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Results: 1651 - 1662 of 1662
View Michael Cooper Profile
CPC (AB)
Great. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Daenzer and Mr. Farrant, I'll direct my questions to you. You gave powerful testimony today. We certainly heard you. All the committee members of the justice committee heard you when you appeared in the last Parliament to tell your story about how jury service had forever changed your lives. It was very impactful. It resulted in I think a very important report, with 11 recommendations and unanimous all-party support around them.
I'm wondering if you could perhaps elaborate on the void that presently exists and how the Canadian Juries Commission would fill that void. When we talk about $20 million over 10 years, we're talking about a pittance. That's really a rounding error. Perhaps you could elaborate on how that funding would result in connecting former jurors with mental health supports.
Finally, I know you've done a lot of great work. Maybe you could also elaborate on all of those who have been involved in developing the commission.
Mark Farrant
View Mark Farrant Profile
Mark Farrant
2020-02-06 13:42
Jury duty is the most important civic duty left in Canadian society, and it is the last mandatory civic duty left in Canadian society. When you receive a summons, you are bound by law to respond to it. We want Canadians to welcome the opportunity to serve their communities in court to deliver justice and not to want to shirk the responsibility or find ways to avoid it.
We believe that a national organization that represents the interests of those on jury duty and that can support jurors and promote jury duty to Canadians is missing from our country as it is now. Police associations and first responders and our veterans associations, which we have connected to through our work to raise the profile of mental health and PTSD, are wonderful organizations that work on behalf of their members to support them and to give them access to evidence-based treatment and the like, which jurors do not have access to.
That's a shame, because jury duty is not a vocation. It's not something for which there is training. It's not something that has personal and professional development or peer support, yet jurors are the most vulnerable to trauma, due to the evidence they see in court and the burden of jury duty and the decisions they are bound to reach as part of a verdict.
We're already working with fantastic organizations like the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Peer Support Canada and the Canadian Mental Health Association, and we met yesterday with the National Judicial Institute and we'll be partnering with them on programs for justices. They're approaching these from the judge and the justice side. We're bringing the voice of the juror to the table to provide those solutions and the like to train judges on their roles and responsibilities in the courtrooms.
Many judges actually have power to execute very cogent security programs for jurors in the courthouse. They just don't do it because they don't realize that it's necessary. When jurors are sitting in a case involving gang-related activity and are being stalked outside of the courtroom, or are going through the security in and out of the courthouse and passing witnesses who follow them to their cars, that isn't fiction. It's actually happening.
View Wayne Easter Profile
Lib. (PE)
Okay. We will have to end it there.
I just want to clarify, following what Mr. Cooper said, that the $20 million is over 10 years.
View Wayne Easter Profile
Lib. (PE)
Okay. I didn't pick that up the first time. Thanks for that clarification. It's $2 million a year.
Next is Mr. Fraser, and then we will go back over to the official opposition.
View Peter Fragiskatos Profile
Lib. (ON)
It's an open forum.
I do note on your briefing paper that a white paper was submitted in 2010 to the Senate, called “Toward a Red Serge Revival”, talking about the human resource crisis that the RCMP faces. This white paper goes back, as I said, to 2010, so you've been asking for this for some time, not just under one government but under different governments.
You alluded to this in your remarks, and this is my last question, because I want to go to Mr. Davis. Tell us about not just the physical challenges your members are facing but the mental health challenges that are at play.
Brian Sauvé
View Brian Sauvé Profile
Brian Sauvé
2020-02-05 16:32
Mental health is a lively topic today in the first responder community: fire, police, paramedics, even the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. It has been for a number of years. Suicide rates are through the roof. The RCMP has addressed this and tried to go down a mental health strategy approach by reducing stigma. Part of that has been resilience training. The road to mental readiness program is a Canadian Mental Health Association course we've implemented and developed for policing, and it's gone down the road. That's fantastic. We can train our members to be resilient for what they see in the field. Where that resilience wanes and where it fades is when you're overworked and you cannot get well rested to be resilient. That's where we're seeing challenges in the field.
Daniel Perron
View Daniel Perron Profile
Daniel Perron
2020-02-04 11:06
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the finance committee.
