# "Public Safety Canada’s Emergency Management May Suck"



## MarkOttawa (16 Dec 2016)

Only to be expected when Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness (OCIPEP, previously Emergency Preparedness Canada) lost its autonomy and got folded into the ordinary departmental bureaucracy at Public Safety Canada; emergency preparedness/management is very rarely a priority, indeed even taken seriously (Y2K an exception), in the public service, nor by politicians, except briefly when something goes wrong:
https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/mark-collins-public-safety-canadas-emergency-management-may-suck/

Mark
Ottawa


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## OldTanker (16 Dec 2016)

This will come as no surprise to anyone involved with emergency management in Canada. Anybody who is expecting a FEMA-like response from the Canadian government (and not to say FEMA doesn't have their challenges) is in for a rude shock.


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## Old Sweat (16 Dec 2016)

Then little has changed in the twenty-plus years since I used to deal with EPC, whose major self-identified function was to have meetings, in other words to generate issues to discuss endlessly at meetings.What follows is based on a few years of dealing with their headquarters and their outlying agencies may have been a different matter. Their major bureaucratic objective was to become a wing of the PCO so they could issue orders to departments. 

Fortunately this did not happen. In the days before the 1996 Manitoba flood and the 1998 ice storm, they were convinced the people of Canada would not accept seeing troops providing assistance in response to disasters, so their concept of operations was that the CAF would provide a manpower pool dressed in civilian clothes to operate under the direction of EPC officials. They also considered the part of the NDA that directed that orders for the forces would only be passed to the CDS by the MND as a minor hinderance not worthy of their consideration.

They were equally officious with other departments, making few friends in the process. Their only saving grace was that they were so incompetent, they were almost completely ineffective. I am not making any of this up, and few tears were shed across the government when they were put under the control of DND.


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## mariomike (16 Dec 2016)

OldTanker said:
			
		

> Anybody who is expecting a FEMA-like response from the Canadian government (and not to say FEMA doesn't have their challenges) is in for a rude shock.



No idea how they'll handle it out of town, but this is Toronto's Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) plan
http://www1.toronto.ca/City%20Of%20Toronto/Office%20of%20Emergency%20Management/Files/pdf/ESFs/Mass%20Casualty/Mass%20Casualty_Plan_ESF_A_161130.pdf

Will it work? That's a good question. It always has, but on a smaller scale.


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