(Ottawa) If the leader of the Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre delights in calling the mayors of certain cities “incompetent”, the Minister of Civil Protection, Harjit Sajjan, maintains on the contrary that they are all “allies of the first importance” to respond to emergencies caused by climate change.
It is for this reason that he is keen to meet all the chief magistrates each time he goes to a region of the country in order to find out their needs and the state of their preparation in the event that their municipality would be threatened by a forest fire, floods or a hurricane, for example.
In an interview given to The Press, the minister maintained that municipal leaders will always be called upon to intervene in the first hours of an extreme weather event. The unprecedented forest fires which ravaged some 18.5 million hectares across the country last year clearly demonstrated this, Minister Sajjan believes.
The first hours of an intervention are the most important. The response of mayors and municipal services can in certain cases save lives. This is why I always meet the mayors in all the municipalities I go to.
Harjit Sajjan, Minister of Emergency Preparedness of Canada
After wildfires destroyed 90% of Enterprise, Northwest Territories, last summer, Mr. Sajjan visited the small town to meet with the mayor, he said. example. “The mayor drove me around in his pickup truck so I could see what happened on the ground. Mayors are on the front lines when these disasters strike,” he insisted.
With this in mind, Mr. Sajjan wishes to offer more training and training to municipal service managers in order to optimize the effectiveness of interventions during the first hours. This could also be an opportunity to focus on prevention.
“Last year we lost four firefighters during the wildfires. We were lucky not to have to deplore any deaths among the civilian population when we see all the devastation,” he noted.
Be ready
In an emergency situation, everything must be planned for: the evacuation of residents, the supply of water and food, temporary accommodation, the protection of essential infrastructure such as electricity and drinking water.
As a former Vancouver police officer and former member of the Canadian Armed Forces, Harjit Sajjan is well aware of the importance of being prepared for all scenarios.
“We have to be ready now, but also for the extreme events that are coming. And we must be ready in all provinces and learn from each other according to the emergencies that arise,” he noted.
On this subject, Mr. Sajjan confirmed that he is working to establish a national emergency response agency. Various models are being studied. He examined those that exist in the United States, Germany and Australia, among others.
We can no longer constantly call on the Canadian Armed Forces to act as a sort of federal deployment force. Some say that we should create a sort of FEMA like in the United States. But we must rely more on local resources
Harjit Sajjan, Minister of Emergency Preparedness of Canada
In the United States, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is the American federal agency responsible for ensuring the arrival of help during an emergency situation.
For now, Mr. Sajjan favors a system that builds on existing resources at the local level to eventually include a series of local reserve emergency response forces that can be centrally coordinated.
Pilot projects are also planned this year in certain regions to assess whether a federal agency would be able to respond to worst-case scenarios. And that includes the possibility of an earthquake and a hurricane occurring at the same time, in the middle of a severe wildfire season.
In 2023, Canada experienced its worst fire season on record. Nearly 10 times the average land area was burned and almost every region of the country was affected.
In Quebec, the Society for the Protection of Forests Against Fire (SOPFEU) indicated that on average over the 10 years preceding 2023, 15,800 hectares of forest had been damaged by flames, while this year alone, nearly 1.074 million hectares were affected.
With The Canadian Press