National Defence committee  That's since March 2020, sir.

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  Thank you. That is a great question. The capacity of Canadian provinces, territories and municipalities to respond to emergencies has definitely evolved. Certainly, we have very strong provinces in many cases. Quebec obviously has a very strong emergency management capability, and I think many municipalities have evolved significantly over the last, say, decade.

National Defence committee  I'm happy to go over that. As I said, if emergencies happen and they impact the local level initially.... Think of the thunderstorm event in Ottawa a few months ago. In that case, the province did not seek federal support and did not ask to deploy the army. Ottawa managed that.

National Defence committee  That's correct. In the past, say three-plus years ago, we would maybe have five or 10 requests for federal assistance a year. As I said, we've now passed 200 requests for assistance in terms of COVID and all of the major events in Canada in the last two and a half years.

National Defence committee  Yes, there are definitely issues. Our group is fairly small at the GOC. We worked a lot of long days—every weekend and holiday for the first year and a half of COVID, for sure. That's in terms of capacity. To get into the bigger question about the federal capacity to respond, in terms of COVID, there were huge supports by Indigenous Services Canada to first nations, with all kinds of funding and capabilities.

National Defence committee  As I say—and this gets into the distributed accountabilities in Canada where there are these shared responsibilities—oftentimes the provinces will have those mechanisms. We also have, as I said, procurement, but it's emergency contracting. This isn't your typical “put out a request for proposals and wait” weeks in advance.

National Defence committee  We do, actually, and we typically refer to those as “exercises”. I think there's a demand in Canada for more of these. There is an extensive list that is available across the federal government of the national exercise calendar. There are many hundreds of small, medium and large exercises that go on every year in Canada, but there's always a demand for more, because it's a great step in terms of preparedness.

National Defence committee  As I said, the coastal response is the most major one, and that involves almost every federal department. We have elements of that that are called “building blocks”, which are going on constantly, and they will have their crescendo in February, in late winter of this year, in British Columbia.

National Defence committee  I think you'd have to ask my colleagues at the Public Health Agency about their participation in those. If those were led by CDC in the public health sphere, they may have participated. I'm not really aware. I know that the Public Health Agency had plans and exercises that it was considering, I think, prior to the pandemic, but I'm not really up to speed on what the CDC did in terms of exercises.

National Defence committee  I think we have a pretty good system. It's a complicated one in Canada, as you heard me allude to. There are multiple levels of shared responsibility. I would say that when it comes to what we refer to as “cyclical” events—fires and floods—these things are well known. The capacities of the provinces and territories to prepare and respond are actually quite good, even despite some of the events we've seen in B.C. in the last couple of years.

National Defence committee  Sure. Obviously the CAF has demonstrated its ability to meet many concurrent operational requirements, but that's come at a cost, as I think you've heard from a number of folks who have presented here. One thing I just want to flag is that the government and Public Safety did create a humanitarian workforce program.

National Defence committee  There are a number of ways to answer that question. I would say that provincially there are workforces. Federally, there's the humanitarian workforce program that I just referred to quickly. That has at least four NGOs supported by the government to build capacity and to be ready to respond.

National Defence committee  Thanks, Mr. Chair. I'm happy to be here. As you said, I'm Deryck Trehearne. I'm the director general of the government operations centre at Public Safety. I just want to spend a little bit of time this morning talking about my organization, the process for requesting federal assistance and our very special relationship with the CAF and the armed forces.