I don't have specific recommendations for changes. I agree very much with Dr. Young that the proof will be in the pudding when we see the spirit of the way this bill flows into the psyche of emergency management folks in this country.
You've heard the word “coordination” umpteen times already in the very short time we've been talking. It's the key fundamental issue in an emergency, and it's not all about response on the day of the emergency.
Dr. Young started to refer to mitigation.There are four known pillars of emergency management that everybody of the emergency management ilk lives by. They are mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Those are the four component pieces. No emergency exists without all of those.
Mitigation is stopping it before it happens. Preparedness is having the plans in place for any eventuality from an all-hazards perspective. On response, if your mitigative activities do not work, then you need to have the capacity to respond. Then you need to be able to recover. Those are the four chunks of it, and we are looking at this bill to look holistically at emergency management from all of those areas.
Response, which is the one that gets all the attention, is about 2% of an emergency management event. It may get the media, but it's nothing. Recovery--and Dr. Young will know this from SARS--is the hugest part. That's why it's important that the federal government, through PSEPC, has the mandate to coordinate, not only at the time of a response but in advance, to put into place all the planning and component pieces of a full holistic emergency management program within Canada. There is work going on at each of these levels .
I've personally been involved in federal-provincial-territorial working groups for five years. That work will be in jeopardy if the mandate to PSEPC to actually coordinate people, not just in times of response but in getting to the planning and mitigation work, is not clear. I'm not an expert in how to word legislation, but if it isn't clear in this legislation that PSEPC not only leads in an actual emergency event but also leads all federal resources in the four component pieces of emergency management programming, we are going to have an issue. When there is an event and PSEPC is coordinating federal resources, it is imperative that the coordination at the federal level syncs seamlessly with the different emergency management operations within each province and territory.