The Globe and Mail - June 26, 2012
By Colin Kenny
Elliott Lake’s shopping centre disaster became a tragedy laced with irony Tuesday when Stephen Harper’s office announced that the prime minister was willing to send in emergency assistance.
That would be a noble gesture – if the Conservative majority in the Senate weren’t about to approve the omnibus budget bill that will kill off federal assistance to front-line emergency relief teams across Canada – including the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Unit (HUSAR) that is based in Toronto and currently on the scene in Elliott Lake.
If the federal government does find a way of helping out in Elliott Lake, God bless it. Alternately, God may wish wish to damn the government for shutting down its contribution to a cooperative federal-provincial-territorial program meant to ensure that Canadians across the country have access to competent, timely assistance when disasters hit.
The Joint Emergency Preparedness Program (JEPP) was established in 1980 to create the infrastructure and provide search-and-rescue and other types of equipment for front-line emergency workers to do their jobs as quickly and safely as possible. The five HUSAR units located in big cities across the country are meant to ensure that help can get to surrounding communities in a hurry. The Canadian Emergency Management College in Ottawa offers invaluable classroom and field training to emergency workers. Federal funding is being withdrawn from all of them.
Canada has suffered countless disasters since confederation, and these joint programs recognized that response capacity has been fragmented across the country, without a clear definition of the roles of various branches of government and too often without the resources to respond to disasters, particularly in small towns and rural areas.
The federal government has invested more than $170 million into these joint programs. The Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, in its 2008 report Emergency Preparedness in Canada, argued that even more funding and more sophisticated coordination was required, with the federal government taking the lead.
Instead, the Harper government is abandoning the field. It argues that, in terms of providing equipment, “the objectives of the program have been met.” That statement is laughable, if one can laugh through tears. Equipment is in constant need of upgrading.
When Vancouver fire chief John McKearney heard last week that the city’s HUSAR unit was being stripped of federal funding, he declared himself “shell-shocked.” The Vancouver team provided valuable assistance in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. McKearney argues that it needs continued federal support if coordination is to be ready for potential earthquake disasters in B.C.
This funding cut fits nicely into the Harper government’s ideological belief that the provinces’ constitutional responsibilities should be funded by the provinces alone. Why that mantra applies to emergency relief when it doesn’t apply in areas like education and justice is a question Canadians should be asking. When who matters to you is lying under a heap of rubble, waiting for rescue, what is needed is relief from anyone who can best provide it. In most cases, the best response will be a well-coordinated effort with every possible level of government involved.
Elliott is not an isolated incident. Go back to July 21, 1987 (Edmonton tornado); July 20, 1996 (Saguenay River floods); April 29, 1997 (Red River Floods); January 9, 1998 (ice storms in eastern Ontario and western Quebec); September 11, 2001 (terrorist attacks in Manhattan and Washington); March 5, 2003 (SARS epidemic in Toronto); August 14, 2003 (largest power blackout in North American history); September 28, 2003 (Hurricane Juan, Nova Scotia); the list goes on until we get to June 23, 2012, at the Algo Mall, in Elliott Lake.
The arrival of the HUSAR squad on Monday morning may well not save a single life in Elliott Lake. But how reckless is this government’s gamble that federal support won’t be crucial in all those inevitable disasters to come?
[Colin Kenny is former chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca]