Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 26 - Evidence for the afternoon session
TORONTO, Thursday, October 30, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 2:10 p.m. to examine and report on the need for a national security policy for Canada.
Senator Colin Kenny (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence. Today we will hear testimony from provincial officials about the province's ability to respond to a natural or man-made emergency.
My name is Colin Kenny. I am a Senator from Ontario and I chair the Committee.
We have on my far right Senator Jack Wiebe from Saskatchewan. Senator Wiebe has been a leader in the farm community throughout his life. He served as Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan and as a member of the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly before his appointment to the Senate in the year 2000. Senator Wiebe is the Deputy-Chair of the Senate Committee On Agriculture and Forestry. Currently this Committee is studying the marketing of value-added agricultural, agri-food, and forestry products.
Senator Wiebe sits on the Senate Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament, and on our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Beside Senator Wiebe is Senator Norm Atkins from Ontario. He came to the Senate in 1986, with a strong background in the field of communications and with experience as an advisor to former Premier Davis of Ontario.
Senator Atkins is a member of our Subcommittee Veterans Affairs and also of the Senate Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration. He also serves as chair of the Senate Conservative caucus.
On my far left is Senator Tommy Banks from Alberta.
Senator Banks is well known to Canadians as one of our most accomplished and versatile musicians and entertainers. A Juno Award-winning musician, he also received the Grand Prix du Disque-Canada. He also has been a conductor with symphony orchestras throughout Canada and the United States.
He was appointed to the Senate in the year 2000.
Senator Banks is chair of the Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, which is looking at the implementation of the Kyoto Accord.
Beside him is Senator Meighen from Ontario. Senator Meighen is a successful lawyer and businessman who is active in a wide range of charitable and educational institutions.
He is the Chancellor to have the University of King's College in Halifax, and was appointed to the Senate in 1990. He has a strong background in defence matters and is the chair of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs. This subcommittee is presently studying commemorative activities, and, incidentally, is visiting Sunnybrook Hospital tomorrow, at 10:00 a.m. Senator Meighen is also a member of the Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce that is examining the state of domestic and international financial systems.
Beside me on my immediate left is the distinguished Senator from Nova Scotia, Senator Michael Forrestall. Senator Forrestall has served the constituents of Dartmouth for the past 37 years, first as their member of the House of Commons, then as their Senator. Throughout his parliamentary career, he has followed defence matters and served on various defence-related parliamentary committees, including the 1993 Special Joint Committee on the Future of Canadian Forces.
Our Committee is the first permanent Senate committee mandated to examine security and defence. Over the past 27 months, we have completed a number of reports, beginning with ``Canadian Security and Military Preparedness.'' This study, which was tabled in February of 2002, examined the major defence and security issues facing Canada.
The Senate then asked our Committee to examine our need for a national security policy. So far, we have released four reports on various aspects of national security. First, ``Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility,'' in September of 2002; second, `` Update on Canada's Military Crisis: A View from the Bottom Up,'' in November, 2002; third, ``The Myth of Security at Canada's Airports,'' January 2003; and fourth, ``Canada's Coastlines: The Longest Under-Defended Borders in the World,'' which was released yesterday.
The Committee is continuing its long-term evaluation of Canada's ability to contribute to the security and defence of North America. As part of this work, the Committee has been holding hearings on the federal government's support of the men and women across the country who respond first to emergencies or disasters.
Last month, just a few days before Hurricane Juan hit Halifax, our Committee heard from representatives of the Halifax Regional Municipality and the Province of Nova Scotia. This afternoon we hear from officials from the Province of Ontario.
Our next witness is Dr. James Young. He holds three concurrent positions. He was appointed Chief Coroner for the Province of Ontario in 1990. In 1994, he was named Assistant Deputy Minister, Public Safety Division, Ministry of Public Safety and Security. In 2002, he was appointed Ontario's first Commissioner of Public Security, responsible for maintaining and enhancing physical and economic security in Ontario by working with a number of diverse partners and stakeholders located both within and outside the province.
He comes with extensive experience in emergency matters. During the SARS outbreak earlier this year, he was co- manager of the provincial emergency and was responsible for co-ordinating activities to manage and control the outbreaks in addition to being one of the government's spokespersons in the daily briefings with the press.
During the power blackout in August, Dr. Young was asked by the government of Ontario to take a lead role in ensuring the coordination of the government's response to this crisis and in providing a leadership role when communicating with the public.
Dr. Young is accompanied by Mr. Neil McKerrell, Chief, Emergency Management Ontario; by Dr. Colin D'Cunha, Commissioner of Public Health, Chief Medical Officer of Health, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care; and Superintendent Bob Goodall, Field and Traffic Support Bureau, Ontario Provincial Police. Also in attendance is Inspector Dan Hefky, Field and Traffic Support Bureau, Ontario Provincial Police.
I welcome you to the committee, Dr. Young. The floor is yours.
Dr. James Young, Assistant Deputy Minister, Public Safety and Commissioner of Public Security, Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services: It is our pleasure to be here this afternoon. We very much look forward to working with you this afternoon and answering your questions. We believe that the work that this Committee is doing is very important. To address the kinds of issues that we face, it takes a coordinated effort on behalf of the federal government, the province, and municipal governments. That is the way we chose to manage SARS, and it is the way we intend and hope to manage emergencies in the future.
I am not going to go through all of the slides that I gave you because I more than recognize your ability to read and digest what we have given you. What I would like to do for just a few minutes is talk about where we have been and what some of our relationships are.
We approached emergency management, as did most provinces, in a fairly unstructured and loose way prior to the ice storm of 1998. That was our first wake-up call that we were not, in fact, properly prepared to manage large events in the Province of Ontario. If one looks historically, somehow, despite the size and the diversity and the number of risk factors in this province, we managed to escape big plane crashes or weather events or disasters of any kind for many years. The ice storm then became our wake-up call.
The events of 9/11 were a further wakeup call to us. We recognized that, while there was preparedness in regards to the intelligence community and some policing procedures in regards to terrorism, any terrorist act has profound implications on the rest of government and the overall emergency management that government has to undertake. It may, in the case of bioterrorism, involve health and health facilities and public safety on an ongoing basis as well, if it were bioterrorism or a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear, CBRN, event of any kind.
The Government of Ontario then moved on a number of fronts in regards to the period following 9/11, including passing a new Emergency Management Act, which now requires that both provincial ministries and municipal governments have detailed plans in place. Right now, we are working to the first level of plan. With time, we will move into a second and third level of plans, which will become increasingly more comprehensive and detailed as we go through. The plans have to be approved by the province; they should include critical infrastructure; and they should include a course of action for training and exercises.
In the past, it was voluntary for municipalities to do plans. Over 90 per cent of our municipalities did have plans but they varied between being quite adequate, in the cases of some of the larger municipalities, to being inadequate in the cases of many jurisdictions. During the ice storm, that difference became obvious as we saw a wide range of ability to respond at a local level.
In addition, the government moved in a number of other areas. My office was created to coordinate the actions of the ministries of government because it became recognized that most of government was working on something. The question was whether we were working on the right things. Were we duplicating? Were we working as efficiently as we could? That holds true with our relationships with municipal governments, with the federal government, with state governments and with the U.S. government.
I was given the broad mandate to coordinate everything including intelligence and emergency preparedness and border issues. The government recognized that while we want to and need to promote security at the border, we also need the flow of goods and services to exist over the border, and therefore it is necessary to marry those two concepts together and pay close attention to that.
Regarding that, we have been and remain very strong supporters of the 30-PointActionPlan and have been very anxious to see that the 30-Point Action Plan be enacted as quickly and effectively as possible.
In respect of intelligence, the Government of Ontario wanted to support the intelligence community by adding to it. The OPP were given money to create an intelligence squad. We have added to CISO, the Criminal Intelligence Service of Ontario, by giving them money for education of police regarding issues of gathering information at ground level and for the purchase of more computer software and tools with which to do the job.
We wanted to ensure that that information is being properly shared and we have been promoting cooperative activities with the Ontario Provincial Police and other municipal police. We are pleased to report that these cooperative activities have been going well. We have been working with the RCMP's Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, INSET. That is the model that we like, and it is the model that we have been favouring and working towards.
Over the last few years, we have doubled the size of Emergency Management Ontario down to the community level as well. At one point, we had only three community officers; we now have 12 community officers and five people doing education in the province. There has been a large increase there.
All of this activity has begun to pay off. We needed all of those resources and more in the SARS emergency and during the power blackout. It has positioned us in a position where we are much better equipped than ever before to carry out our job.
We think it is essential to work in cooperation with both municipal governments and the federal government. I would like to briefly describe our role with the municipal government.
During the SARS problem, the first thing that we did was to invite the City of Toronto Public Health to join our management team, to help us make decisions. We felt that it was important for continuity that we were saying the same things and moving in the same direction. We felt it avoided duplication and it meant that everyone had the same information. That model served us well.
When they had difficulties in that area and some SARS cases, the York Region joined us as did Durham Region Public Health. Dr. D'Cunha coordinated the work of the other 34 public health units and ensured they were informed and moving in the same direction as well.
We also invited and had active participation from Health Canada in the SARS operations. Particularly in SARS II, they joined us on a daily basis by telephone link and sat at our executive meetings. They were fully aware of what decisions we were making, what problems we were facing, and why we were deciding what we decided.
We are working with municipalities through our training officers to develop plans. We do not have the money to pay for those plans but we have tried to create templates and work with the municipalities to make the job of creating the necessary plans as painless as possible.
Despite the fact that we put additional demands on them, the cooperation from the municipal sector has been outstanding. They recognize the need for better planning and for putting more resources into this area, and they have been fully supportive. They would like more money from senior levels of government, but they have got on with the job despite that. We also hope to help them with training and with exercises. By developing exercises that they can take and apply to their community, we hope that that will be of assistance.
We also have a very close working relationship with the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness, OCIPEP. We have watched them grow and develop over the last few years. The province is involved in OCIPEP both on the emergency planning side and on the cyber side. The Government of Ontario spent a good deal of money and effort trying to ensure that its cyber-systems are secure. Much of that work has been done in consultation with OCIPEP to ensure that our standards are the same.
We hope to co-locate with OCIPEP in the future in an operations centre and on a daily basis. The OCIPEP office here in Toronto has been tremendously supportive during the power blackouts, the ice storm, and during SARS, We have a very good working relationship. The directorate of OCIPEP have also been supportive. During the power blackout, I spoke to the Associate Deputy Minister of OCIPEP on a daily basis, as I did with her predecessor on an ongoing basis, with SARS and other issues.
We think that OCIPEP and the federal government have an important role to play, both for the province and for the municipal governments. The model in the United States has been for the federal government to support municipalities with equipment and training. We believe that that is a good model.
The actual delivery during an emergency turns out to occur, no matter how we plan it, at a local level with support from the province and support from the federal government. We have to recognize that that is going to continue, particularly in a country this big and this diverse.
