Public Safety committee  Thank you.

Public Safety committee  Certainly. Good morning to you, Mr. Chair, and to members of the committee. I'm the special adviser to the Deputy Minister in the Department of Public Safety. Formerly I was the commissioner of emergency management for the Province of Ontario. In that role I coordinated and mana

Public Safety committee  Certainly. I think this is an important bill because it reflects the evolution of and thinking on the management of emergency management in Canada, partly as the result of the experiences we've had. It does not change the federal authority. In fact, what it recognizes is the need

Public Safety committee  I acknowledge that they're not mentioned specifically in the bill. Let me just make a brief comment. In practical terms, the way we manage emergencies in Canada is bottom-up. There's a very clear understanding that you can't manage any emergency, including something like a publi

Public Safety committee  Could I perhaps add to that answer? The province is very involved. Obviously a province like Ontario is very involved in nuclear, nuclear safety, and nuclear emergency planning. It constitutes a large part of what Emergency Management Ontario does, because they recognize the ris

Public Safety committee  I would just say, again, if I go back to my provincial experience, the province, for example, paid close attention to issues like that. Nuclear enrichment in the Cameco plant in the Port Hope area, for example, was something we watched very closely. Chalk River we watch very clos

Public Safety committee  To start with the second question, then, I think the term in clause 3--if I can look at the exact word--is “entities”, rather than “stakeholders”. When I read that, I think entities means stakeholders. I'm not quibbling over words, but when I read that it means, to me, municipali

Public Safety committee  I think we're saying the same thing. You could include that under mitigation, going back and fixing something. I'm only using as one example that one way of doing earthquakes is to do building codes. But in some provinces, Ontario for example, I had responsibility for the fire ma

Public Safety committee  Yes, the bill is really aimed at making it clear, both within the federal government and to those that react with the federal government, how the federal government is structured and how it operates. But that level of certainty, as I think many people said in their opening remark

Public Safety committee  Yes, absolutely. First of all, you will start to hear more about pandemics because the avian influenza will start up again in the next few weeks. It is starting again; we're starting to see a few deaths. So we predict we will start to have more discussion on them. I've done a

Public Safety committee  Yes, just to finish your thoughts about the role of the federal government, I think the other thing that it does is set a way for the federal government to act. It doesn't take away the authority of individual departments within their areas, but it means that someone is asking th

Public Safety committee  First of all, it actually occurs at all three levels of government. There are agreements in place and, on occasion, exercises and real-life scenarios in border communities. For example, Windsor and Detroit have MOUs in place and are able to move reasonably seamlessly across the b

Public Safety committee  I was involved with calling the military in Ontario during the ice storm, and it turned out it was General Hillier, and again it worked very well. Mayor Mel called them during the snowstorm. I was not responsible for that one, and I don't want to take the blame for that one. But

Public Safety committee  Certainly, I completely agree with your assessment of the importance of municipalities and what they do. I don't think you'll find anybody in this field who disagrees, particularly with the model we use in this country. Making sure the municipal voice is there is very important.

Public Safety committee  I'm not disputing the importance of it or that we can prove it, but the only downside I can think of, since you've asked the question, is that one of the criticisms of even federal-provincial relations now is that it takes so long to get anything done. That's because there's one