US embassy cable - 05OTTAWA3069

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 OTTAWA 003069 
 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR WHA/EX, WHA/CAN 
 
WHITE HOUSE FOR HOMELAND SECURITY COUNCIL (Townsend) 
 
DHS OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS (Marmaud) 
 
FEMA (Office of the Director) 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PBTS, PGOV, PREL, PINS, CA 
SUBJECT:  Hurricane Katrina and Canadian Response; Lessons 
Learned 
 
 
1. Summary: Operational linkages between DHS and Canada's 
Public Safety Ministry (PSEPC) worked reasonably well as 
Canada responded to provide relief in the wake of Hurricane 
Katrina.  But, to make those connections even more 
effective, Canada would like to have a DHS Liaison Officer 
stationed at the Canadian operations center in Ottawa, and 
would like the PSEPC Liaison Officer now assigned to DHS HQ 
to be inside the DHS Operations Center.  PSEPC feels also 
that other linkages need to be strengthened (such as in 
emergency response policy and planning) with DHS.  To ensure 
that Canada-U.S. disaster management and response is as 
robust as possible, Embassy and GoC officials agreed it is 
time to reinvigorate the "Consultative Group on 
Comprehensive Civil Emergency Planning and Management" as 
mandated by the 1986 Canada-U.S. Agreement on Cooperation in 
Comprehensive Civil Emergency Planning and Management. 
Embassy plans on following up by hosting a bilateral meeting 
in Ottawa before the end of the year with DHS, 
Northcom, State, their Canadian counterparts, and other 
interested agencies, to advance this agenda.  End summary. 
 
2. James Young, Canada's Special Advisor to the Deputy 
Minister at Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada 
(PSEPC) and Ross Hynes, the Director of the Secretariat for 
the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force at Foreign 
Affairs Canada (FAC) joined the DCM for lunch on Friday, 
October 6, along with several other Embassy, PSEPC and FAC 
staff members for a discussion of Canada's assistance to the 
United States in response to Hurricane Katrina (see para 16 
for participant list).  All present agreed that the Canadian 
response was timely and generous, and that the deep links 
between the two countries allowed for multiple channels of 
communication and action.  Bob Lesser, the Director General 
of Operations for PSEPC and Craig Oldham, the Director of 
PSEPC's Government Operations Center noted that the PSEPC 
operational link with the DHS Homeland Security Center 
worked well; especially so because PSEPC has recently posted 
an employee to DHS HQ. 
 
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PSEPC and DHS Liaison 
--------------------- 
 
3. Young and Lesser mentioned that PSEPC sees great value in 
having its liaison officer at DHS HQ placed within the DHS 
Homeland Security Operations Center in order to gain greater 
situational awareness. This would create an even more 
effective link between PSEPC and DHS during emergencies and 
disasters. Currently the Liaison Officer has an office 
separate from the Ops Center.  Lesser and Oldham noted that 
the issue of security clearances is a barrier to their 
Liaison Officer gaining full access to the DHS Center; but 
that models exist (for example at NORAD and NATO) to 
overcome this barrier. (Comment - This came up during 
several visits last year by senior DHS officials, such as 
Admiral Loy who indicated he would try to work through the 
clearance issues.  With so much information and intelligence 
already available to GOC through other channels it strikes 
us as odd that we continue to have this restriction as we 
work to improve seamless coordination on border security and 
emergency response.) Lesser also mentioned that PSEPC is 
keenly interested in having DHS station a DHS Liaison 
Officer within the PSEPC Government Operations Center in 
Ottawa. 
 
4. Oldham described the role of Canada's Government 
Operations Center as providing a strategic coordination 
function for the national response.  That is, it provides a 
central node to identify, track, and - ideally - to 
coordinate federal, provincial and local response.  Another 
department such as National Defence or Transport Canada, 
depending upon that organization's technical expertise and 
equipment, may lead the actual operational response.  Oldham 
added, however, that because Provinces have broad 
jurisdiction in emergency response, command and control of 
disaster management is not as clear as it would be in a 
unitary state such as the UK or France. 
 
5. Although operational coordination between DHS and PSEPC 
was smooth, largely because of the PSEPC Liaison Officer's 
presence at DHS HQ,  Lesser, Oldham and Young noted that at 
the policy coordination level for emergency management there 
remains some confusion about where and how the two 
organizations should connect.  For example PSEPC's emergency 
planning predecessor, the Office of Critical Infrastructure 
Protection and Emergency Preparedness (OCIPEP) had a strong 
connection with FEMA.  The shifting status of FEMA within 
DHS and the absorption of OCIPEP into PSEPC has attenuated 
somewhat those pre-existing linkages.  PSEPC believes that 
it is critical to invigorate linkages between the emergency 
planning and response policy communities in these two new 
departments. 
 
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Coordination with Provinces; Provincial and Private Aid 
Contributions 
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6. With respect to the differing jurisdictions that have a 
role to play, PSEPC's James Young offered his view that 
Katrina and other recent emergencies underscore that the 
role of governments is changing. Issues don't cascade 
smoothly from the municipal to provincial (or state) to 
federal level as they once did.  He emphasized that it is 
important now to get all levels of government involved at an 
earlier stage.  Young, who has a background in medicine, 
illustrated his point by noting that in the case of an 
influenza pandemic, even though the primary response will be 
provincial, there will need to be a consistent response 
nationwide which will require very early and close 
coordination between the federal, provincial, and local 
governments. 
 