Having said that, the local governments do need the resources to be able to deliver. Often that involves costly equipment and training. We have supported, along with the federal government, the establishment of the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue, HUSAR, unit in Toronto and the CBRN teams in Windsor, Toronto, and Ottawa. OCIPEP has also supported these. This is a good example of three levels of government working together, doing it once and doing it well, knowing that it is going to be delivered generally at the local level. We are very pleased with the progress being made in those areas.
The federal government has also been supportive with Join Emergency Preparedness Program, JEPP, grants — a way of flowing money through to the municipalities. We believe that the JEPP funding should continue at its present level, or grow. However, the process itself can be streamlined somewhat. As well, perhaps the terms of reference of what qualifies for JEPP grants could be looked at and broadened to include more than just equipment. Perhaps the process could include multi-year funding in some instances. That is the position we hear from municipal governments, for which we have considerable sympathy.
We are working with OCIPEP on training for first responders. We believe that OCIPEP can play an important role in the future in respect of training. The province is currently adding an addition to the Ontario Fire College in Gravenhurst, so that we can train our first responders all in one place with one set curriculum, and make sure that when they get together in disasters they can work together.
We also think there is an important role and have been working with OCIPEP on critical infrastructure. This is an area of which none of us understood the complexities on September 11. We now understand, particularly given that 90 per cent of infrastructure is in private hands, that we have a unique chance to work with the private sector and governments at many levels in order to increase security and make sure that critical infrastructure is not a terrorist target. OCIPEP have shown leadership in this area, and Ontario has been working very hard, but we still have a lot of work to do still.
We were asked to comment on our relationship with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, CSIS. We have a growing relationship with CSIS. I see the CSIS Toronto people on a regular basis. When events such as the threat in the El Al flight last week transpire, we hear directly from the OPP and often directly from CSIS and RCMP, so we have a day-by-day working relationship with those people as does Emergency Management Ontario. We receive more intelligence information than we ever did before, because it has been recognized that emergency planners need to know these things in advance. Therefore, I would say that our relationship has been growing and has been very positive over the last few years with CSIS.
Finally, I would like to comment on the emergency caches of supplies. We are not only aware of them but have been to visit them and look at them. They contain an amazing display of medical equipment from 30 years ago, however, most of it is still very good. If you want to know what a stethoscope looked like 30 years ago, go and visit the caches. Other than in a few minor areas, such as the lab, where they are still using centrifuges and microscopes — and I do not think anyone trained following Dr. D'Cunha and myself would know how to use those — the caches are really quite practical and useful. We used them for the Pope's visit, and we used them more recently with the Rolling Stones concert. In both of those instances, we were faced with weather conditions that led us to believe that we might have serious problems with dehydration and other weather-related problems. When the Pope visited, we were concerned about storms and lightening.
We set up field hospitals in advance and used some of the National Emergency Services Stockpile System, NESS, equipment, so that we could practice triage and treat a good number of people in advance of or instead of having to take them to hospital. Many of the people who became dehydrated at those events were re-hydrated with IVs at the scene. We could then take only the people we needed to take to hospital, and not clog our emergency departments, so we potentially averted a problem by doing that.
Finally, we are beginning to explore with Health Canada, the possibility of looking at the NESS and seeing whether it would be better strategically to break some of it up and place more of it in local communities so that we may pull it on a quicker basis. We believe it has a role in a major emergency for triage and prevention of hospital overflow. However, to achieve that, we cannot wait 48 hours for it to arrive here. We have distributed atropine in the province already as a preventative in the event of chemical attack, and we are aware of the stockpiles of antibiotics in the province.
Our own supplies are mainly limited to gowns and gloves and masks — everything you need to fight SARS. However, we have a considerable number of gowns and gloves and masks now, in anticipation of a difficult winter.
I would invite questions.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dr. Young. We appreciate your presentation in covering off the points that we asked you to look at.
I would just like to say on behalf of the committee how impressed we were with the way you and your team handled SARS here in Toronto and in Ontario. We could not help but note the daily television appearances you, Dr. D'Cunha, and others had, communicating to the community. It was a very impressive exercise to see going forward.
Dr. Young: Dr. D'Cunha and I spent so much time we can answer each other's questions now, in fact. We may answer for each other by force of habit.
Senator Forrestall: I am wondering about the last thing you mentioned, so I will start with it.
Yesterday we produced a report, which, among other things, calls for a significant restructuring and revamping of the Canadian Coast Guard. We are recommending that it be established with constabulary authority, that it can play an active role in interdiction for a variety of purposes.
I notice a fleet of 141 vessels are working out of Greater Toronto. In making our recommendations, one of the problems we faced are the capital costs involved.
Would these vessels be available to work or to co-operate with the Canadian Coast Guard, were they to be upgraded? Would you welcome it, or do you see it as something that may not be necessary here in the metropolitan area, but may be in the rest of the Great Lakes?
Dr. Young: Perhaps I can begin and then the Superintendent can continue.
Last year, we had discussions with Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco and with U.S. Immigration about issues surrounding the Great Lakes and the borders. During those discussions, Chief Fantino accompanied the Minister and me to Washington. There were discussions about issues such as illegal importation of guns and firearms, and immigration issues as well.
Our approach was that these were problems for all of us and that the agencies needed to work together. At the INSET level and at many other levels, there is a lot of cooperation in respect of these issues. The question really becomes getting enough resource into some of the areas, because the problems are there with the Great Lakes.
Superintendent Bob Goodall, Field and Traffic Support Bureau, Ontario Provincial Police: Those 141 vessels constitute the number of vessels in the OPP fleet. That fleet is deployed throughout the Province of Ontario so that we can meet our legislative mandate for waterways policing.
However, there are instances when we work with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with regards to the IBET initiatives — the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams. We do co-crew our respective vessels with Coast Guard personnel and Ministry of Natural Resources Ontario personnel so that we are able to crew the vessel appropriately and have the vessel on the waterways.
We have transformed our fleet, in recent years, from a fleet that was basically a pleasure-craft type of vessel to a vessel that has more industrial-type capabilities. The vessel is now a work platform for the use of underwater search and recovery, underwater demolitions if that happens to be the incident we are dealing with, and also the deployment of tactical officers. However, these vessels are in no way comparable to the size of the vessels that the Canadian Coast Guard have available to them for search and rescue.
Our vessels are significant enough for us to participate in search-and-rescue type incidents. However, such use also depends on the size of the seas, the size of the waves and the weather conditions. In extremely poor weather, the Coast Guard is normally available to back us up.
If you are considering the potential for that fleet to be used to offset a Coast Guard for the kind of activities that I believe you have in mind for the Coast Guard, our vessels are much smaller than theirs are.
Senator Forrestall: No, I had in mind more augmentation than size.
Mr. Goodall: We are certainly in a position to augment Canadian Coast Guard capabilities.
We are currently researching the inclusion of vessels that are capable of sustaining small-arms fire without having the vessel incapacitated or immobilized by that kind of threat.
Senator Forrestall: We are interested in who is the ``bus driver.'' Your group seems to have an excellent bus driver in Dr. Young. By ``bus driver,'' we mean somebody at the wheel who knows what is going on and how to cope with the myriad problems that emergency situations thrust upon you, frequently without any warning.
I would like to ask you about the line in the chain of command.
I get a feeling, Dr. Young, that some witnesses in areas of great responsibility are somewhat frustrated about the lines of communication and the lines of authority in times of emergency work. I am thinking of the need to go to your municipal unit, to your provincial unit and so forth. You have to send the plans back and forth and people at all levels of government are making changes here and there. After a week or so, maybe something happens and maybe you get a denial.
You seem to be pretty optimistic and relatively hopeful about what was described this morning in — I must suggest to you — in slightly different terms. Are you satisfied with the relationship with the federal authorities? Notwithstanding what you have told us about the good arrangements with OCIPEP and other federal authorities, are you generally happy with the link?
Let me put it another way. Are you not terribly happy with how things work through the provincial intervention, and are there ways of putting in place protocols that in times of emergency would allow you to communicate directly with the source of a requirement that you may perceive to need, like yesterday?
Dr. Young: We are all in a learning mode because so much has changed so quickly. We in Ontario have tried a number of models of managing the various emergencies. We have told the Premier and his government that we need to be clear about what the model in Ontario is going to be. All levels of government need to do this so that it is clear who is doing what and who to go to with what issues.
There are always bumps with events such as SARS and other similar emergencies. Because of the medical nature of it, Dr. D'Cunha and I co-managed the SARS. We ourselves acknowledge that it took us time to get used to each other. The model was confusing to others. We would not necessarily recommend it. It was a good idea at the time, and something that we did with good reason. However, we would not necessarily recommend that model in the future.
It is very difficult. Governments are starting to understand that in times of an emergency, the normal processes have to go out the window. You cannot reinstate them too quickly.
At the beginning of SARS, for example, we wrote directives. Dr. D'Cunha, our medical committee and myself effectively shut the health care system down from 7 o'clock in the evening until 4 o'clock in the morning while we prepared those directives. Everyone instituted those directives, even though we did not have time to tell them how to do it. We just told them what we wanted them to do.
The problem in emergencies comes as you prepare the future directives and there is not quite as big a crisis. Then everyone decides that they want to be consulted. That is where it gets more complicated. That process needs to be streamlined.
We were able to streamline that, for example, to a much greater degree during the power blackout. We had a much better defined process. We effectively created a crisis cabinet in Ontario during the blackout. The Premier was available twice a day. The affected ministers were there; the affected deputies were there. We brought our decisions forward, got rapid approval, and instituted them often within minutes. We did it morning and afternoon, and followed it with press conferences. That was an effective way of breaking the logjam of things going in too many directions and waiting for too much approval.
We got it done during SARS, at the beginning, but we certainly, at times, got into a lot of consultation. I know other people found that frustrating, and rightly so.
Dr. Colin D'Cunha, Commissioner of Public Health, Chief Medical Officer of Health, Ministry of Health and Long- Term Care, Ontario: The key thing here is, in an emergency there should be one commander. Cut right through the jazz and go straight to dealing with it.
As Dr. Young has correctly pointed out, it is really the process of recovery, where, as people start come back to normal, democratization inserts itself into the process. It is difficult to move a file to completion until you consult with Jack, Jill, Jim, Jane, et cetera.
Senator Forrestall: We call a commander a ``bus driver.''
Dr. D'Cunha: I can live with that term too.
Senator Forrestall: A commander does not have the capacity to put in his bathroom all the people involved in an emergency, but the bus driver can house them all on his bus.
I know what you are saying. We heard a little bit more of that this morning. We have heard it from other Senate hearings. Today, incidentally, will be the last of our hearings on some of these questions to first responders: Are they working effectively? Could they work more effectively under different protocols? We all know the difficulties of sections 91 and 92 in the Constitution of our country.
