Thank you very much.
Thank you for inviting me. It's an honour to be here.
In terms of our stance towards Russia, the first comment I'd like to make is that in the long term, running forward to think in terms of decades, the world is going to have to co-operate in terms of dealing with global risks such as climate change and other things. Whatever stance we take towards Russia, I believe we should keep in mind that at some point we're going have to be co-operative with them and other countries that we meet.
I'm going to be speaking from the perspective of the emergency management system in Canada, which is where I live professionally. I really can't speak to the military side of things. I'm going to be speaking more from a civil society perspective.
I have put together a list of recommendations that I think, in a very practical way, would enhance our ability to manage some of these threats. I divided them into the categories of capacity, research, training, and governance. Again, this is just speaking from my particular areas of work in disaster risk reduction.
In terms of capacity, I think it would be of great help if Canada had an interdisciplinary national centre of excellence on disaster studies so that people from different disciplines and fields, as well as academics and professionals, could coagulate around that and work together.
From a local community perspective, all local communities need to do risk assessments, which is a difficult and complicated process that tends to be poorly done. There is a lack of support for local communities in terms of doing these things. I'd recommend that the Government of Canada, perhaps under the leadership of Public Safety Canada, create a group of people, of experts, who could assist local communities with methodologies and access to data and interpretation of data so that they could do the risk assessments.
Critical infrastructure is a particular area of vulnerability from a threat perspective. There's a lot that we don't know about the interconnections between them. It's a complex, tightly connected system. I'd recommend funding a long-term study looking at the interconnections and vulnerabilities of critical Canadian infrastructures.
Under training, Emergency Preparedness Canada used to have an emergency management college, which performed a very important function. It was disbanded a number of years ago. Even though colleges and universities in Canada now have programs in emergency management, they do not replace the functions that were carried out by the emergency management college, which particularly addressed mayors and local people involved in emergency management who would never go to a program at a college or university. It had the function not just of education and training but also of creating a community and culture across Canada of people involved in emergency management issues.
Finally, on the governance side, about 85% of Canada's critical infrastructure is owned within the private sector. That creates, I think, a tension in terms of priorities. One of the main priorities of the private sector is creating profit and serving the interests of their shareholders, whereas I would argue that critical infrastructure is basically a public good. The role of governments in terms of owning and [Technical difficulty—Editor] critical infrastructure. I think it needs to be revisited, because many of the disasters we've seen have resulted from reductions in safety that originated in a neo-liberal economic environment.
Our system of emergency and disaster management is rooted historically. Particularly, it evolved out of civil defence after World War II, but we live in a world that is now moving in a direction that is very different. I would want to take a close look at the system we have now and see to what extent it's serving our current needs and future needs.
I will end my remarks there.