VEZINA: We need to fix how we handle national emergencies

Regardless of where the fault lies, it is clear there are serious flaws in how Canada handles national emergencies.

Here are some issues that contribute to the problem, which can be addressed.

The best people to determine when an emergency should be declared are emergency management professionals.

Not spies, or doctors, or police, or government bureaucrats.

Emergency management professionals are trained for and specialize in knowing when something is actually an emergency, knowing how to document the reasons for declaring an emergency and knowing how to act during the declaration of the emergency, using as a baseline that everything we do will be made public eventually.

When politicians are put in a position where they are making rapid ‘“what if” decisions and justifying the results after the fact, no matter how flawed, with, “well, it all worked out in the end”, then the emergency managers advising them are either:

1. Not in the room.

2. In the room, but incompetent.

3. In the room, but not being listened to.

Canada has a ministry of emergency preparedness and an emergency preparedness minister.

The Emergencies Act is the working document for emergency management operations in Canada.

This is one of the first things emergency management students are taught in universities.

Insuring the Emergencies Act applies realistically to modern-day Canada should be the number one priority of the emergency preparedness ministry and its minister.

The fact that in the 34 years since it was passed in 1988, the Emergencies Act has not been updated to envision events such as the Freedom Convoy protests is absolutely baffling.

In Canada, most city emergency management departments are housed within the fire department.

In Ontario, emergency management has been moved around over the years and is often presided over by the fire marshal.

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Federal emergency management is so limited with regard to powers that in effect it doesn’t exist.

A significant part of modern emergency management and preparedness is “all-hazards planning”.

The problem is that if emergency managers work for a fire department, then their priorities will inevitably be focused on the fire department’s priorities.

They cannot, and do not, report directly to the political leadership and they almost always report through someone else with a hazard-specific agenda.

Recall how throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, medical professionals were only focused on pandemic-related health risks and political leaders said they were only listening to doctors.

The problem was a lack of expertise in broader emergency management in order to weigh all the problems caused by the pandemic, not just the COVID-19 specific medical ones.

In the case of the federal Emergencies Act, political leaders were clearly baffled that every police force they consulted ended up advising them that the political protests spawned by the Freedom Convoy were not a national security threat.

Trained emergency managers would have known that police forces, which were focused solely on dealing with the protesters, were not the correct agencies to consult with in assessing the economic risks posed by the border blockades.

They would have immediately put together a crisis working group that would have, for example, included the federal finance department.

When the finance minister appears before a public inquiry and has to fumble around without providing an evidence-based justification for declaring a national economic emergency, it means either emergency managers were not involved in the decision making or if they were involved they were incompetent.

Putting the political leadership in that position is unacceptable to professional emergency managers.

Emergency management is what allows a peace-time political leader to make better wartime decisions, whether the war is a traditional conflict, or one against a virus or one that poses an economic threat.

If we want people who can help with every aspect of an emergency, they need to have direct access to the political leaders who have to deal with every aspect of an emergency.

— Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and teaches Disaster and Emergency Management at York University. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.