These problems notwithstanding, what should the federal role be in assisting the first responders? The JEPP is fine, but we keep hearing that the money goes to the province and it is a trickle-down.
You do not get a hundred per cent of what you are doing. Regina, that beautiful city that adorns the Prairies, and other places, use old school buses for mobile decontamination centres. We have just come from looking at your multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment. That is fine, but is there a better way to get this money to the first responder?
Mr. Neil McKerrell, Chief, Emergency Management Ontario, Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services: I would say, Senator, that there is a need for a review of the guidelines and the procedures and the processes for dealing with JEPP. As Chief of EMO, I, along with my counterparts across the country meet with OCIPEP annually. There has been discussion with the federal government that there is a need to take a look at the rules and the regulations and the processes by which JEPP is managed.
I personally think it is too bureaucratic, and it needs to be streamlined and made more responsive. It takes two or three years to get changes in the guidelines. Circumstances in the emergency management business change too rapidly. There has to be progress much sooner than two and three years' time. More flexibility should be built into the processes and procedures for dealing with JEPP.
In terms of getting it down to the first responders or to the municipalities, the municipalities put their submissions in with the EMO in Ontario. We endorse them, make sure all the T's are crossed and I's are dotted, and send them forward. Whatever OCIPEP approves and decides upon, by whichever formula they use, the funds do get passed out. If there is any sort of short-changing going on in other provinces — it is not going on in Ontario. Whatever money the feds approve to go to the municipalities goes there. The EMO is certainly not getting rich in the process; I can assure you of that.
Senator Forrestall: I am glad for that assurance because it had been suggested to us that that is not the rule, that is the exception to the rule.
Dr. Young: I would argue that it should go through the province because to get it properly coordinated it is best that all three levels of government are involved, and that the province knows what the municipalities are doing and building.
In cases such as CBRN and HUSAR, we have added provincial money to the federal money and the municipal money and built a three-way partnership. Wherever we can, we have tried to add and complement that money.
Senator Forrestall: Dr. Young, I am about when your foot is in the fireplace, you call the doctor second. You get a bucket of water first and you get your foot out of the fire.
I know what you are saying, and I am not asking you to suggest how we rewrite the British North America Act of 1867. We are working on it, and we will follow it up.
Would Dr. D'Cunha care to respond?
Dr. D'Cunha: I think part of the problem, senator, is that perhaps the pot of money available for distribution is small.
When you go through the distribution process, the original grant — and I am going to use an example to reinforce the point I am making — may have ideally been for more, but because the pot of money is small, you are forced to artificially make it smaller.
The best example I can use is for some health preparedness in communities. I am seeing large communities in the GTA trying to deal with the guidelines that Mr. McKerrell just described. This forces large municipalities with populations close to a million or more, as in the case of the City of Toronto, to apply for small sums of money in the grand scheme of things —$30,000, $40,000, or $50,000 does not go too far in a planning process. That may be why you have heard from some of the stakeholders that the sum of money appears to be a pittance.
I am trying to shepherd an application through the system right now, and I can see, from the local stakeholders' perspective, why it does not appear to be a lot of money.
Senator Forrestall: Well, I would not have thought $25,000 or $30,000 requests for money would be entertained. I would have just thought that would be referred back to the municipality or the province. One would have thought that something of that nature would have been handled locally.
I was talking about, for example, the process of emergency preparedness training for first responders. Millions of dollars may be required.
Dr. Young: The province has not had the resources to do that. Frankly, we are just getting on that page ourselves.
Among our provincial ministries, the quality of emergency plans varies. We have come to realize in recent disasters that every ministry needs to be prepared, because ministries we never dreamt would get involved in things suddenly are. For example, in SARS, the tourism ministry is playing quite a major role, and we virtually, over this last year, called on every ministry of government somehow.
We are trying to help the municipalities with training templates. However, we have not had the money to actually pay for it because we have expanded from 32 to 60 people in Emergency Management Ontario over the year. A staff of 60 is not all that big for a provincial population of 13 million. Our core spending in the province is relatively minor.
Senator Wiebe: Following along that line, we have talked about JEPP and the concerns expressed by Senator Forrestall that we have heard from the first responders, those on the ground.
I would like to hear your response to another argument that we also heard. We have heard from those on the ground who say that when it comes to planning between OCIPEP and the provinces, that the first responders do not have opportunity to have input into those discussions between the province and OCIPEP. What do you think of that argument?
Mr. McKerrell: In some cases that is quite true. On matters related to CBRN and things of that nature, there has been direct contact between people in OCIPEP and first responders. On other matters, when it comes to JEPP or, indeed, the emergency management programming or planning, OCIPEP works with the provinces and the provinces work with the municipalities and the communities.
The constituency for Emergency Management Ontario is the 446 municipalities in the Province of Ontario. As part of our new legislation, each municipality is required to identify a community emergency management co-ordinator, a ``point person,'' if you will. Now all 446 municipalities have a person responsible for managing the affairs of the Emergency Management Program. That gives us a point of contact for our 12 community officers, who are deployed throughout the province and work closely together. We have also established a committee that has representation at the sector level across the province, and then that rolls up to five areas around the province. Then it rolls up to a provincial-level committee that I chair.
The representatives in the sectors and in the areas are all people from the local communities. They could be the fire chiefs or police or emergency medical personnel. It could be the CAO of the local community. However, they are all local people.
They provide their input on a gamut of issues ranging from emergency management planning and programming issues in the province to the chairman of the local group. That information is fed up right into our provincial level. That is something new that we implemented about a year and a half ago. We have just completed the first cycle of that and everybody seems to be quite satisfied with the way in which the local communities are getting the opportunity to raise their issues.
We were able to make some adjustments in our policies and programs that were directly responsive to the points that were being raised. I think we are moving in the right direction. We work on a constant, day-to-day basis with OCIPEP Regional here in Ontario and any information that we receive from local communities that applies to OCIPEP is channelled through.
We also deal directly with some of the directors-general in Ottawa, in the different areas in OCIPEP. There is a national training committee in OCIPEP of which you are likely aware. This committee comprises representatives from different provinces. The assistant chief responsible for education and training within EMO sits as part of that committee.
The Chairman: Senator Forrestall still has the floor, but I have a supplementary. I just wanted to note that, not just in Ontario but elsewhere, we have seen a continuing theme is coming back to this committee of frustration at the municipal level. We hear from the federal level a similar theme of frustration that they are unable to provide the municipalities with some of the things that they need.
This is our last public hearing. We have an opportunity, in talking to you as our last panel of witnesses, to have as clear as possible your position on whether this is a problem as Senator Forrestall has brought up and as Senator Wiebe has brought up.
All of the committee is seized with the fact that two levels of government, I do not think in an organized or planned way, talk about the difficulty of communicating back and forth, principally as a result of this Constitution that we have and that we understand, but in a practical sense they say that there is a problem.
If there is a problem, I am sure you have views on it
Dr. Young: Well, anybody who has anything to do with emergencies on a daily basis and at any level of government would tell you that until recently, it simply was not a priority. The problem is that we have been building the system with limited resources. Of course, the municipal levels are the ones who are delivering it and they are not getting huge amounts of financial support from the other levels of government.
Traditionally, the province has provided neither money nor physical assets and the JEPP program has grown only recently. We are learning as we go. Decisions must be made about who is going to fund what parts of it. However, it is perfectly valid that the municipalities are questioning the process. They can handle the day-to-day emergencies, but we expect them to be prepared for the big things and yet neither the provincial nor the federal government is providing a lot of assistance in that regard.
Mr. McKerrell: In the emergency management business, the last thing you need is a bowl of ``bureaucratic spaghetti'' to work through. There can be elements of that. You can find it at the municipal level; you can find it at the provincial level; and you can find it at the federal level.
At the risk of boasting, in Ontario we are trying to cut through all that and find ways to streamline the process and eliminate as much of the garbage as possible. In dealing with emergency management, you have to have a structure. You have to have a bus driver, as Senator Forrestall has pointed out. You have to have leadership. You have to have a certain amount of process, and you have got to have rigour, and the ability to cut through the baloney. You have to get the job done.
There are not enough resources at the federal, provincial or municipal level. I would suggest, however that everybody, whether provincial governments, municipal or federal, has a filing cabinet full of wish lists. Nobody has enough money to address all these wish lists. Not even the very affluent American government can fund all of the wish lists that are out there.
Therefore, in Ontario we are moving to what we call ``risk-based emergency management.'' As part of our new thrust in the last couple of years, we are trying to identify what the risks are in the province at the municipal level, at the provincial level. We are trying to prioritize the risks so that the resources that are available can be channelled in a particular direction to address the most significant risks. We will get to the lesser risks when we are able.
No government has all the money in the world. We cannot wrap people up in cotton wool to protect them from all manner of things that can befall them. Here in Ontario we are taking the approach that we are trying to build a province of what we call ``resilient communities,'' so that they can rebound as quickly as possible from the inevitable emergencies.
The emergencies are going to happen as sure as the sun is rising today. We cannot avoid some of them. Some are them are natural events. Where they are human-caused, work can be done there. Where technological or infrastructure issues exist such as aging, bad planning in terms of building on floodplains — a whole range of things can be done to mitigate and prevent. However, we cannot prevent everything from happening.
By taking a risk-based approach, we identify what resources are available. Governments, whether federal, provincial, municipal, identify resources and then prioritize the distribution of those resources.
Senator Forrestall: Let me finish my round of questions for now with a very specific example.
Would you care, one or all of you, to walk the committee briefly through the implications of the El Al threat last week? Were you advised of it? If so, what did you do about it? What did you do about putting into place an emergency plan.
Dr. Young: Obviously, we have to be somewhat cautious.
I will ask the Superintendent as well, however I can say that we were advised in a timely fashion. We were advised by more than one source. The information came in from three sources, which is the built-in redundancy that we have tried to establish. That, in and by itself, is a fair accomplishment because, prior to 9/11, we never would have heard the information that we heard.
Following that, I had conversations with CSIS and an in-depth briefing about the situation on an ongoing basis. If I have any questions, in fact, I have only to pick up the phone and ask them and I will be given honest answers, whatever my questions are.
It was primarily a police issue but we needed to know on an emergency basis.
Senator Forrestall: That is what I am interested in.
Once you were apprised, what did you do?
Dr. Young: Once we were apprised, we assessed what it would mean for us. We paid attention to who was where in the province, if they needed to be contacted that day. However, the information did not go too far down the chain because we did not believe it was necessary. If we had needed to mobilize further, we would have mobilized further, but we paid attention to where Mr. McKerrell was, that day, where I was, where other government officials were. We had a good idea of how fast we could act if something had to be done.
Mr. Goodall: Senator, regarding our ability to respond to that incident, there does not necessarily have to be formal agreements between government to government.