My name is Daniel Perron. I am a member of the board of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, division fire prevention chief for the regional municipality of Marguerite-D'Youville and retired chief of the Ville de Sainte-Julie in the suburbs of Montreal. I am joined here today by Dr. Tina Saryeddine, the CAFC's executive director.
My colleagues and I appreciate this opportunity.
In our August pre-budget brief, we offered four recommendations. I will touch on each of these, but first let me tell you about the people and organizations that make up the CAFC.
There are about 3,500 fire departments in our country—metro, large, small, medium, urban and rural, career and volunteer—and within them are about 155,000 firefighters. About 85% of both departments and firefighters are volunteer or paid on call.
When we talk about fire departments, flames might come to mind, but fire departments are “all-hazard”. Many have responsibility accorded from their municipality for emergency management, whether it's by formal mandate or informally, because of the expertise held within the fire department.
About 20% to 30% of a typical fire department's caseload is fire suppression, 30% to 50% is emergency medical response and 20% to 30% is all-hazard response. Why is this?
With roots in fire suppression, we've worked as a country to reduce the number of fires through public education and prevention. The skills needed for fire suppression and the culture of training within fire departments are transferable to all hazards, and the numbers and complexity of and demand for all-hazard responses are increasing. Remember, an effective response to fire, flood, dangerous goods or other adverse events mitigates further environmental and economic damages.
I recall my own department's experience during the 1988 Saguenay earthquake, the largest earthquake registered in Canada. It registered 6.0 on the Richter scale, the largest earthquake in Canada in the last 50 years.
Here is where I'd like to illustrate one of our asks. Today, the country's heavy urban search and rescue teams would most likely be called upon to assist in earthquakes. They are a source of national pride, consisting of multiple professions from fire to police, search and rescue, paramedics and medicine, nursing, IT and others, able to operate 10 days autonomously off the grid.
Four of Canada's six HUSAR teams are housed in fire departments. The federal and provincial governments provide significant funding to them. However, unlike in the United States, where all HUSAR teams are coordinated through the federal emergency management administration, FEMA, our coordination nationally still has gaps.
While Canada has agreements and has experts who, as one HUSAR leader said, operate easily on a “call us and we'll come” basis, we have no centralized emergency management agency to coordinate at the interfaces between policy and operations and between different levels of government, the fire departments and the public.
Our model, which consists of various acts, agreements and experts, has many virtues. It ensures that those closest to the emergency are responding unencumbered. However, consider FEMA's stated mission of helping people before, during and after disasters, making the linkage between mitigation, response and future planning.
The U.S. Fire Administration, under FEMA, also performs five functions: public safety information, including official messaging to the media; data; operations support; research; and, grant administration. These are intimately coordinated with the fire departments.
We need all of these in Canada. Through various initiatives at all levels of government, we have them. However, we don't yet have a whole-of-government approach. It could begin with a small investment. Consider that more than 14 federal departments have policy functions relevant to fire departments and are doing commendable work.
A national fire adviser secretariat linking all fire departments, the municipalities, and different levels and parts of government would further improve mitigation, response and resilience.
CAFC members can assist in scoping this out with a large cross-section of the country's fire chiefs and all of the provincial, territorial and national affiliate fire organizations at its national advisory council. Aside from this, we are also asking the federal government to consider a modified and improved form of the joint emergency preparedness program that was intended to provide aid to emergency response capacity in small and rural departments. The program had difficulties because of its execution, which can be improved. Remember, micro investments matter.
In addition, as a nation interested in innovation, we need to ensure capacity for emergency response involving innovations. Examples are electric cars and tall wood buildings. This is why we ask for a fire-driven research and innovation fund. It would allow us to match innovations with training on the emergency response side. It would also allow us to call the research priorities that will bring the evidence to bear on our experiential knowledge. Remember, federally funded research is driven mainly by researchers. Finally, we commend you and ask you to continue your regular efforts on mental health for first responders.
Thank you for hearing us today, and we look forward to your questions.
View Michael McLeod Profile
Lib. (NT)
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will be splitting my time with my colleague Annie Koutrakis.
I have a couple of quick observations that I want to flag. Then I have a question for the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.
