Evidence of meeting #15 for Public Safety and National Security in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was paramedics.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Randy Mellow  President, Paramedic Chiefs of Canada
Pierre Poirier  Executive Director, Paramedic Association of Canada
Daniel Dubeau  Deputy Commissioner, Chief Human Resources Officer, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Don Head  Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada
Paul J. Charbonneau  Past President, Paramedic Chiefs of Canada

1 p.m.

Liberal

Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON

You're not using it as the only thing though. It's part of a toolbox.

1 p.m.

Past President, Paramedic Chiefs of Canada

Paul J. Charbonneau

It's part of a toolbox. I can speak from my own personal experience. Last year we put all the paramedics in Frontenac County through compassion fatigue training with a psychologist, and it was very well received. It was awareness not only of yourself, but of your partner and everybody else in the service.

There are lots of tools in our toolbox. I think the thing that's exciting about it is that we can improve those tools so much over the next few years.

1 p.m.

Liberal

Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON

Mr. Head, are you using it?

1 p.m.

Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada

Don Head

Yes, we've been using it since the fall.

We're rolling it out across the country. It will become a national training standard for every employee.

1 p.m.

Liberal

Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON

How did you change it for your—

1 p.m.

Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada

Don Head

Similar to the RCMP, basically all that we did was to adopt the framework presented to us. There were modifications made to some of the scenarios and videos to make them more corrections specific. The version we were working with was the one that had been developed for the Calgary Police Service. The scenarios were police officer-based. Now they've been modified to be correctional officer and correctional employee based.

We have an evaluation planned to assess it effectiveness in relation to the goals that we set. But the early response from staff has been that they wished they had had this at the time they became CSC employees. It's been very positive feedback in the early days. We'll see what that means in the long run when we go through the evaluation.

1 p.m.

Liberal

Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON

Do I have any time left?

1 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

We need to end there. It's been over five-and-a-half minutes, just to let you know.

Again, our apologies for losing 45 minutes, but also my thanks to the committee for staying an extra four minutes for this meeting. Thank you.

I will just mention to the EMS folks, if there's something out tomorrow from Ontario that you think would be helpful for our committee, we'd be happy to receive it. Keep that in mind. We may be in touch with you if there is an appropriate person for us to talk to in Ontario. I think that could be helpful.

We'll see you folks on Thursday.