Senator Forrestall: I am not asking about that at all. I am just asking you what happened. Where were you? Who did you call first when you were called?
Dr. Young: I talked to Mr. McKerrell. I was up in the Emergency Measures Centre when I got called.
Senator Forrestall: Did you call him?
Dr. Young: Someone from the OPP did.
Mr. Goodall: Someone from the OPP was in liaison with the EMO and Dr. Young.
My point was that the memoranda of understanding between agencies within government facilitate our ability to supply resources and other things that are necessary to deal with the incidents.
Senator Forrestall: Where was the decision taken, and by whom, to divert the plane from Toronto to Hamilton?
Mr. Goodall: It was a federal decision.
Senator Forrestall: Was it a decision of the Federal Department of Transport?
Mr. Goodall: Yes. I am sure that CSIS and RCMP were involved in that decision as well.
Senator Forrestall: Was there occasion for you to speak to people in Hamilton to apprise them of the event?
Dr. Young: I was aware of which police agencies were involved and what was being done. We did not speak directly, in that instance, to the emergency people in Hamilton because the threat was likely directed at the Toronto airport. We were aware of who knew what in Toronto in respect of the airport.
Had we felt that it represented a threat in Hamilton, we would have contacted people at the appropriate level in Hamilton to advise that they needed to be on alert, that there was a credible threat and that they should know where their people were in case they had to mobilize.
Senator Forrestall: Would this have been OPP's intelligence, or was this your sharing of intelligence with other gathering agencies?
Mr. Goodall: The INSET structure, the Provincial Counterterrorism Unit and other agencies interact with each other with regard to the sharing of information.
In this case, because I was involved in deployment of resources for which I am responsible, I found that the information sharing was very detailed and took place very quickly. This was not a case, as we have experienced in the past, where the information is only shared to a certain level. There was a great deal of information sharing so that the operatives at all levels were included.
Senator Meighen: Was that to pre-existing protocols — that once something happened, the information flowed freely and there was no confusion and no misunderstanding and no reluctance to share because everybody knew who could share what with whom?
Mr. Goodall: That is correct. That is a result of the processes that have been put in place since 9/11. The issue has been placed on the table very succinctly and directly by people such as Dr. Young that we cannot afford to function in an environment where part of the response is not to provide us with the information that we need.
Senator Meighen: You say ``process.'' Do you mean a written procedure?
Mr. Goodall: For example, the Peel Regional Police Service, who has jurisdiction for Pearson International, has an emergency plan that was invoked by the police incident commander once the information was received. That plan lays out where support will be obtained for that police service to be able to deal with the event, and what the chain of command is. Those matters are already included, and they are exercised from time to time as well.
Dr. Young: We spent the time since September building relationships into the intelligence community. Mr. McKerrell and I have been security-cleared.
Traditionally, most of the information I get from INSET would be from the OPP. That is because we have agreed that, given they are a provincial agency they would flow the information in. However, that does not preclude contacting, from time to time, the RCMP chief superintendent in the area. I see him frequently, and he often will say something.
We also have an arrangement with CSIS and they contact us both on a regular basis and about events such as this. I may receive the same information from CSIS and from OCIPEP. We have arrangements with OCIPEP. OCIPEP passed on the information as well. A certain amount of it comes from the local police into our duty desk. The information may come in through three or four different routes, however, that redundancy has been deliberately built in.
This is very new. It has been a bit of a struggle because the idea of passing intelligence information more broadly through any government or any level of government is a new concept. I believe I now know people in intelligence by their real names, so we have made progress.
Senator Forrestall: I like that buddy-buddy, I really do. I am sold on it a hundred per cent.
From the time you were apprised of the situation, Mr. Goodall, is there a time parameter you can give us between then and the plane being safely on the ground in Hamilton? Was it half an hour? Two hours?
Mr. Goodall: We were advised as soon as the plane had put down in Montreal.
Senator Forrestall: You knew two or three hours ahead?
Mr. Goodall: Yes, we were advised as soon as the information came to the attention of Peel Regional Police.
Senator Forrestall: The bottom line is, things seem to be coming together. That is great. That is in part what we are trying to do, to make sure that if somebody shoots down a plane, one does not worry too much about the airport. Fifteen years ago, I was going to shut down all the fire stations at the airports. Planes rarely crash on airports; they crash out in the suburban centres, either short of the threshold or somewhere after takeoff. If you use the ``handheld'' system, it would disable the plane but it would not necessarily knock it out of the air. The plane might stay airborne for several minutes and crash somewhere. That is why we always used to argue for a big footprint at the end, much bigger than the threshold.
Senator Wiebe: I cannot let the afternoon go by without some comment that Senator Forrestall made about my capital city, Regina.
Yes, they have a converted school bus that is used for decontamination. We went to another municipality that was considerably larger. Their decontamination unit was a huge semi trailer-truck, brand new, with all kinds of bells and whistles. We found that in comparison to that particular unit, the school bus could probably decontaminate about 30 times as many people per hour. The federal government so far has not really established any meaningful national standards.
Is this an example where you believe national standards should be developed?
Dr. Young: It is an excellent example of where national standards can be developed. We have to do certain things, but we do not need to buy Cadillacs everywhere and spend extra money. In fact, the work on decontamination and some of the bioterror work is underway. Health Canada struck a committee across the country to look at these very issues.
I sit on that committee and have gone to some meetings.
As far as I know, the work has run out of money and has stopped now. Somewhere there is a cardboard box full of the almost-completed product in this case. Decontamination was one of the issues being studied. I was looking more at bioterrorism, but the same meeting had a committee looking at decontamination and standard-setting.
Senator Wiebe: The committee, it is safe to say, has taken the view that more provincial funds need to be devoted to municipal emergency health services.
Do you have a sense whether the new government that is presently being formed in Ontario will increase the funding for first responders?
Dr. Young: I do not, because I believe the government is deciding on its priorities. The government according to today's papers is facing a considerable deficit. It is struggling with competing interests — as all governments do — including campaign wishes to support education and health care and hire more nurses, and do many other things.
The premier has indicated an interest in emergency planning and emergency issues. One of the first briefings he received was on emergency management from the commissioner of the OPP and Dr. D'Cunha and myself.
That is almost unprecedented. However, I do not know about the financial side; Mr. Sorbara would have to answer that one for you.
Mr. Goodall: In an event like 9/11 there were significant capital expenditures made with regards to equipment. As a result of that equipment, we start to prepare the standards because of the expectation in future is to maintain that equipment or similar equipment, to be able to deal with emergencies.
However, the funding tends to be short-term and it eventually dries up. Then, we at some time have to replace that equipment. When there are standards set, that equipment has to be replaced to meet those standards, and that is the jeopardy that we run.
Senator Wiebe: That is an excellent answer. Thank you.
Senator Atkins: The divisions of powers established in the British North America Act between the federal government and the provincial government are well established. However, they are not so between the province and the municipalities.
In view of what you have faced since the ice storm — and I know that you have a new Emergency Management Act — as a deputy minister, is there anything in your mind that should be adjusted in terms of the Municipal Act and the division of power between the two authorities?
Dr. Young: Fortunately I am only an assistant deputy, so I may not be all that able to answer.
Senator Atkins: I want to promote you.
Dr. Young: That is a very interesting question: Do you do it legislatively or do you do it by planning and relationships?
When you try to do anything legislatively, the problem is that you will not think of all the possibilities and you will not think of all of the kinds of things that happen, so you will devise a model that will work for some things and not for other things.
I think directly of SARS. When we were dealing with SARS, the management and many of the issues surrounding SARS started at the Public Health Unit. They were the initial responsibility of Toronto Public Health, but with time, almost every other public health unit in the province gets involved. Therefore, the province has a role there.
However, we quickly realized that SARS was not giving us as much trouble in the community as in the hospitals. The hospitals are directly the creatures of the provincial government and stand-alone boards of governors; there is no municipal control. We had to put in place a layer of unprecedented control of the provincial government over the hospital system, which has not been seen in quite some time.
That is an example of a model that, if you tried to design it in advance, it would not work for some other emergency. The hydro emergency was different because it affected every community all at once, and so there was clearly a provincial role. A nuclear disaster would automatically become a provincial role, because it would affect the entire province. In a terrorism act, it automatically becomes a federal matter.
One does it through relationships and planning and knowing people and getting it to work together. In my mind this is as or more important than doing it legislatively, but I invite comments.
Senator Atkins: We get the impression there is a fuzzy area between the provinces and the municipalities.
Dr. Young: I think that is fair. The problem is, I am not sure exactly how to clarify it. Most emergencies that happen are managed every day by the municipalities without any provincial support. There is a certain amount of provincial support in that, when something gets big enough in policing or fire, there are mutual aid agreements and the OPP comes in to assist the municipal police. However, it does not involve the province as a whole, but rather a few agencies within it.
The province steps in when something gets big enough that the municipality can no longer handle it on its own. Our traditional role has been to support without actually taking over beyond the field management of it. For example, in the ice storm, we left it that all of the municipalities ran their own, and we assisted and gave the most support to those municipalities having the most trouble managing. Places such Ottawa, who had a good plan and a viable way of managing, managed on their own and, in fact, supported us and helped some other municipalities. We used almost a mutual aid system with the municipalities.
We could not do that in the power blackout. Everybody was without power; it was more of a centralized problem. The vast majority of the utilities were owned by the province in any event. There was a strong provincial mandate there.
SARS, as I say, potentially affected the whole province but it mainly involved hospitals and public health so there was a different mix for that event as well. That is the problem. Every time you think you have it all worked out, the next emergency comes along. It means your last plan does not quite work as well as you think.
Mr. McKerrell: As Dr. Young said, the principle is that the municipalities handle it, and then when they cannot handle it, the province steps in. It is not a rigid line. We do not wait until the municipality is on its knees before we step in.
We deploy the staff that we have. As soon as we become aware that there is a problem in a municipality, we contact them and send someone there to see if there is anything they need.
Whether an emergency is declared or not, we get involved as soon as there is an indication of a problem. If they tell us that everything is fine and dandy, we leave. Sometimes they might ask that we stay for a while to see how things develop. We are there to give them advice in the management of certain things because some of the smaller communities are not used to dealing with this.
Earlier this year, when there was a major train derailment in a rural community just northeast of Belleville. Some chemical tanker cars came off the rails and they were blowing up and flying through the air and all the rest of it. That was a huge crisis for that small community. Our deployed staff helped the local council consider what should be done, and worked with the first responders. However, we do not ride in on white horses to take over. We do not operate that way; we are there to provide support.
In case of a nuclear situation, or something big like SARS and the power blackout, we must assume a leadership role. However, we very much depend on a co-operative relationship.
With the new act and with the Emergency Management Program — which is not just a plan but a program that entails an up-to-date plan, training, education, exercises, and enhanced communications — we have now electronic communications with the communities that we never had before. All this has been put in place in the last couple of years.