7. The unparalleled relationship between Canada and the 
U.S., with its hundreds of millions of border crossings each 
year, coupled with a completely integrated energy 
infrastructure (a prime CIP asset) and the proximity of 
major Canadian cities to the U.S. border (approximately 80 
percent of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of 
the United States border), suggest that to be as robust as 
possible emergency preparedness planning must fully include 
the Canada-U.S. dimension.   For example one avenue of aid 
contribution could be the ability of provinces to provide 
resources (perhaps first responder units) to "backfill" for 
northern states that send their own resources to help other 
states in need.  That is, Canadian resources could be seen 
as a force multiplier that allows rapid response from U.S. 
states to afflicted regions, and vice versa. 
 
8. On a related note, Craig Oldham cautioned, that there 
needs to be consideration of resources and redundancy by the 
provincial and federal governments.  For example when 
Vancouver's Heavy Urban Search and Rescue (HUSAR) Team went 
to Louisiana, as they did for Katrina, it was necessary to 
identify who could respond to an emergency in Vancouver 
while the HUSAR team was absent. 
 
9. Emboffs described also the phenomenon of private sector 
offers of aid and asked how those were tracked by PSEPC. 
Lesser and Oldham noted that they had a long list of private 
offers which they had forwarded to DHS, but that they were 
not always certain which offers had been acted upon.  All 
agreed that there were many cases of private aid efforts 
that were not communicated or coordinated through the 
federal government.  In one instance, for example, the 
Embassy was aware of chartered aircraft carrying Canadian 
volunteer Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) to the 
affected Gulf States.  The effort was arranged and managed 
solely via informal routes within the Canadian and American 
EMT community.  There may be a need to more explicitly 
recognize this type of interaction in joint Canada - United 
States emergency planning. 
 
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View from Foreign Affairs 
------------------------- 
 
10. Ross Hynes mentioned that although nominally Foreign 
Affairs had the lead in coordinating the Canadian response 
to Katrina, that the role was shared because of the existing 
PSEPC-DHS links; there were no turf issues at the 
operational level.  Whether communication went through PSEPC- 
DHS or FAC-State channels was immaterial as far as they were 
concerned.  Tobi Nussbaum, Director of the U.S. Relations 
Division at FAC, added that there was another level of 
communication as well, i.e. between Canadian military and 
foreign affairs officers at NORAD/Northcom and Canadian 
authorities at FAC and Department of National Defence (DND). 
 
11. Hynes told us that the GOC will be compiling an internal 
lessons-learned on the Katrina response, and invited U.S. 
participation in that exercise.  They plan to address, inter 
alia, an inventory of challenges such as: consular access; 
channels of aid offers; the FEMA-PSEPC link; and approval 
process for use of DND assets. 
 
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Next steps: Establish U.S.- Canada Group under the 1986 
Agreement 
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12. The DCM summed up by saying it would indeed be useful to 
create an index of issues from the lessons learned and 
subsequently 
have Canadian and American officials work together to 
prepare a full lessons learned report as suggested by Ross 
Hynes. 
 
13. Both the Canadian and American participants at the 
luncheon agreed that the 1986 bilateral agreement on 
"cooperation in comprehensive civil emergency planning and 
management" allows for a broad array of actions and should 
still be an effective strategic blueprint and broad-brush 
guide for Canada and the United States to provide assistance 
in case of disasters. 
14. But to address specific planning, and to address some of 
the gaps identified in the Katrina response, it may be time 
to reinvigorate the Consultative Group on Comprehensive 
Civil Emergency Planning and Management as mandated in 
Article I of the Agreement.  The Consultative Group, which 
is described (in Annex I of the Agreement) as being 
responsible for supervising Canada-United States 
comprehensive civil emergency planning and management, for 
both peacetime and times of hostilities, is tasked with, 
inter alia: recommending to the two governments actions to 
be taken regarding studies, the exchange of information, and 
the development and coordination of plans and 
recommendations; encouraging and facilitating planning and 
development of mutual cooperation for comprehensive civil 
emergency management by provinces, states and 
municipalities; and the group may invite other federal, 
regional, provincial, state or local authorities and 
representatives of the private sector to meetings of the 
working groups, as appropriate, with the prior consent of 
both Parties.  Thus it seems the ideal forum and body to 
address the bilateral assistance questions raised during the 
Katrina response. 
 
15. To precipitate an invigorated Consultative Group on 
Comprehensive Civil Emergency Planning and Management the 
Embassy plans on hosting a bilateral meeting in Ottawa 
before the end of the year with participation from DHS, from 
Department of Defense (in particular from Northern Command) 
from State, along with their Canadian counterparts, and 
other interested agencies.  Embassy will be in contact with 
Washington agencies in the next few weeks to identify 
appropriate participants. 
 
 
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Participants 
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16.  US Embassy: DCM John Dickson, Political Minister- 
Counselor Brian Flora, DHS Attach John Considine, Economic 
Officer Lucy Abbott, Economic Specialist Bud Locklear.  GoC: 
James Young, Special Advisor to the Deputy Minister PSEPC; 
Bob Lesser, DG Operations, PSEPC; Craig Oldham, Director 
Operations Center, PSEPC; Ross Hynes, Director, Secretariat 
for the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force, FAC; 
Tobias (Toby) Nussbaum, Director, U.S. Relations Division, 
FAC. 
 
Wilkins