Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Locally, we can't request direct help from the federal government. We have to go through the province to do that. We had discussions very early on to have the army come in, for example, because we knew very quickly that the RCMP were outgunned, and there were [Inaudible--Editor]

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I would agree with you, Cathy, that the success with our ESS people is that they're volunteers, and our weakness there is that they're volunteers. Our weakness in this situation is that normally we take people from rural areas and evacuate them to our municipalities. In this case

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We had a good relationship with most of our first nation communities. I had built the relationships over the past six or seven years. The challenge is of course when governments change. Quite often, first nations government changes. Not only does the political representation ch

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm glad you got the title right, because what has come out of Australia is ”stay and defend”, which has been misleading because most people haven't delved into the issues of what that actually means. One of the concerns is that they train people in British Columbia, both the ran

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think it would be a great thing to see another level of government put forward assistance. Of course, we always found that you would check with us regularly to see if you could assist from a federal point of view, but we need the province to request help from the federal govern

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen and Madam Chair, for the opportunity to speak to you today. I'm Al Richmond, the chairman of the Cariboo Regional District, a regional government in the central part of British Columbia. We are a large area of 80,000 square kilometres.