As Superintendent Goodall mentioned earlier, nobody has all the money in the world to do all this stuff. We have taken the approach that not every municipality and not every organization needs to have all the same stuff. We have a CBRN team in Windsor, in Toronto, in Ottawa; we have the HUSAR team in Toronto.
The idea is that these resources get shared around wherever they are required. It is important that the municipalities and the province — and even the contiguous states to Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec — that we put mutual assistance agreements in place.
Currently, the U.s. has a program whereby the majority of the states have signed on to help each other in the event of an emergency. It is very codified; it is very good; but it also required legislative approval of this program. When Ontario was invited to join, we were very interested. Then our lawyers looked at it and they said the terms would have to be rewritten into language suitable in Canada and Ontario. I told them to forget it. This has been approved by the U.S. Congress. They are not going to reconsider their legislation to suit Ontario. We are now trying to find ways and means of accomplishing that objective without the legal rigidity. It all speaks to mutual aid and mutual cooperation.
Dr. Young: We may do it by getting new lawyers.
Senator Atkins: Just as an aside, I was in Mississauga, and the ``bus driver'' at that time was the Solicitor General.
Dr. Young: That is still our Ministry. Community Safety is the old Solicitor General. That has held through.
Senator Atkins: With all your experience, are you satisfied that the legislation that is in place provincially is working?
Dr. Young: Oh, I did not say that. No. Our experience is showing us that we may need to look at our legislation and we may need to take our latest summer and ask ourselves what we have learned from that. Are we going to need to fortify that legislation to ensure that it has all of the required powers and the ability to move resources and do things?
I do not know how to solve the issue between municipalities and the province legislatively; however, I agree that, even though it is new, we need to examine our legislation.
Senator Atkins: I understand Ontario made a claim to the federal government for a half a billion dollars on SARS.
Dr. Young: I think it was more than that, but the offer was $250 million.
Senator Atkins: That is what they offered you?
Dr. Young: I believe that the offer — and I stand to be corrected — was a firm $150 million and we likely negotiated for the other $150 million. At the time, the province was asking for more than that.
Senator Atkins: Have you received any of it?
Dr. Young: I believe the province has not seen the money yet, but there are ongoing discussions.
Senator Atkins: In respect of the border issue, you made the point that you support the 30-Point Plan. Did you have any input before they negotiated that agreement with Ontario?
Dr. Young: No, we did not.
Senator Atkins: I ask because the Windsor/Detroit border is the busiest in North America.
Dr. Young: It is the busiest in the world.
Senator Atkins: Yes.
Dr. Young: It is the busiest crossing point and the most important single economic crossing point in the world. There is also the Blue Water Bridge and the Niagara Bridge and such. Within Canada, they are two, three, and four. The major crossing points in terms of commerce are within Ontario, so the border is extremely important to us.
The 30-Point Plan was developed very soon after 9/11, and my office did not exist at that time. There may have been consultation at some levels within the Ontario Government; I do not know. I was not involved and I do not think Emergency Management was. The plan is ambitious; it is also a very good plan. We have had no disagreement with it from the beginning.
Senator Atkins: Are you happy with what is happening there?
Dr. Young: It is taking time. It involves many very complex issues and many government departments. We would like to see as much of it instituted as quickly as possible.
However, for example, in parts of it a lot of the crossing can be improved with increased use of biometrics. Part of the issue and part of the delay has been trying to determine what the biometric standards are going to be worldwide. There has been a certain amount of waiting for the U.S. to establish a standard, knowing that whatever standard they settle on is going to become the world standard.
Once we have biometrics, we can start looking at fast lanes and all kinds of other matters that will make things work better, because suddenly there will be the ability to confirm that the person crossing is the person he or she claims to be.
Senator Atkins: As a representative of the Ontario government, what channel and what input do you have in terms of any discussions that are taking place?
Dr. Young: Part of my role was to develop some of those channels. I meet now with Privy Council; I attend immigration conferences; I meet with the federal government, with OCIPEP and other groups. There is now an organization of the states and provinces that border on each other. All of the U.S. states and Quebec, New Brunswick and Ontario are meeting every three or four months on homeland security issues.
We do discuss the progress of the 30-Point Plan. I have also meet with officials in Washington and with the consul general here. Therefore, we have been operating at multiple levels over these issues to try to learn as much, and in some cases push them along.
Senator Atkins: Are they genuinely trying?
Dr. Young: I think so. If Ottawa is a bureaucracy, Washington is the ultimate king of bureaucracy. It has made good progress but it needs to be done. I cannot say strongly enough that things in the 30-Point Plan absolutely must be done. They do need to be done as quickly as they can be done. However, it is difficult.
A classic example is the first time I had a briefing and tunnels, I asked what would be involved in building another tunnel or bridge in Windsor if necessary. The explanation of the amount of bilateral studies, provincial and state environmental studies indicated that if we were to start work on such a project today, it would be 10 years before a bridge was built. There are so many layers, and it is so complex. If something happened to a bridge, we probably, even with a speeded-up process, would be two or three years trying to replace it.
It is not a perfect world yet. While much has been done in a short time, much still has to be accomplished.
Mr. McKerrell: Just yesterday I met with a couple of representatives from the U.S. consulate here in Toronto and a representative from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa to discuss this border issue. They are keen to see to the discussions between the U.S. government, the Canadian government and Ontario, move forward and asked if there was anything that could be done to ensure that.
I told the new minister that the folks at the American embassy are keen to do something about this.
When the events of 9/11 occurred, the borders ground to a halt. At that time, the EMO organized a meeting of all of the different parties that had a role to play in that: Customs, the trucking associations, the OPP, and the Ministry of Transport. Other federal representatives and some American were also involved, as was our economic development and trade ministry. Even the Ministry of Agriculture was there because of the trucks transporting live animals and all those issues.
As a result of bringing these people to the table, we were able to quickly put a process together to expedite the movement of vehicles, given all of the worries and fears and concerns at the time. There were still huge line-ups that went on for days but at least it had started moving.
Since then, as Dr. Young has indicated, a lot of discussion has gone on. For example, we were anticipating the breakout of the war in Iraq earlier this year. Dr. Young and the minister had discussions with the Americans and with the federal government in Ottawa. We mobilized our team with the OPP and the Ministry of Transport, and got everybody together. Steps were put in place to streamline the traffic movement, and it worked rather well.
Dr. Young: Therefore, even at the provincial level, there are things we can do. We had a traffic plan in place. We had more signage. We had coverage with radios so that we could move people to different bridges. We had better pre- clearing. We met with representatives from immigration and customs and police on the other side to see what we could do to speed things up. However, there is a lot to be done yet.
The Chairman: Dr. Young, you were describing biometrics, and maybe you did not intend to, but it sounded like a prerequisite to organizing fast lanes. Surely, these things can move ahead simultaneously?
Dr. Young: Yes, there is a tremendous use of biometrics potentially coming at airports and other places. They certainly have a value in fast lanes, but there is also the NEXUS programs and other programs.
Part of our problems with fast lanes, even in the trucking, is physically designing and getting a lane that can be reserved for the ones that are pre-cleared.
The Chairman: It is an infrastructure problem that requires the clearing to take place away from the bridges and away from the current places.
Dr. Young: Yes, exactly.
The Chairman: We need to start planning those highways now, not when we arrive at a biometric.
Dr. Young: Absolutely. I did not mean to imply that.
Biometrics has certainly hung up some of the various issues in the 30-Point Plan. Certainly, the passage of trucks is one example. However, issues relating to whether you pre-clear and how you pre-clear, whether it is done at the border or further out, and how we handle the sovereignty issues and Americans being here with guns all serve to complicate the issue of how to make the borders flow faster.
The Chairman: I do not understand this issue. We have already addressed pre-clearance. We have got seven airports that have pre-clearance where Americans do not have guns. The principle is clearly established that that can be done.
There is a huge problem in the amount of money that is needed, probably by the province, to build highways to get to the pre-clearance areas. Then the feds have to build a pre-clearance facility. However, I do not see anything that is not already happening in airports, for example, in terms of dealing with the Americans. Guns have been solved, as far as customs pre-clearance goes. We have a model.
Dr. Young: I am hardly expert, but I have attended meetings and been involved to some extent.
The gun issue at airports is solved but I am not sure that it is to the Americans' satisfaction. I have been told that Americans at customs points with trucks would want to have guns. Therefore, the issue is not solved in their mind.
Then you have the other big difference from an airport. If you are pre-clearing further out from an airport, you are clearing goods as well as people. How can you ensure that the goods have not been tampered with from the point of pre-clearing to the point where they go over the border?
There are similarities and differences. I gather that part of the problem has been deciding how to manage this whole issue.
The Chairman: I do not want to oversimplify it because it is obviously not a simple problem, but you are never going to find a U.S. customs officer who feels fully dressed if he or she is not wearing their gun. Having said that, we have provided them with police protection, and that means we have solved the problem in the seven airports we have.
Likewise, the infrastructure that relates to roads is going to require secure roads that do not permit access to anyone else. It also requires that the traffic has to flow continuously or else the vehicle ceases to be cleared.
Dr. Young: There are potential solutions.
The Chairman: This is probably not the forum to discuss it, but it strikes me as being a fairly straightforward issue. The real problem is that nobody wants to put up the money to move it forward.
Dr. Young: Well, there has been money put forward. For example, the federal and the provincial government committed a huge amount of money in Windsor to trying to resolve some of the problems on Church Street. Then the federal government and the provincial government came forward with a single solution. The City of Windsor did not like the solution so that caused a delay of about six months while they sorted it out.
The Chairman: My point is that nobody wants to put up the money to find a solution that is going to work for everybody, because that is going to be an expensive solution.
Dr. Young: If it is doable. I am not sure. I have not seen the perfect solution on paper, but it may exist.
Senator Banks: On that subject, Dr. Young, if you were asked to give an opinion as to whether or not we ought to allow armed American officers in Canada, what would your answer be?
Dr. Young: If they are properly trained and they are law enforcement or if they are from customs and immigration, I am not particularly bothered by the fact that they would be armed. That could lead to the question as to whether to arm our own officers in Canada.
So all of these issues always have a plus and a minus. I certainly do not pretend to be that knowledgeable about them but I would not hold it up over something. I guess I am like Senator Kenny in many ways: I look for solutions to get it done. I am not sure that the population would be all that upset if Americans were armed in Canada if that is the only way to do it. There may be other ways of doing it too.
The Chairman: Senator Banks, I just observe that there are numerous instances where foreign agents with guns do come into Canada.
Dr. Young: That was certainly in my mind. The presidential details, I think, may be armed.
Senator Banks: The issue is in fact a pay issue with customs.
