Looking for Upside? CDSN's Domestic Ops Rock

Niru, Manu, and some of the other participants.
The post workshop dinner is not way we do this
but it is not not why we do this.

 This has been a crushing few days, and the hits will keep on coming.  But I can take some solace from the work we have been doing over the past few years.  Three years ago, the CDSN received funding from the Department of National Defence's MINDS program to address "Global Emergencies and Canadian Resilience."  That year, the MINDS program wanted research networks that addressed, among many other challenges/priorities, global health, supply chain vulnerability, the new NATO climate security centre of excellence, and domestic emergency operations.  We are coming to the end of this three year grant, and our next MINDS network grant application will focus on other stuff as DND's priorities have shifted.

 

Our CDSN Post-Doc,
Manu Ramkumar gave a
great talk on the
Singapore case

So, this was the last of the three workshops in Toronto run by Nirupama Agrawal, a professor of disaster management at York University, on what we can learn from Canada's domestic emergency operations.  She keeps bringing together military folks who are the key connections in Ontario with Ontario emergency management people, Indigenous folks who are involved in this stuff, academics, and municipal folks who do this stuff.  I finally attended one of her workshops as she kindly did not schedule it this time as the same time as US Thanksgiving.  

I am so grateful to Niru.  She got her students involved, they did a great job of running the day.  It was held in the Royal Canadian Military Institute, where I got to stay overnight.  It is a funky place, with lots of displays, libraries, bars, and history.  See the pics below.  I did guess during my talk that there are no displays of domestic emergency ops, and I was mostly right.  There was some stuff about the Canadian Rangers, who are northerners who play multiple roles as the eyes and ears of the military in the Arctic, but not anything else.

Why does that matter?  Well, I opened my intro talk with a discussion of what the CDSN is and does, and then talked about Canadian civil-military relations.  My usual shtick that the military wants to be autonomous and has more autonomy than most democratic militaries, and that the civilians are not doing much oversight.  When it comes to domestic ops, there is a basic disjuncture--the military doesn't want to do it and it successfully gets it listed at the bottom of the priorities of every defence policy document, and the population values this stuff quite a lot.  The civilians in government do not seem to be interested in getting this preference through to the military.  

After I spoke, we had a number of speakers who have real experience in this stuff, and I learned that there is far better coordination and lessons learned among the various actors.  I still am not sure how much Ontario is really picking up its share of responsibilities on this (there is a basic temptation for the provinces to shirk since they don't have to pay the bills when the CAF does the work even though the CAF could bill them--politically impossible to do so).  The military folks there were super sharp and had good stories to tell about how things play out in such efforts.  There is definitely room for improvement as the CAF is always asked to do more than their assigned tasks when they do engage in a domestic op (hey, can you take my appliances out of my flooded basement?).  

 

 

 

WWI flag with the scars of battle

Once again, the biggest challenges are how to deal with natural disasters that affect the Indigenous communities since the history of settler-ness means these places have poor infrastructure and are vulnerable to disasters.  Yanking them out in an emergency and evacuating them may be preferable to their being killed, but it is a crappy way to live.  So, there was some discussion of some efforts to improve their capacity to protect themselves.

 

 

I am very, very pleased and proud of what Niru and her students have accomplished.  This grant is ending, but we will certainly stay in the Niru business in one way or another, and our civ-mil stuff will ponder the domestic ops of it all.  I am just very grateful for the accidental networking that led to this partnership.

 And now a few random shots from our tour of RCMI:

An original copy of the letter
Ike sent the troops on the eve of D-Day

 

Display of women at war
featuring future CDS
Jennie Carignan

Display of Carignan's A-stan gear

 

 

Nature-Triggered Emergency Operations in Canada

 This week, I went to Winnipeg in the coldest temps of the year thus far to observe one of the new CDSN research efforts: understanding the dynamics of Canadian domestic emergency operations in response to natural events.  Paraphrasing Emdad Haque, one of our co-directors,  nature will create extreme conditions, but whether they are disastrous is up to people and government.  Emdad, Nira Agrawal, and Kawser Ahmed brought together a sharp group of folks, including the army's liaison to Manitoba, the ADM for Emergency Management in Manitoba (a survivor of my big IR class at McG), researches from the universities in the area, and more (see here for details).  

What did I learn?

• Emergencies are rare for any individual but they are increasingly common collectively.  Climate change is already fostering more and more floods, fires, and other extreme events.  So, this is not just a thing that happens from time to time but is an every day thing now.
• The notion of the CAF as a last responder needs to die.  Yes, the military wants to be called on only in the most extreme emergencies when no one else can do what they can do.  But there are plenty of incentives for folks to ask for help and for the CAF to be unable to say no.
• That most of this stuff ends being led by the most local folks--that the feds don't take over but are there to supplement.  Which means the military is following orders, not ordering people around.
• As always, prevention is the least expensive route but often there are not political incentives.  It seems to me that the real opportunity to make changes to manage/mitigate is as the cycle goes from response to the emergency to recovery--that building back better is a thing.  Rebuild out of harm's way, away from the flood plains, for example.
• As always, the Indigenous people are put into awful positions by the past and by the present.  Limited infrastructure means they need assistance, but then they are seen as objects, those to be rescued, rather than agents with their own expertise and preferences.  Evacuations need to be rethought--they are very disruptive physically, economically, culturally, mentally.
• 
  Federalism in Canada continues to suck mightily.  Some provinces understand that they need to build back better, so the Winnipeg floods didn't recur with the same level of damage.  Others understand that they can save money by doing less preparation and then call the feds in when help is needed.
• There is a lot more work, coordination, planning, preparation going on in this area in between emergencies, that many bad storms and other events do get mitigated.  But again, it is going to get much harder as storms and other conditions get more intense.

I was very pleased to see the CDSN idea work out here--that we had engaged people in different parts of government and society, there was a real exchange of information, the students were super engaged, and it is the start of a more comparative analytical conversation.  

I also learned that Winnipeg is cold, full of friendly folks, and one can lose one's mittens in a cab and then get them back when one happens to take the same cab back to the airport.

So glad I could hang with Andrea Charron,
who has done so much for the CDSN