Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted on Wednesday that his government was toying with the idea of creating a “national disaster response agency”, like “FEMA” in the United States.
And a senior government source confirmed to The Canadian Press that those discussions included analyzing models like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States.
FEMA oversees US government programs to prepare for, prevent, respond to, and recover from natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other major incidents.
In Canada, initial disaster response is currently the responsibility of municipal and provincial governments, which can then request assistance from Ottawa as needed. Most often, this involves the deployment of the Canadian Armed Forces.
When the army intervenes, the operation comes under the “Lentus” emergency plan. Army documents show that Lentus operations were launched 21 times between 2018 and 2022, not including 118 requests for military assistance in 2020 to respond to COVID-19.
Chief of the Defense Staff, General Wayne Eyre, however, warned that the high demand for disaster relief was straining the overall capacity of the Armed Forces.
More than 500 soldiers and military specialists are currently deployed in Alberta, Quebec and Nova Scotia to fight the fires and ensure the safety of the population.
“We must continue to ensure that we are doing everything we can to keep Canadians safe when these extreme weather events occur,” Prime Minister Trudeau said Wednesday during a press briefing in Ottawa. But we also need to make sure we are doing all we can to plan, protect and act before more of these events happen. So we continue to discuss and look at new mechanisms and new ways to do this,” he added.
“We are going to face more and more extreme weather events, which will be more and more expensive in terms of costs for families, for communities and also for our country,” said the Prime Minister. How are we going to acquire the capacity to respond to these emergencies, but also, at the same time, how are we going to ensure that the impact of these events for decades to come is minimized? That is by continuing our fight against climate changes. »
A yellowish sky
Hazy skies tinged with an eerie yellow glow once again greeted millions of Canadians in Quebec and Ontario waking up Wednesday morning as smoke from hundreds of wildfires continued to raise warnings about the quality of the air in Canada’s most populated corridor.
In the morning, Environment Canada’s “Air Quality Health Index” ranked Ottawa and Gatineau as the worst cities in Canada, followed closely by cities in eastern Ontario — Kingston, Cornwall and Belleville. Residents of these cities were encouraged to limit their outdoor activities and those most vulnerable to smoke were told to avoid them altogether.
The smoke was so thick in downtown Ottawa that the Gatineau office towers were barely visible a few hundred meters across the Ottawa River.
Ironically, Wednesday was National Clean Air Day in Canada, when air quality was among the worst the country has ever seen.
Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said more than 400 fires were burning across the country on Wednesday, and more than half of them remained uncontrolled. The area of land burned has surpassed the 40,000 square kilometer mark, making 2023 the fourth worst fire season in Canada on record before the official start of summer. At the current rate of burning, the all-time record will be broken next week.
Although the majority of the fires are burning in northern and western Quebec, the smoke is affecting much of the Montreal-Windsor corridor and is causing air quality warnings as far south as New York and even Washington.
In Ottawa and York Region north of Toronto, school boards have canceled outdoor recess and sports leagues have canceled games and practices. The Toronto District School Board said all “strenuous” outdoor activities would be postponed or moved indoors when possible.