Mr. Goodall: Sir, your point is well taken, because we are only fooling ourselves if we think the Americans are on our soil and are not armed. The question begs to be asked, however, notwithstanding presidential security and detail such as that, why do American law enforcement officers need to be armed on our soil when, as a provincial police officer, I don't have the right to carry my firearm outside of my province and I can conduct my business without being armed?
The Chairman: I understand. It is not just American officers, by the way. There are other states as well that are welcomed here. Usually those states offer reciprocal arrangements to allow us to carry weapons in their countries. I cannot speak for other provinces.
I agree with the fundamental question regarding why they need to be armed in the first place. I would not think that they would need to be armed. Having said that, I cannot tell you when a person feels naked or when they do not. I will leave it at that.
Senator Banks: Mr. McKerrell, you mentioned that HUSAR was up and running in Toronto. It has not actually happened yet. You have the stuff in Toronto but you do not have the people nor are they being trained yet. Do you have an idea when that is going to happen, or do you have a target date in mind?
Mr. McKerrell: The HUSAR team actually has been used. They were used earlier this year, when there was a building collapse in the west end of Toronto. The HUSAR team went in and helped to sift through the area.
However, you are right; the whole thing is not fully up and running. The issue is split into three areas, all of which really come down to money. The City of Toronto is picking up the tab for the officers and the firefighters. The federal government kicked in money for equipment. Ontario kicked in money for training. Those three sets of resources are coming together. Nobody is arguing that they could not use considerably larger resources, but that was what was available from the three levels of government.
As to a time frame, I have not talked to the new fire chief about that specific issue, but it is a high priority with them to get it done as soon as possible.
Mr. Goodall: The Province of Ontario funded a unit within the OPP called the Provincial Emergency Response Team. Part of that team's mandate is HUSAR. Currently we have 12 officers fully trained in HUSAR. They have taken their training at Texas A&M University in the U.S. Another 11 officers from that unit will be travelling to Texas later next month to complete their training as well.
Senator Banks: I was referring to the level in Vancouver that is UN sanctioned — the ``Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,'' if you like.
Dr. D'Cunha, I am sure that you have read Dr. Naylor's report, with specific reference to SARS, in which he said that the usefulness and efficacy of the federal involvement in the SARS matter was hampered and made less effective because of the lack of a business-oriented kind of process by which to bring it to bear.
Since that has happened in respect of the ``lessons learned'' kind of thing, has it improved?
Dr. D'Cunha: Briefly, we have to realize the amount of data being requested by the WHO changed over the course of the outbreak. My staff actually tabulated what fields had been collected at the start of the outbreak and what ended up being required by the WHO right through to June.
My own perspective is that we did not know, a priori, at all levels in here in Canada what information the WHO was going to ask for. As an example, WHO actually served Canada with 24 hours' advance notice that the travel advisory was going to come on, and we did not pick up on that because we did not understand the language. As of last week, my colleagues in Health Canada still do not have all the datasets that they think WHO will need, and one of them was travelling to Geneva.
I have signalled back to my counterpart assistant deputy minister that all non-nominal information that we can collect is available. Now, the issue is, if we are asking for fields that are not collected, we need to know so that I can put it in the collection instrument and require the 37 health units to submit the data.
Our tracking showed that between March and June that the amount of datasets required for the WHO changed four times. The list got bigger
Senator Banks: This was changed by WHO?
Dr. D'Cunha: Presumably. We only know what Health Canada was asking us for.
From a public health standpoint, where an individual came from another jurisdiction in Canada or from the United States, there would be a conference call involving people from the United States' Centres for Disease Control, the State health department, the local health department and, on the Canadian side, Health Canada, the province, and the local health department. We shared names, phone numbers, addresses — everything to ensure we knew whom to contact for follow-up.
Recently I discovered that my staff were frustrated that while certain information would be made available verbally during the daily eleven o'clock conference call, the actual written transaction would not occur for another four to five days later. That delay was not at the province. The delay was really at point of collection.
We were trying to run with a real-time information system, which for the most part worked, but written confirmation took four days to follow. Our science advisory committee that reported to Dr. Young and myself in fact showed that the median time lag was 4.4 days right through the start of SARS outbreak.
The earliest we got information in a few cases was on the same day. When I say ``information,'' I mean substantial information in terms of datasets, not names. The delay could be as much as 29 days before getting the full dataset.
Senator Banks: That information is collected on the ground at ``the point of the stick''?
Dr. D'Cunha: That is right.
Senator Banks: Dr. Young, in your opening remarks, you said that you would like a movement toward the United States model of the relationship between the federal government and municipalities, from where we are now. Did I understand you correctly?
Dr. Young: I apologize if I was not clear. I was referring to the fact that there has been recognition at the federal level that, to be effective, Homeland Security will have to move resources through to the municipalities who do not have the necessary resources. There has been the recognition that the huge weakness in their system is at the municipal level and that some agency in Washington would not be able to move the resources in quickly during the time of a crisis.
The states do not have the money to do it and have not been doing it. Therefore, the federal government is flowing money through the states to the municipal governments, and trying to equip them and train them accordingly.
That has been the correct position on the part of my own security because it will be better used in those hands. They have a stronger federal knowledge with FEMA than we traditionally have, but it is that movement that I was referring to.
Senator Banks: Is this something that you think we ought to follow or emulate?
Dr. Young: We need to recognize that the actual delivery is going to occur at the municipal level and the equipment has to be sitting there for them to deliver. Ontario is a big province. It is better that the on the ground training be delivered at the municipal level with assistance from the province.
Senator Banks: The way you described that sounds so irrefutably logical. These guys deal with it, and if they need some help, we will go and help them. If they need more help, then those guys can go and help them. That is a really well laid plan, but ``the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.''
There is a natural tension in this country that has been in place probably since 1868. I am referring to the constitutional tension between the national government and the provincial governments — which we are always careful to refer to as ``orders of government,'' not ``levels of government,'' for the following reason: That ``levels'' implies a stack going this way, with somebody else at the bottom, and the province here and the feds here. In respect of some questions that is appropriate.
However, when it comes to dealing with an emergency, is it not more like a horizontal level in which the first line of troops, the guys who ride into the Valley of Death, are the municipal guys? They are firemen and policemen and emergency medical workers and the like?
Dr. Young: Or hospital workers, as with SARS.
Senator Banks: Yes, very much so, in the case of SARS.
Do we not have to start thinking that way more and start finding ways to get around the business that still exists of the lack of really fluid interoperability between not only the agencies at each of order of government, but between and among the orders of government?
Dr. Young: Absolutely.
Senator Banks: That is still a problem, is it not?
Dr. Young: It is still a problem, although it is less of a problem. Following 9/11, we had a series of meetings in Toronto. The fire chief, the police chief, the emergency chief and the public health chief met with their corresponding representatives at the provincial level. It was decided that everyone needs to be on the same wavelength when bad things happen and we looked for ways to manage these things together.
Have we eliminated all of the issues and all of the egos and all of the problems? No. Are we moving in that direction? Do we accept the direction that you are saying? Absolutely. I do not think the public will tolerate seeing governments argue about saving lives and how to do it right.
It has to be managed effectively. Each emergency does that a little bit differently than the other. Most of the time, it is done at the municipal level.
Sometimes, however, issues — SARS for example — can get simply too big for the municipal or involve powers or responsibilities they do not have. However, we still have to work hand-in-hand with the municipalities because we will fail miserably without them on board.
There are fewer instances when the federal government would step in and actually manage something, but they have a huge role to play in marshalling resources from other parts of the country, and providing backup and expertise in areas, and supplies in the case of the NESS.
I do not foresee the federal government moving in and actually managing a whole lot of disasters. First, they do not normally perform operation tasks. However, they have a tremendous role to play and we must build those relationships.
Senator Banks: I come from ``Tornado Alley'' in Alberta, which requires, often, the use of an early warning system. Superintendent Goodall, you have referred to the necessity of alerting persons endangered by emergency and co- ordinating evacuation. We need to do that frequently in Alberta, because of tornados and other things like that.
The Province of Alberta has found a very effective way to do that. It is an early warning system that, with the push of a button, allows a person to speak live on every form of broadcast: commercial, private, television, cable — the lot. There is no ticker running across the television screen. Everything is interrupted at that second and the person or the voice message can simply say, ``there is a tornado coming to this area. Get into your houses or go down to your basements.'' People can be advised of any pending disaster be it fire or whatever.
To my knowledge, it does not exist anywhere else in the country. I am wondering whether you have considered it at the provincial level in Ontario. It would cost about as much as it did in Alberta and cover about four times as many people. If you have not considered it, recommend that you look at it.
Mr. McKerrell: You are right that we do not have such a system in Ontario.
There are bits and pieces of early warning systems in place, particularly with respect to the nuclear industry that we have in this province. Currently there is a process underway to install a network of sirens and indoor warning devices in Pickering and Darlington, around the two nuclear facilities there. There is further work being done to see if any of that should be extended beyond the three-kilometre zone zero to three kilometres from the reactor.
There is a siren system in place near the Bruce nuclear facility up on Lake Huron. Those sirens not only wail and moan, they also transmit voice messages. They are very clear; you can understand the words with extraordinary clarity.
There is a small siren system down in the southeastern part of Scarborough, in the City of Toronto, but there is nothing that goes across the province. A number of vendors have come to us over the last few years with different ideas about telephone systems, some for household phones, others for cell phones.
There have been some discussions with the people who operate the Weather Channel. They asked us and the OPP to see if we would endorse their bid to the CRTC to get a crawler across the bottom of the television screen.
Senator Banks: All of those things are revenue generators, though. Our early warning system is not.
Mr. McKerrell: Absolutely. I thought it was a good idea and still do. I wrote to the CRTC saying that it is a good idea but I am not shilling for any particularly company.
There is a lot of advantage in having a good early-warning system. It is something we are looking at but we certainly do not have the plan together; we do not have the model, and we do not have the resources.
This is subject to correction, but I believe Alberta had significant support from the oil industry in putting their system in place. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that oil interests have helped to advance the state of emergency management in Alberta.
Senator Banks: I do not think so but I will find out. The industry has supported the state of emergency management, but I am not certain about this particular broadcast system. In any case, I am going to try to get the specific information about that system, how it works and who pays for it. We will certainly get that to you.
Mr. McKerrell: We would be interested.
Senator Meighen: Dr. Young, you may have said most of this when you were responding to Senator Banks. However, I should like to know what OCIPEP does for you guys? It provides some funding through JEPP. I heard you say, which I had not realized before, that it was one of the sources of intelligence. It establishes caches and stashes in places where very few people know where they are.
Dr. Young: It is actually Health Canada that does that.
Senator Meighen: Well, then, we will cross that off OCIPEP.
I do not know whether you were in the room, whether you heard how the field hospital was accessed during the SARS crisis, not through the formal request, which took seven days to get an answer, which came back negative, but through interpersonal contacts, someone phoning someone and saying, ``For God's sake.''
