I'm going to focus on two things, Mr. Chair. One is the relationship between the provinces and their municipalities.
Ontario Emergency Management, under Mr. Fantino, has legislation that determines when municipalities must report things centrally to the province in Toronto. We have a working relationship. We have regional folks in Toronto who work very carefully with Ontario Emergency Management, and we have permanent seats in their operations centre, as do the RCMP and the Canadian Forces.
At a certain level there is always a judgment call as to what level people need to know about these things, but certainly it was clear...there were evacuations out of some northern communities over the last while to more southern communities. Hearst and some others were involved with that, Indian and Northern Affairs on the federal side, as well as our colleagues in the Ontario government. It was time to take a look at whether they needed support trying to transport people out of areas. Kashechewan was another good example.
There is no formal criteria that would go from a provincial EOC to us that says under these circumstances you are mandated to do that. And this legislation doesn't require that. What this legislation sets up is...we talk about the national emergency response system, agreements we're working on currently with all the provinces on how we can link at the federal-provincial level to have information passed forward that's appropriate to pass on.