Instead of sending in the troops to deal with what promises to be another dangerous wildfire season, Public Safety Canada is testing the capabilities of civilian-led first responders and relief providers.
Emergency Preparedness Minister Harjit Sajjan said the new program will be deployed during this wildfire season in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.
Sajjan, a former defence minister, added that the Canadian Armed Forces is “not the best resource to deal with a lot of emergencies,” including wildfires.
The federal government is expanding its existing Humanitarian Workforce Program — which supports non-governmental organizations responding to natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies — to support its 2024 wildfire response and other emergency services through pilot programs in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.
Just to be clear, a majority of wildfire response efforts are provincial and CAF basically gets called in when resources are tapped out across the country. And Quebec actually did privatize their wildfire emergency response a while back, although I don’t know the details on how that compares against their public agency. And lots of bits and pieces of response are either privatized or partially privatized in many provinces, such as aircraft and helicopter resourcing.
All that said: yeah, CAF just needs to be trained better for emergency response functions. It’s most of what we use our armed forces for anyways. I’ve heard plenty of stories of CAF being deployed and then sitting around for a week because their radios aren’t compatible and they don’t know how to integrate into a unified command structure. These are the things that need to be sorted out, not throwing more money at more entities who can complicate things.