great time to come back. You're certainly welcome to tour that once we get rid of the construction helmets and those kinds of things.
As for what it does, there are a number of main functions. The first one is a monitoring and reporting function. As I mentioned before, there are different areas that it monitors for, and they're fairly wide. It's much more than for emergencies, it's for public safety writ large, if you will. Then there are a number of kinds of products that it will report on. There's one that we call an information bulletin, and it primarily goes to our minister, the minister's staff, and the Privy Council Office, to give them a heads-up. It contains unconfirmed, uncorroborated information, and within thirty minutes we'll come back with what we call a notification. That then comes with accredited and, as best we can, certified information as to what may be occurring.
Depending on that, in the other areas that we have, we gather situational awareness. It's really that whole thing to develop, in more military terms, a common operating picture. With that kind of information, we then take a look at doing a risk assessment. We don't do threat assessments. Those are done by CSIS, the RCMP, DND, etc. We do a risk assessment that asks the questions, “What do we care? What does this mean? And if it does mean something, what do we do? Is there a particular plan that's already in place that we implement, or do we have to develop something to respond specifically to this?” There will be an immediate action plan if we don't have a plan to do that.
Our last function is operations coordination, which is done at the strategic level, which is different from the very pointy end, the tactical level or, say, the mid-level operational level. Within the operations centre right now, the director of the operations centre is from the Canadian Forces. We have a planner from the Canadian Forces who is responsible for their pandemic plan, so he's a highly trained planner. And we are integrating our planning system with the military planning system. We're finding a lot of that is then in line with the 2010 planning for the Olympics. We have former RCMP and CSIS members within the entire Government Operations Centre who look at situational awareness, risk assessment, planning, as I talked about, and ops coordination.
When something happens, if it's very small and very quick.... There are a number of times that you've probably read about in the papers when there are people who are on aircraft who are on the American no-fly list. Sometimes it's required that either Canadians or Americans under NORAD will scramble jets to do protection on that, and then they go through a series of checks to find out whether or not they can confirm a risk or deny a risk. We are immediately involved with five key departments in terms of determining the risk. If there was ever an opportunity or the occasion when it was decided at the highest levels that the aircraft would have to be shot down, we'd be involved in the consequence management of that, notifying the provinces and providing the assistance that would be needed.
Some events will happen in less than twenty minutes. Other events are fairly long-term. Our role with the repatriation of the Lebanese citizens took about three or four weeks. By and large, that was a fairly simple thing for us as the interlocutors between Foreign Affairs Canada and the provinces and the local municipalities, like Montreal. Certainly Quebec did an excellent job of looking after returning citizens for the first 72 hours. Ontario and the City of Ottawa equally did some excellent work there. So we would also perform that liaison function, that situational awareness, that passing of that kind of information.
As an event grows for us to level two and then level three, simplistically we'd do more of the same, but we'd bring in people from other departments and agencies. We see ourselves as simply the experts in the process, the emergency response process. We are not experts, nor do we intend to be experts. If there was a radiological threat or a biological threat or a national security threat, we'd bring in the experts from the areas that have that expertise and they would fit into the planning process, the risk assessment process, and the ops coordination process, and they would be very key in that one.
