Bureaucratic bafflegab hobbles Canada's disaster readiness, report says
New Senate report slams the Canadian government’s disaster coordination efforts; the report suggests that past floods, ice storms, the SARs epidemic, blackouts in Canada, and the 9/11 attacks should have — but have not — served as a wake up call for various levels of government to hatch concrete plans to work together to ward off disaster
Canada’s efforts to respond to large-scale disasters are being hobbled by “bureaucratese” and a lack of communication, according to a new report released Tuesday morning by the Senate Committee on Security and National Defence. Coming on the eve of an election call, the strongly worded report garnered a political reaction within hours of its release. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day dismissed the findings in a written statement as “irresponsible” and then accused the committee chair, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny “of playing fast and loose with his alleged research.”
The plainly titled report — “Emergency Preparedness in Canada: How the Fine Arts of Procrastination and Bafflegab Hobble the People Who Will be Trying to Save You When Things Get Really Bad” — amounts to a progress report on federal emergency-planning measures. The report suggests that past floods, ice storms, the SARs epidemic and blackouts in Canada, and the 9/11 attacks in the United States, should have served as a wake up call for various levels of government to hatch concrete plans to work together to ward off disaster. The Senate, which last looked at the issue in 2004, finds there has been little discernible progress.
“It can be measured in inches,” Kenny said in an interview with the National’s Colin Freeze and Omar El Akkad yesterday. “There’s that tremendous line from Cool Hand Luke,” he said. “‘What we have here is a failure to communicate.’”
The report makes a point of being a plain-language review of disaster-planning measures in Canada, and sometimes adopts a chiding, even sarcastic tone, as it reviews replies federal agencies gave to questions the Senate asked them. “Bafflegab is a peculiar kind of language that is unique to public servants who are trying very hard to justify their existence,” Kenny said. He went on to say the new report can appear as if it were written “a tad emotionally,” but that was partly a reaction to the “smug self-satisfied way bureaucrats and politicians go about handling what could be life-and-death issues.”
The Senate committee researched the report by corresponding back and forth with bureaucracies and departments across Canada. Among the problems the report highlights are the lack of follow-up funds handed out to municipalities to maintain or improve their readiness. The committee also found that “there is no centralized system of funnelling “lessons learned’ and “best practices” to first responders who will have to deal with emergencies on the front lines.”
The Senate tried to
