Bureaucratic bafflegab hobbles Canada's disaster readiness, report says
speak directly to front-line responders to disasters. For example, last year a survey was sent to the heads of disaster planning for 92 cities across Canada, and the completed questionnaires are incorporated in the report.To use one example, the City of Toronto’s emergency manager, Warren Leonard, was asked whether Canada’s largest city would be prepared for a disaster on the scale of the hurricane Katrina disaster that afflicted New Orleans a few years ago. “Our belief is that real operational support to municipalities is one of the shortcomings of the current hierarchy of emergency management in Canada,” he replied. He said that judging from what he knew about the federal response to the evacuation of Canadian citizens from Lebanon two years ago, there would be a “prolonged debate” about who got to be the lead agencies as well as competing requests from different agencies.
The report points out that the Department of National Defense has announced plans set up for disaster-response platoons across Canada. Yet the Senate committee has “been unable to retrieve any information as to whether ‘security platoons’ or these ‘rapid reaction’ battalions are for real or figments of someone’s imagination,” the report says.
Canada has 165 field hospitals, with 200 beds each, stashed around the country, but the report finds that municipalities do not necessarily know where the stores are. Some municipal officials who have seen them complain that the supplies are “Korean-war vintage.” The committee also suggests there has been no progress by federal officials to provide municipalities with equipment that could be used in the even of a chemical, radiological or nuclear attack. “As for action, none yet. No guarantee of action in anyone’s lifetime,” the report says.
The tone of the report drew the ire of the Tories. “The Senator’s report, from the title on down, is irresponsible and does not reflect the true picture of how much progress has been made in protecting Canadians since the last election,” the Public Safety Minister, Day, said in a statement from his office. “We did not have to wait for Senator Kenny to tell us that the Liberals neglected emergency management for 13 years.”
The multi-volume report found that there is no system to force the communications industry to keep citizens informed during emergencies; and described overall emergency planning and funding in Canada as top-down. “[Federal] and provincial bureaucrats issue edicts to municipalities to prepare for emergencies without listening to first responders,” the report notes. “There are at least a score of major issues that deserve serious (and timely) attention.”
The senate committee last reported on the topic of emergency preparedness in March of 2004, issuing a report titled “Canada’s Fragile Front Lines.” That report also gave Canada’s emergency preparedness efforts a failing grade.