First of all, I want to commend you for the work your organization is doing on the indigenous fire marshals. I think it's a good move. I think it's something that's much needed. In your document you state that you need support. Maybe you could provide to the committee what form that would take.
The second thing is that as fire chiefs, fire marshals are responsible for all hazards by default. This is an observation from the Northwest Territories, and I think it will happen with these fire marshals on the reserves. We don't have building inspectors. By default, the fire marshal's office is usually asked to take on that responsibility. It's a serious concern. I think that may be an area that you could look into a lot more.
The question I want to ask is regarding mental health. I think this is a real serious concern. It's something that we deal with with social workers in the north. We've already invested $30 million in a commitment over five years. Is that meeting the mark? Is that meeting what it's intended to meet?
If you could respond to that, then I'll turn it over to Annie.
Daniel Perron
View Daniel Perron Profile
Daniel Perron
2020-02-04 11:46
Indeed, mental health is a serious problem not only for firefighters but also for all the first responders of this country, and it's even larger than that. We have had the chance to make some forward movement with the latest investment the government has made in the last couple of years. The problem with the situation right now is that most of that money has gone to research. Even though we acknowledge and we know that research is important and that it will be extremely useful in the years to come, on the ground and in the field we see what the problem is and we know that there are already a couple of solutions that could be applied, programs that do exist right now that are doing the work they're supposed to do.
We are firefighters. There's no time if one's in front of a house on fire to write a white paper. We're having problems with things that take a lot of time to come out and to translate into actions in the field.
Do you want to add something, Tina?
Tina Saryeddine
View Tina Saryeddine Profile
Tina Saryeddine
2020-02-04 11:48
Thank you, Chief Perron.
Thank you for the question, Mr. McLeod. This is an ongoing case we've had with those you funded from the $30 million that came out from budget 2018. Something that I think all fields struggle with is the speed of translation when you try to get an evidence-informed process, as Chief Perron said, to the front line. That's why our brief is called “Between 7 minutes”—which is the fire response time—“and 17 years” which is the time the evidence tells us it takes for health research to reach the front line. You're doing a great job, because supplementing your long-term thinking are the short-term boots-on-the-ground types of responses. That's why Chief Perron said in his remarks “micro investments matter”.
Let me give you a great example, not because it's all we need to do—we have a long way to go—but to encourage the types of initiatives that you're taking. Recently Public Safety Canada shared with us that through the University of Regina, they would provide an additional $400,000 of funding to help spread the Road to Mental Readiness program. This type of programming is something that you use with DND and that we are taking to the Northwest Territories this year through a grant from the Motorola Solutions Foundation.
I don't want to take too much time answering the question, but to Chief Perron's point, we do have the struggle of finding evidence-based practices that can get implemented quickly. It takes creativity. The best thing the finance committee can do is to hold to account those who are leading the charge in terms of the research and ask what innovative methods they are using to take those research dollars to the front line and how they are engaging the front line. One of Chief Perron's colleagues has the opportunity to co-chair the public safety steering committee, which is working with the University of Regina. Another big area is suicide prevention.
We still have quite a bit of time, so thank you on that.
Ed Holder
View Ed Holder Profile
Hon. Ed Holder
2020-02-03 17:40
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, it feels a little different, I must admit, to be on this side of the table. It's the first time, and hopefully not the last. I'd like to thank you and members of the Standing Committee on Finance for the opportunity to appear before you today. As you've indicated, I'm joined by Adam Thompson, manager of government and external relations with the City of London.
As the largest urban centre in southwestern Ontario, London provides economic and social opportunities for all 2.5 million residents of our region. We embrace our role by providing the infrastructure, jobs and amenities that people rely on each day. We recognize that we rely on our region's success, much as our region relies on our success.
In advance of the development of budget 2020, I'd like to focus today on the theme of connection. As a mid-sized city, London connects services to people, people to their community, and the community to the world. I'd like to touch on each connection point individually as all parties weigh in on priorities for the year ahead.
First, on connecting services to people, London continues to grapple with a people crisis. Providing safe, affordable housing for our residents remains a systemic challenge. With average rental market vacancy rates in London at 2.1%, and below-market rental units closer to 0%, we continue to struggle to meet the needs of not just Londoners but residents across the region.
