National Defence committee  Certainly especially the MAJAID requires a lot of overhaul and maintenance of medical supplies, swapping out and things, and it requires a platform to deliver it. If you consolidate that, when you have all those things together, you end up with a faster response than you would have if you sort of cached it someplace in the north and then had to fly to it to pick it up.

National Defence committee  Absolutely, sir.

National Defence committee  I would like to speak a little bit about the air ambulance. The mandate for the federal SAR does not include air ambulance. Our responsibility is for aviation and marine incidents offshore. The Great Lakes are also included in that marine responsibility. What takes place, though, is that provinces and territories have the responsibility for air evacuation, and when they do not have the capacity, they call upon the military, the CF, to perform during those incidents.

National Defence committee  It's very difficult to determine that the time the SARs resources came on scene was the difference between life and death. The assumption is that if they had been there a little earlier, the individual might still have been alive, but whether or not that individual could have been kept alive...maybe there were serious injuries and it was just a matter of time.

National Defence committee  There are a number of elements, but I think by and large, the posture we have in place on the bases and the dedicated SAR squadron, both the rotary-wing and our fixed-wing aircraft provide that SAR capability we are looking for, so to take other resources and to increase their mandate, if you will, to do some SAR services, which will include a number of other personnel, training, and all that sort of thing....

National Defence committee  Currently there is no cost recovery for the provision of SAR services. I guess it's a federal commitment to the population. It is not only the large cruise ship that is operating in a potentially dangerous environment, but we have a number of adventurers and risk-takers who are the subject of our SAR response capability as well.

National Defence committee  I didn't spend a long time, but obviously you understand that the Joint Rescue Coordination Centres are co-manned, so you have the coast guard and CF personnel all working side by side. With every incident that occurs and is reported to the RCC, there is collaboration. There is a determination of how the incident will be prosecuted.

National Defence committee  As I mentioned, we do 8,000 incidents a year, so not every incident is going to drive a report, because a report is obviously sort of like an investigation. If we do a report on a situation like you've just described, then the on-scene commander will participate in the preparation of that report, similar to those people who were actually in the rescue coordination centre that day.

National Defence committee  Extra resources in terms of manpower or...?

National Defence committee  The RCCs don't actually receive direct communication from satellites. That's done on different systems. They rely on reports from various sources--telecommunications--to get their information. In terms of the facilities themselves, they're the same as any other capability we have in the military.

National Defence committee  First of all, Canada was one of the four leading nations in coming up with an international system for satellite-based detection of emergency beacons. Originally it was on frequency 121.5, which is a radio emergency broadcast frequency. All that it provided through satellite was a beacon detection initially, but no location.

National Defence committee  I can't answer on the maintenance costs. Certainly if it's important, I can get some information on that. In terms of age, I flew the Buffalo when I was fairly young, so that goes back a long time. The aircraft is the sixties vintage. The Hercules, depending on what airframe, because we've had a number of models....

National Defence committee  I can indeed, sir. The locations of the bases have been strategically placed to ensure that the SAR resources we have available can respond to the greatest number of incidents in the shortest amount of time. So there's some logic to where they are. It goes back to a previous question of what the dot plot looks like.

National Defence committee  The ones I briefed this morning are actually all primary. They are the ones that are on continuous standby--half-hour or two-hour posture. The secondary ones don't maintain a full standby posture. Their primary duty is in support of military flying operations and military activities, but they have SAR capability and SAR techs to respond, and often we will use those resources.

National Defence committee  We do, but I just don't have it with me. I'm sorry. I think the last time I was here I did present a dot plot, and not surprisingly it showed the responses as being predominantly along the southern border. That's where the majority of the population is, so you have more aviation activity and boating there.