National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm honoured to join you today from Treaty 6 territory. My name is Josh Bowen. As was pointed out, I'm a faculty member in the disaster and emergency management program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. I'm also a member of the Government

National Defence committee  One of the things we've seen in some of our most significant allies, specifically Australia and the United States, is moving away from having the military hold primary responsibility for responding to disasters. That's a recognition, both of the competing demands that are on thos

National Defence committee  I think you're absolutely on point. Competent disaster response teams cannot be created after the disaster occurs. We need to build a national structure in which we're standardizing training, we're standardizing capabilities and we're standardizing the modality through which orga

National Defence committee  I believe so. I don't necessarily see that being nested within the Canadian Armed Forces. It costs a lot of money to train somebody to be a soldier or to be an officer, and it doesn't matter what the trade is. The cost associated with that initial training can be better put towar

National Defence committee  Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen. If I can just touch on Madam Normandin's question from before the break, I think it dovetails quite nicely. Having personally helped draft requests for federal assistance in 2016, we shifted the emphasis of those letters from requesting specific CAF as

National Defence committee  I'm happy to jump on that one first. One thing that's been done around the country and in multiple different post-secondaries is to actually establish emergency management training. We have diplomas, degrees and graduate level programs that exist. We also have professional devel

National Defence committee  While I can't speak directly to any budgetary allocations, what we do know from multiple studies is that for every dollar invested in mitigation and preparedness activities, we save six to eight on response and an additional twelve on recovery after a disaster, so if we're lookin

National Defence committee  That's a great question and definitely one that other people are far more knowledgeable about in terms of exactly building that structure. What I will say, though, is that we need to identify the core capabilities that we require. We need to identify who has them already so that

National Defence committee  As you know from your work in Iraq, coordinating civil-military response is absolutely essential. It doesn't matter whether it's conflict, or it's a disaster response. Being able to build mechanisms where people can share ideas, share information, and then appropriately allocate

National Defence committee  Absolutely, sir.

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. I had the distinct honour of serving under General Eyre in western Canada and during the Fort McMurray wildfire event. Actually, I would not advocate establishing a reserve force specifically to deal with disasters. If we did that, we would be cannibalizing our ex

National Defence committee  First and foremost, I would say that building hyper-localized, trained and equipped volunteer teams across the country is going to drastically reduce the time and cost that it takes to mobilize during a disaster. If we look to my earlier comments about the typical daily increment

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. If I may, I agree that the Canadian Forces need to come in as an augmentation force and that we should have a civilian, largely volunteer-based organization leading. Whenever there is a disaster response, the local authority always has jurisdiction, so it would n

National Defence committee  My understanding, as limited as it is, is that the German model requires mandatory national service. That doesn't necessarily mean the military. It could be working in a seniors' residence. It could be driving an ambulance, just to free up a paramedic to actually work on a patien

National Defence committee  May I jump in? This is why we need to have federal coordination of both NGOs and federal-provincial response capabilities. The nation-to-nation relationship has to be protected and is so critical. First nations have the ability to reach out directly to the federal government an