Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Knight, Dr. Duplessis, and your colleagues, especially my former colleague and Minister of National Defence, David Pratt, we're grateful that you're here today. I'd like to underline the importance of your presence and who you represent.
The reality of modern governance is that no level of government can deal with a major issue alone, even if the issue is properly integrated across that government's various departments and branches. A government has to work with its opposite numbers at every level. But good governance goes beyond even governments themselves. It involves the market and the academy. Most important, it involves civil society and the volunteer sector that plays a part in it.
These two organizations perhaps exhibit the best practices of modern governance in this country, from the civil society side, the intergovernmental side, and, with FCM, the intragovernmental side. I thank you for that. I think the importance of your role in governance is best demonstrated by what you're doing in emergency preparedness. One thing about Bill C-12 is that we've changed emergency preparedness to emergency management. I wouldn't want to give that away. With proper precautionary action, we might not have to manage an emergency. With the right planning, we might be able to avoid it, or at least mitigate it.
The hardest dollar for any government to spend is a preventative dollar. It doesn't have the urgency. It doesn't have the public imperative. The work that we're considering and that you prepare yourself to practise is immensely important, but it's also the toughest budget to find dollars for. Risk management is just the likelihood of an occurrence multiplied by its consequences. If it's a small likelihood with catastrophic consequences, we had better pay a lot of attention to it. I know that's what you're speaking to today.
I'd like to consider the natural disaster category and leave terrorism and such aside for a moment. We often think we can't avoid the natural disasters, but we can certainly prepare ourselves to react to them quickly. I want to ask your opinion about the possibility of a specific natural disaster. I want to get the value of your experience on how we might deal with it together. I'm talking about the risk of seismic activity on the west coast of Canada and the United States. Some schools that have not been properly updated are particularly vulnerable. Some of them are brick or plaster and 60 or 70 years old.
We know that a major seismic event is going to happen in the Vancouver-Victoria-Seattle area, and this brings in the international aspect that Dr. Duplessis mentioned. We have dozens of substandard schools for our children, while we are in post-and-beam houses or in modern office buildings that are well protected and able to withstand a major seismic event. Our children are sitting beneath piles of bricks and in buildings that will instantly collapse. It seems to me that this is off the radar screen of our emergency preparedness or management. Could you draw on the experience of each of your organizations and tell us how we should be approaching this situation? This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Simply to add the international component to it, Seattle faced a similar situation where they did have a major seismic event that just missed Vancouver a number of years ago, but they reacted immediately to evaluate and then stabilize all of those old structures, of which schools only represent, perhaps, the most emotionally and socially tragic potential emergency. But I value your comments on how we might as a country--