Dr. Young: That is how it got accessed in the Stones concert too. I phoned Dr. St. John and said: I need it, after they turned it down. It worked. That is why we need relationships, to get these things moving.
Senator Meighen: ``They'' was Dr. St. John?
Dr. Young: It had gone through a lower level and they said that we could not have it because we did not have an emergency. We told them we were trying to prevent an emergency. I contacted Dr. St. John and he agreed and it was done.
Senator Meighen: Well, has that now been put in a big book somewhere where someone can say, ``Aha, preventing an emergency; that qualifies.''?
Dr. Young: I do not know. I can ask Dr. St. John. However, there are situations where you first have to change the thinking in an organization. It is possible to change it.
Senator Meighen: Let us go back to OCIPEP. What else could it do for you, give you a list of best practices?
Dr. Young: Best practices are very important. They can play an important role, particularly in areas on critical infrastructure.
Senator Meighen: An Inventory?
Dr. Young: No. An inventory is not necessarily something you want to be sitting around in a drawer, to be stolen by a terrorist. You need established principles that address how you operate in various sectors; how you put out best practices that will be available. Generally, it is on a voluntary basis that industry chooses to take the advice — unless we are prepared to legislate it. However, we find that industries are hungry for information and very willing to take it.
OCIPEP, places an important role in showing leadership, organizing and getting standardization across the country. It would be very helpful to know that, if we have a big emergency, we can move people from other provinces in and they are going to operate in much the same way. They have got a role to play there. We are always happy to have federal funding, of course.
Mr. McKerrell: I am not going to say anything here that I have not said to my colleagues in OCIPEP directly. I am aware that there is a fair bit of grumbling across the country about what OCIPEP does and does not do. They are a valuable resource and need to be reinforced, quite frankly.
When they got their new mandate three years ago there was perhaps too much emphasis placed on the cyber side of things. At that point, everything was focused into cyber, and not enough on the former old emergency preparedness side. I have recommended that they should be looking at reinforcing their regional operations to work more with all the provinces across the country. They need to strengthen that side and match it to the cyber side. They do some good work in terms of policy, but they need to work more closely with individual provinces where the rubber hits the road.
They could also focus more on research. There is a whole raft of things that need to be researched properly in the emergency management field. OCIPEP could be funding research with universities and different organizations into different issues. There is a gamut of issues that would be valuable both at a federal level and provincially across the country.
I think they are struggling internally with their mandate and what their structure should look like. When they were given their new role three years ago, they were on the right track but they need expand a bit and reinforce the regional operations in each of the provinces. I keep telling them they should change their name to Emergency Management Canada.
Senator Banks: I have a lot of supplementary question on that one, but we are running out of time. Dr. D'Cunha, there are two more reports coming after Dr. Naylor's report on SARS. Is there much more to be said, do you think?
Dr. D'Cunha: Yes. Dr. Naylor did not have, and I will note for the record, a Province of Ontario representative on the panel. In my view, there is a federal story there. In contrast, the Walker Panel has Dr. Young and myself as ex- officio members. We participated in most of the panel meetings and there are other people locally and federally. Dr. Naylor himself is a member, as is Dr. Basrur, ex officio. Justice Campbell has been tasked with looking at what the system can do better.
My sense of all three reviews is that I would expect Justice Campbell's to be the most thorough, especially looking at his track record.
Dr. Young: The Walker commission is attempting to look at the Naylor recommendations and say, okay, this represents the federal piece and the beginning of what the province might look like and what public health might look like across the country. Where does the province want to be, and how do we intersect into that? Do we agree with it? If we agree with it, how do we make that work? What do we do to the Ontario system, and at a municipal level that will make that work? At the meetings of the Walker commission, those are the kinds of things we are discussing.
We are not examining everything from the point of view that we did it wrong. With SARS, we dealt with the system we had. We all recognize that it is not the system we want. We are trying to determine how we can we build the system that we are going to need and want for the future that allows us to anticipate these things put in place the necessary measures to stop it in its tracks.
That system did not exist the day, on March 8, when a man went to the emergency at the Grace. That system was not in place.
Justice Campbell is trying to analyse the environment within the system that caused there to be the missed communication. There is a rumbling out there, that at the ground level, people saw it coming back and that was missed. The question is why was it missed?
That is the $64,000 question in SARS. The measures we took the first night, and retook without the same punishing necessities the second time, worked. If you count 10 days out from what we did, we stopped it in its tracks. We know what to do now. If any jurisdiction in Canada that gets SARS, we can give them the protocols and tell them how to stop it.
The l challenge is recognizing it before a hundred cases are already sown in the system, and recognizing it when there are one or two cases. That is part of Justice Campbell's focus. What went wrong that nurses claimed they were seeing it and yet it was being missed and so it went on and many more people became infected? Justice Campbell will make recommendations relating to emergency management and other things.
All the studies are doing distinct things and there is real value in each of them.
Senator Meighen: What about mandatory quarantine? Last time, did not we say, ``Please stay home?'' Now do we have the equipment?
Dr. Young: No. We called it ``voluntary quarantine'' — that was a nice Canadian way of doing it. Dr. D'Cunha will explain the various ways.
Dr. D'Cunha: Essentially, we do not use the phrase ``quarantine.'' That is the federal act, in place only at the airport. The Quarantine Act addresses that. I think the correct term should have been ``isolation.''
The adjective ``voluntary'' was a misnomer. It was really a public health request, as we normally make for other communicable diseases, to take a series of actions or not take a series of actions to interrupt the chain of transmission. For those who did not comply with that initial request, then the legal aspect of section 22 under the Ontario Health Protection Promotion Act comes in.
By using the phrase ``voluntary quarantine'' or ``voluntary isolation,'' we were misleading people to believe that they were doing it on a voluntary basis. In fact, what they were doing was complying without the full force of legislation being brought to bear, because it would be a waste of public health personnel power to write section 22 orders on every person who you believed needed to go into isolation.
The good thing about the Canadian social fabric — and as our data, in fact, shows — is that the vast majority, over 99, percent complied with a public health directive to go into isolation. In fact, only 65 section 22 orders were written up in over 15,000 cases. We have a rough estimate because of the lack of public health infrastructure in the early days to count who was put into isolation. So my best estimate is somewhere around 20,000 people complied. Only 65 people needed the enforcement of the full arm of the public health law.
Law enforcement authorities in Ontario — specifically my colleagues in the OPP and down at the municipal police force level — also assisted public health in the Greater Toronto Area in helping us ensure compliance. In some cases, one had to talk tough with some people, but one did not write an order. In other cases, one wrote an order.
My view — shared by most of my public health colleagues — is that when we write a section 22 order, it is a sign of frustration on our part. We have appealed to someone to do the correct thing, politically, from a societal standpoint, and he or she has refused so we bring out the ticket book. The generally public health way is not to take out a ticket book and write something.
Senator Meighen: That is very helpful and encouraging to know. However, if I am defying your nice request to voluntarily place myself in isolation, do you then send out an officer?
Dr. D'Cunha: I would need to answer, then turn it over.
Senator Meighen: Right now, have you got the masks and whatever else you need to not expose yourself to danger in coming to me, who might be a carrier of the disease, to tell me to stay home?
Mr. Goodall: As a result of participating in the SARS incident, the equipment is available. It is a matter of distributing it to the officers for their protection. However, in this case, the role of the police was merely to prevent a breach of the peace during the serving of the orders.
Dr. D'Cunha: I will try to clarify the judicial process. A section 22 offence is usually written by a Medical Officer of Health, an Associate Medical Officer of Health, or myself, as Chief Medical Officer. I have never written one as Chief Medical Officer of Health. As a former Medical Officer of Health for the City of Scarborough, I have used the privilege now and again, when I needed to.
We serve the order. If there is compliance — and I need to stress, not voluntary compliance, but compliance — there is no need to do anything further. There is a subset of diseases deemed ``virulent'' in the act. We deemed SARS ``reportable, communicable and virulent'' on the March 25, so we have an additional step we need to take if somebody does not comply.
If someone refuses to comply with a section 22 order, we can tell a provincial offences judge that so and so has not complied. In the case of a section 22 order, the judge has the option of fining the individual up to $5,000 a day for each day of non-compliance. However, in the case of virulent disease, the judge has the additional power to confine the individual to a provincial hospital as recognized under the Hospitals Act — private or public — with the consent of the hospital. ``Quarantine,'' in the medical sense, not in the federal/legal sense, would occur for periods up to 120 days. Every 120 days the order would be reviewed automatically. We have used this power in the past for tuberculosis. It is a rare occurrence, but we have used it.
In the case of SARS, we did go for 235's and successfully got them. What we discovered is, sometimes to put a person in isolation who is not infectious but has the potential to become infectious when he or she develops symptoms — and you cannot predict that — there was no need to occupy a valuable hospital bed.
On April 29, as part of Bill 1, with the unanimous consent of all three parties in the house, it allowed the Chief Medical Officer of Health or local Medical Officer of Health to certify to the minister that such and such facility is a suitable alternative and may be used. We took off the strain of parking somebody in the hospital. Our act was passed in 1984. We have never run into the situation until SARS where we needed to isolate so many people. So that was a key lesson learned, for which we took decisive action.
Senator Wiebe: Do all provinces have similar acts?
Dr. D'Cunha: No.
Dr. Young: In China, they decided that if you broke isolation, the penalties were up to and including the death penalty.
Senator Banks: Mr. McKerrell indicated that he thought that OCIPEP ought to be re-named the Office of Emergency Management. You used the word ``management.''
Dr. Young earlier mentioned that the voluntary compliance by municipalities to have an emergency program in place did not work. I gather that the province brought down the hammer and made it mandatory?
Dr. Young: I think the new act required that they do it. I am not aware of a single municipality that objected. They all agreed to what was necessary. They would have liked us to pay for it but there was no argument about the need to do it.
Senator Banks: Was it mandated?
Dr. Young: It was mandated, with all-party approval.
Senator Banks: What do you think the reaction would be if the word ``management'' were to be inserted into OCIPEP and their mandate — to use the term in a different way — was made to be one that could be imposed; and if those best practices and national standards were mandated, or even proposed?
I am bearing in mind that in this country, as you move through the various orders of government, people who are being instructed or asked to do something have a tendency to say, ``Do not tread on me. I know how to do this better than you do. This is my turf. I am closer to the ground than you are.'' There are all sorts of arguments.
However, to make it really effective, if we used the example that was set by the province, might it be possible that some of those standards and practices ought to be mandated by the Government of Canada?
Dr. Young: You could certainly make that argument: If we can do it at the provincial level, why can you not do it at the federal level? Furthermore, none of us sitting in this room can tell you where the big disaster is going to happen next. It is more likely to be more serious in a heavily populated area but it is not necessarily so. If, for example, you start out with floods and forest fires in one area, they can quickly spread to other areas.