At the same time, growing challenges persist in the area of mental health and addictions. In response, the City of London has moved forward with our core area action plan, which outlines nearly 50 initiatives to respond directly to homelessness, health issues, safety and security in our downtown and create a positive environment through attracting people to the core.
Connection forms the heart of our plan. The plan includes the development of 40 resting spaces where individuals can come off the street, shower and have a warm meal; 20 stabilization spaces where individuals can find medical attention and support while in crisis; and 10 supportive housing spaces. We are actively working with the Province of Ontario to secure the necessary investments into medical personnel to provide primary staffing for these spaces.
In addition to providing the direct supports people need, this program will free up essential capacity in our hospitals, providing an estimated $7.5 million per year in emergency room occupancy savings.
We've all seen the long lineups of ambulances and emergency vehicles at our hospitals, which are required to wait with people experiencing crises until a hand-off to medical staff can occur. By providing an alternative, we aim to free up approximately 5,700 hours of police time and 9,200 hours of EMS time per year, time that could be reinvested into serving our community.
The Government of Canada can help the City of London advance this work immediately. With nearly 30% of our homeless population self-identifying as indigenous, we know there is a desperate need for community-based, culturally appropriate resources. Under the reaching home strategy, targeted funding under the indigenous stream is available to support municipalities and local indigenous service providers. While we do not receive funding out of this sub-stream today, future access would support immediate initiatives to open resting spaces, stabilization spaces and supportive housing spaces in a matter of mere months. We have a plan for a pilot program before the Government of Canada, and I'm hopeful that we can move ahead with this immediately.
As London continues to focus efforts on connecting critical services to people, we are also undertaking bold action to connect people to their community. At my recent state of the city speech, I spoke about our vision of becoming the first major city in Canada to have a zero-emission public transit fleet of buses. We will do this by moving away from diesel to a fully electrified fleet.
In April 2019, London City Council declared a climate emergency. We are taking that pledge seriously, not only by our words but by our deeds. Public transit emissions represent as much as 40% of total emissions where London has direct or indirect influence. Even after electricity costs are factored in, our estimates show that a move towards electrification would represent substantial operational savings each year. These savings will only increase as the cost of fuel rises.
Transforming our public transit system would generate significant savings and provide millions of additional dollars each year, money that could be used to invest further in programs to tackle the needs of our most vulnerable residents. The London Transit Commission will be moving forward with a significant study to explore net-zero public transit options over the coming months.
While this work progresses, we are looking for additional details from the Government of Canada as to how the federal government plans to partner with cities and communities. Budget 2020 provides an excellent opportunity.
Finally, we are focusing on a greater connection of London to domestic and international markets. Within the strategic plan, our vision as a council emphasizes London as a leader in commerce, culture and innovation, our region’s connection to the world. I recently met with the leadership of Via Rail, alongside the new president of Western University, Alan Shepard, to explore expanding rail connections across the province and, ultimately, the country.
London operates the fourth-busiest Via Rail station in Canada. Our station operates within Canada’s busiest economic corridor, with nearly $23 billion moving between southwest Ontario and the greater Toronto area each year.
Our residents and businesses, and the economic potential they represent, continue to be held back by a lack of options to move between London and Toronto, as well as London and Windsor/Detroit. Private vehicle and freight traffic on Highway 401 is expected to double over the next decade, heightening safety concerns along this high-frequency corridor. Additionally, increased congestion will continue to cost our economy and impede economic growth if we do not urgently invest in alternative means to move around the entire rail corridor from Windsor to Quebec City.
Our conversation with Via Rail will remain a priority in the coming year. Connecting mid-size communities like London will require federal investments into Via Rail to expand the fleet and the service offerings for our people and our businesses. I look forward to a meaningful discussion with the Government of Canada in the coming months.
I would like to thank you for the invitation to present today. I would like to acknowledge that we have two of the four great members of Parliament from London at the table today. I must say, London has fully embraced our place as a regional hub for southwest Ontario. I look forward to further exploring our focus on connection and providing answers to questions from members of the committee.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
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