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 a

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 c

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 read

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 req

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

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 Bri

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

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 capacit

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

National Defence committee  I think the Red Cross has a really important role to play. As I alluded to, this humanitarian workforce program that was set up in 2020 has taken a big step forward in terms of their capacity to help Canadians. They have always played an important role in Canada, with St. John Am

National Defence committee  We all know about the provincial and territorial challenges in the health care system, which we won't get into here.

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

National Defence committee  Yes.