Auditor General warns Canada could be susceptible to disasters

Chapter seven in the November report released from Canada’s auditor general is entitled ‘Emergency Management – Public Safety Canada’ and hints at the possibility of the government being unprepared to handle a number of disasters.

According to the document, the federal government is not prepared to engage is any sort of coordinated emergency response effort relating to natural disasters, pandemics and terrorist attacks. The report goes on to state that Canada “has yet to develop the policies and programs that would help clarify its leadership and coordination role for an 'all-hazards' approach to the emergency management activities of departments.” The recently released report comes from the office of Sheila Fraser who is Canada’s Auditor General. She also has about 650 employees that work with her to develop these reports. According to their website, the group “provides Parliament with independent information, advice, and assurance regarding the federal government’s stewardship of public funds.” While Fraser’s report did state that provincial and municipal branches could handle some of these disasters, the federal support needed to carry on a larger scale operation has not yet been developed. The reason for this, according to the report, is because Public Safety Canada's federal emergency response plan has yet to be adopted and accepted by the government and federal departments. At a news conference, the CBC reports Fraser said she “has no idea why” something like this has not yet been approved after being in the works since 2003. CBC News also found that the report mentioned “the emergency management branch of the department has left a third of its budget unspent in the past two years.” The budget allotted to the branch was $58.5 million in 2008-09. Fraser mentioned that “lessons learned have not been used to improve emergency response,” and she hopes with the release of the report, things will change. According to the report, the government needs to create “critical national infrastructure, such as food, water, and energy supplies; health and financial services…” It goes on to say “communication networks, need to be protected during such events,” which is in response to the lack of compatible radios emergency response teams have. The report concludes “while it has a challenging role, Public Safety Canada still needs to develop the policies and programs that would help clarify its leadership and coordination role for the emergency management activities of operational departments.” While there was a lot of focus put on natural disasters, the report also focused on cyber attacks. The report states that the government has “been slow to develop" a strategy when dealing with a cyber attack that would affect Canada's computer systems and electrical grids. These concerns are mentioned as the report states "such threats are growing.” The latest report that also touches upon the income tax legislation, acquiring more military vehicles and electronic health records and can be viewed in its entirety by clicking here.