Canada’s seat-of-the-pants response to disaster management isn’t working

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Wildfires, landslides, floods, tornadoes, train derailments, viruses, and more – there seems to be an endless array of threats to our health and safety.

But Canada’s response to disasters always seems a bit haphazard, as officials scramble at municipal, provincial and federal levels to figure out who should be doing what, when and where.

Eventually, if things get bad enough, we call in the army – whether it’s to do sandbag duty in flood-ravaged communities or to care for elders in nursing homes overwhelmed by COVID-19.

Then comes the tediously predictable finger-pointing between various levels of government.

This seat-of-the-pants approach isn’t working.

Canada is the only G7 country that doesn’t have a national health security and emergency co-ordination agency of some sort.

The U.S., for example, has FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with a US$29.5-billion annual budget.

Canada spends about 1 per cent of that amount on its emergency response and, again, not in any focused way.

But, with the constant pressure being applied by everything from viruses to massive wildfires, there are growing calls to formalize how we respond to health emergencies.

The Public Policy Forum, for example, is calling for the creation of a Canada Health Security Agency.

In a new report released Tuesday (titled “Exposed: How Canada can close its Health Security Gap”), the think tank makes the compelling (and frightening) argument that, despite the ravages of COVID-19, we seem unprepared for the next pandemic. And with looming threats like the H5N1 avian flu virus and a new variant of mpox in the headlines, that could be sooner than we think.

“Canada’s allies stand ready to meet oncoming threats with systemic, integrated approaches to public health emergencies and attacks,” the report states. “We cannot say the same of ourselves.”

The report focuses on global health threats like pathogens and the importance of technical preparedness, including in the areas of procurement, supply chains, and investment in research, but many of the issues the PPF raises apply to our response to domestic emergencies as well.

“True health security requires institutional and policy support,” says Edward Greenspon, the president and CEO of the Public Policy Forum.

True emergency preparedness also requires doing prevention work like tackling climate change, implementing mitigation strategies, and doing risk assessment – and doing a lot of tedious, behind-the-scenes work like stockpiling equipment, replenishing emergency supplies, and sharing data.

And, all-important in the Canadian context, creating a means of co-operating formally between jurisdictions.

Responding to disasters after they occur is essential but isn’t enough. You can’t just hope for the best, you have to prepare for the worst, as the saying goes.

The federal government has been talking for years about creating some sort of national disaster response agency, but it has never gone beyond talk.

Harjit Sajjan, the federal Minister for Emergency Preparedness, has been asked repeatedly if Canada needs its own FEMA. His response has always been vague and non-committal. Asked about the not-so-great response to the recent wildfire that ravaged Jasper, he said: “We need to make sure the right resources are put into the right place.”

Sure. But how do we move beyond platitudes to action and actual preparedness?

The Commons Standing Committee on National Defence weighed in on the issue recently. Its June report, “Providing Aid To The Civil Power: Disaster Relief and the Canadian Armed Forces’ Domestic Operations,” didn’t really take a firm stand other than to say the country’s reliance on the CAF for disaster response is creating too great a strain. (Unsurprisingly, in these deeply partisan times, committee members split along party lines rather than coming to some consensus on how to deal with disasters.)

Soldiers spent 141 days on “domestic operations” last year – which, in itself, is a compelling argument for creating a permanent disaster management work force, either within the CAF or as a standalone agency.

In its report, the PPF notes a famous quote from University of Michigan professor Dr. Howard Markel: that the most common final act of a pandemic (or any other large-scale disaster, for that matter) is invariably “profound amnesia.” Canada, the PPF concludes, is “well and truly in the forgetting phase.”

But with new threats arising regularly, we can’t afford to forget or to sit on our hands.

The PPF report, again: “As the pandemic fades further into the background, the more time we have had to learn our lessons and ensure better preparedness in the future is also more time we have lost.”