There will, of course, always be some resistance by people. I would like to think that the direction that we are moving, in Ontario, is that we would always view something like that as being the minimum standard. We would like to exceed that standard, given the direction that we have been taking in recent times. However, you could make a strong argument for that.
The Chairman: Continuing on the role of OCIPEP and its function, can I take it that a useful function for OCIPEP is to be the repository of the ``lessons learned file.'' That is the right place to keep the lessons learned?
Dr. Young: I think so. You keep them multiple places because some of them are more applicable. They can gather them all together, though, essentially.
The Chairman: Not exclusively there, but at least all of them are there.
Dr. Young: Yes.
The Chairman: The next step, obviously, is that they then become a clearinghouse for that information and have the capacity to transmit — not only on request — if they think it might be useful, to a certain area.
Dr. Young: Yes.
The Chairman: We have discussed the question of natural and regional communication systems.
Dr. Young: Can I just qualify? They gather the reports and clear them; I do not think they necessarily always write that report.
The Chairman: My assumption would be that the ``lessons learned'' file would be best written by a range of people working in a co-operative fashion. That the lessons learned would be more compelling and mow powerful if they were signed off by three levels rather than by one level or two levels.
Dr. Young: Yes, I agree with you. There is a risk, if OCIPEP had the job of always going in and evaluating afterwards, and writing reports unilaterally, it would not have the expertise and it would become a difficult issue on a number of fronts to manage.
Can they play a role and then be part of it? Absolutely. I agree with you that all levels should participate.
The Chairman: We heard this morning of the number of people who approached the City of Toronto to get advice about how to deal with the SARS crisis. Up to a point, people are always going to want to go to Toronto and talk firsthand to the people who were there and actually did it.
Having said that, would it be possible to keep that information elsewhere and to have that distribution function handled in a more central fashion?
Dr. Young: Absolutely. It largely is. The reports that are written are shared. The federal government had a SARS conference, for example, towards the end of the first outbreak, and people came together and shared the information.
From the beginning, all of our reports have been given to the federal government and shared with the WHO. You are absolutely right; that is the way it should work.
The Chairman: It should work. I would have more confidence if the answer from the federal Assistant Deputy Minister were not: ``I hope that is happening somewhere.''
My impression is that there is enthusiasm from the panel about the concept of the CRTC regulating to provide for national and regional communication systems providing for direct communications to the populace that would interrupt all electronic communications for short periods in the event of national, regional or local emergencies?
Best practices fits in with lessons learned. We are all interested in developing best practices. Should this be a function of OCIPEP, to encourage the development of best practices with all three levels participating where they can contribute to such a discussion?
Dr. Young: Absolutely.
Mr. McKerrell: I would like to encourage that they look beyond Canada's borders — outside the box.
The Chairman: Absolutely. We have no monopoly on best practices.
Mr. McKerrell: Australia is excellent.
The Chairman: Yes. For example, Rotterdam has a terrific set of biometrics with fingerprints and eye scans. If they have invented the wheel, we do not need to.
Mr. McKerrell: That is right.
Dr. Young: Exactly.
The Chairman: Have you contemplated an audit system for emergency preparedness amongst provincial departments?
Dr. Young: We have to first approve their provincial plans.
The Chairman: Right. This is legislated?
Dr. Young: Yes. Within the legislation, the repository for both the municipal plans and the provincial plan and the provincial ministries is with us. We have to approve the ministry's plan. We work with them, but ultimately we have to approve them.
Whenever we have an event, we study it after the fact, report on it and audit it. We also are currently having an audit of EMO. There is an audit process currently underway in the Ontario government. This year the EMO is being done as part of that. We chose that partly because we have expanded so quickly and we want to be sure that we are on the right stream and that we are using our money wisely.
Mr. McKerrell: It is more than just money. It is also looking at how the Emergency Management Program is being developed within the Ontario Government.
The Chairman: Does your legislation provide for a regular and public audit of each department from an emergency measures point of view?
Dr. Young: No. We work with them, and we audit after each event. The legislation also requires ministries to update their emergency plans every year.
The Chairman: We understand the situation of ministerial responsibility. It obviously has a role in our system of government.
Having said that, we also find that there is great utility in having an Auditor General because, notwithstanding the concept of ministerial responsibility, the Auditor General seems to discover that there are lapses on a pretty regular basis.
Dr. Young: We do not have those in the Ontario Government. However, the provincial auditor certainly has at that function and can do that in the Ontario government. They could either, for example, choose to audit EMO and all of the emergency responses within the government, and sometimes they will take an audit by topic — for example, they might look at all of our travel expenses or all of our this or all of our that. They might go ministry by ministry. Part of that audit within a ministry can be: How good is your emergency plan and what are you doing?
Senator Atkins: Public accounts?
Dr. Young: Yes, public accounts.
The Chairman: I am not talking about the route that an Auditor General tends to take. Auditor generals function like auditors.
I am talking about whether or not your department should be taking a look at other departments in the provincial government to examine whether they are well prepared to deal with emergencies and to take care of themselves in an emergency.
Dr. Young: Are you referring to business continuity?
The Chairman: Yes.
Dr. Young: Oh, yes. That is one of the elements within our plans that we are asking them to do. Before we approve those ministries, right now we are going through a growth curve. Some of the ministries in the Ontario government, for example, the Ministry of Natural Resources manages emergencies on an ongoing basis. They deal with forest fires and they have elaborate plans. They can manage things very, very well. Within our ministry, operational areas like the Ontario Provincial Police, which are a large part of our ministry, are very operational and have wonderful plans.
Other ministries are much less developed. We are trying to bring them along, but we are not prepared to okay their plan until they meet a certain standard.
As I mentioned earlier, we have set up three standards of plans. We are striving towards the first level, which is ``essential.'' Then they move to ``enhanced.'' Then they move to ``comprehensive'' over the next five years. In essence, that is an audit system because they have to pass the mark three times over the next few years.
The Chairman: Do you go back and look at them, and decide whether or not they have met that standard?
Dr. Young: Yes.
Mr. McKerrell: It is not spelled out in the legislation: ``EMO shall go out and do an audit.'' We do it in a much more subtle way. For example, all of the different ministries are currently required to submit to EMO their proposals for what they need in order to meet the essential level that Dr. Young just addressed. EMO then has to sign off on all of that showing that we essentially agree with and support what they are putting forward.
I have told that ministries that if they are asking for too much, I will say so. If I do not think they are asking for enough, I will also tell them. If they are missing the boat in the direction they are taking, I will also say so.
Therefore, it is not formally called an audit, but in essence, that is the step that we are going through.
The Chairman: Is it public?
Mr. McKerrell: No it is not. It is internal government financial stuff.
The Chairman: What confidence do you have that in fact on an annual basis, or two to five years from now, things are happening?
Dr. Young: The plans, for example, are public.
Mr. McKerrell: Yes.
Dr. Young: The information is available through Freedom of Information. Anybody who wants a provincial plan for any ministry only has to ask. They are transparent.
The Chairman: Did you encounter any pushback that this was a diminution of ministerial responsibility?
Dr. Young: No. The view right now of emergencies in government is that there is a central function of Emergency Management Ontario where the expertise lies; that they have become the cabinet office from where emergencies will be run. The ministries are looking for help and expertise, and they are working together very well.
Mr. McKerrell: In fact, they are asking for the leadership to be provided, which is very positive.
The Chairman: If we went to your office today and wanted to talk about the Ministry of Transport, could you pull a file out of a drawer and show us that these are their plans, here is how they are functioning and assess whether they are doing well in terms of progress, et cetera?
Dr. Young: Some of it would be in writing. We would be able to give you some of that information verbally. We are developing; we will be at the point where we can open the drawer, pull out their plan and say, ``This is where they're at and their MB20 for money next year will be flowing partly through us.''
Many of the requests for money, if they have anything to do with terrorism or emergency management, go through me for approval before they go to the financial arm of government to make sure that they are what we need and that we agree with them.
That has been informally happening. It was not written in stone, but the committee insisted on it.
The Chairman: In other words, the folks with the dollars will not sign for dollars until they see your signature on the paper?
Dr. Young: Or my support; that is right.
The Chairman: Finally, I would like to address the concept of approaching provinces and municipalities for an inventory of disasters that they anticipate; that they think they should be prepared for; that they think they should handle; and, in association with that, the types of assets they have in place currently to address those disasters; and then, flowing from that, a deficiency list that at some point could be discussed as to whether the federal or the provincial or the municipal government would finance those deficiencies. Do you think that is a role that OCIPEP should initiate and move through the system?
Mr. McKerrell: We strongly believe in the need for an inventory of risks and hazards, and a hazard assessment or risk assessment process done with hazard identification, for all levels, for all orders of government.
The Chairman: Down to what size community, 20,000?
Mr. McKerrell: We are making no distinction. We have said that every municipality in this province has to undertake what we call a HIRA — a hazard identification risk assessment — suitable to their own jurisdiction. If they do not know what is in their own backyard, how can they put together an effective Emergency Management Program? That is the basis of it.
The critical infrastructure is another matter. Yes, there is a need for that to be identified and considered and reviewed. However, we do not want to put it all down on paper where it could be accessed through Freedom of Information. In fact, we included in our legislation some clauses that exempt some of these things for security reasons so that they are not made public.
However, we certainly believe an inventory of hazards and risks should be created. We have built that into our Emergency Management Program requirements. We have developed, on a provincial basis, a list of 37 significant risk factors that we think exist in this province.
The Chairman: Is that list publicly available?
Mr. McKerrell: It is not publicly available. It has been made available to people who should have it, but is not publicly available. Because of the nature of the information, people have to sign to receive their copy of it.
The Chairman: What about the question of the assets to address the risks?
Mr. McKerrell: That ties into the nature of developing the program. Once you have identified the problems you are facing, then you must develop a plan to be able to deal with all of this stuff. We see four elements: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
The capability to deal with these things and the equipment, the people, the training — whatever it is they need — has to be taken into account, once you know what you are dealing with in your backyard. Then the question of how to pay for it arises. Is it municipal, provincial, or federal? How can there be that collaboration?
The Chairman: It leads to a question of having a deficiency list at some point, and then having a process of negotiation or discussion to arrive at which level of government can best meet the deficiency.
Mr. McKerrell: Yes. The option would be as was done with HUSAR, whereby all three levels kick in.
The Chairman: Absolutely. That is very helpful in assisting us with our consideration of OCIPEP's roles.
I would like to thank you very much as a panel, you, Dr. Young, and your colleagues, for coming and appearing before us. We were counting very much on hearing from the province and from Toronto. You are our last panel before we go forward to write the report, and, frankly, we could not have written the report without having heard from you.
We are very grateful for your participation today and for your assistance to the committee in this work. Undoubtedly we will be back to you for more advice and assistance in the future, but I would like to thank you on behalf of my colleagues very much for your assistance today.
The committee adjourned.