Mr. Speaker, yes. Most Canadians would be pretty happy to assist our American cousins in an emergency and they would expect just about the same for us from them.
The difficulty is that unless the statute takes the step to put a minister in charge of this, we will not have a person in charge of putting an emergency response plan in place. This clause would allow a particular minister here to carry out the work of preparing emergency management plans in a joint way with our American neighbours, as appropriate and when appropriate.
The issue of spending Canadian money south of the border, or west of the border if we are looking at Alaska, could be an issue, but I will leave that for another time. However, the general thrust of making plans to deal with emergencies and assisting our neighbour I am prepared to accept. The wording of the clause is pretty broad, but it would be naive to not address it in a statute like this.
The nickel and dime details about the spending and the resourcing will probably be made by cabinet, but the statute should be sufficient to at least get us on the page when these unfortunate emergencies arise.