Environment committee  Yes, it has changed in terms of where we were with respect to.... In 1995 we had only three disasters that exceeded—

Environment committee  Yes, it's a trend going up, so as an example, we're at 1 billion at this time.

Environment committee  What we do, Mark, is we take a look at the request that comes from the province or territory with respect to a disaster financial assistance arrangement. If any province or territory puts in a request for what would be counted as a disaster, under a very specific definition that I don't have with me today—

Environment committee  In our department we have a definition, but it's triggered by a request from the province or territory. Fort McMurray would be an example of that. The province or territory would put forward a request for assistance, and then we would count that in our category of statistics in terms of looking at that.

Environment committee  We work very closely with Environment and Climate Change Canada as well as NRCan in terms of determining those with respect to how we define a disaster. It is very clear in terms of the science and in terms of the data that we are seeing an increase with respect to disasters. We are seeing that through the requests as well from the provinces and territories for disaster relief funding through the disaster financial assistance arrangement program.

Environment committee  Good morning. I'm pleased to be here to speak on behalf of Public Safety Canada and my colleagues from Environment and Climate Change Canada, Infrastructure Canada, and the National Research Council of Canada on chapter 2, on federal support to mitigate the effects of severe weather, of the spring 2016 reports of the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. Actually, we're very fortunate in Public Safety to have such a huge responsibility in terms of our public safety officers. Our minister has a pretty significant role in terms of the Emergency Management Act and his responsibilities in working with the provinces and territories, so we do think we're uniquely situated to support this initiative and provide leadership to it.

Public Safety committee  It's a very good question. When we looked at some of the numbers for first responders and we looked at our responsibilities in our portfolio, we made a definitive decision to include them as part of our steering committee because we have to have their voices there. Their numbers are very high, and they face a unique situation given that not only is it their community that they go into that experiences trauma, institutions are like a community within a community, so they go back into the community within a community every day to re-experience those same traumas.

Public Safety committee  It would.

Public Safety committee  We have a few. As an example, we know from some surveys we've done that about 36% of male correctional officers have identified as having post-traumatic stress disorder. At the lower end we have about 7% of police officers, but numbers vary, depending on the study or the survey that's been done.

Public Safety committee  I can speak specifically to the global number of first responders, and I'll give you some percentages. I don't have that data for Veterans Affairs and Defence with me today, but I'll speak to Public Safety. Approximately 250,000 people would fall into the category of public safety officer: approximately 69,000 police officers; 110,000 firefighters, of which about 80,000 are volunteers; about 20,000 paramedics; and about 18,000 volunteer search and rescue workers.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for your question. I'll give a couple of answers to that. First, budgetary pieces are spread across different departments. Within Public Safety, my particular area, I have some resources that are working towards that. Within the portfolio itself, the RCMP would have some resources associated with that, as would Corrections, as an example, or CBSA.

Public Safety committee  Right now we're working with a small budget within Public Safety, and most of the engagement we're doing involves consultations through things like the round table. We have just stood up an assistant deputy minister's steering committee. We'll do the next round table sometime in summer and then come up with a plan after that.

Public Safety committee  That's part of what we'll get back to you with.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. We had some very good conversations at the round table around prevention. A couple of key points came out of that. The first point was on early intervention, just to support Doctor Lanius' comment that the earlier we can put prevention in place, obviously, the more longer-term positive impact that can have.