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(PART 4 OF 4)
Following is part of the transcripts from the first COS Roundtable on Emergency Preparedness, held on August 12 at the Centre for Health and Safety Innovation in Mississauga, Ont. COS editor Mari-Len De Guzman moderated the discussion.

Panelists:
John Hollands, corporate account manager, Ontario Service Safety Alliance
John Parish, chief, provincial fire sector, Municipal Health and Safety Association
Andrew Harkness, senior strategy advisor, healthy workplaces, IAPA
Ralph Dunham, board member, Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness
Doug Morton, director, life sciences and business management, CSA Standards
Jason Lakhan, Gowlings
John Saunders, provincial director, disaster management and international response, Canadian Red Cross – Ontario

Moderator: If an emergency or disaster strikes today, what scenario are we looking at in terms of our preparedness?

Parish: If it’s an immediate disaster - and I’m looking at emergency service responders and things like that, which I normally look at - if it’s a tornado or something like that that happens suddenly, we’re probably fairly well-equipped to deal with that, or chemical spills and things like that.

A long-term situation such as a pandemic, I think there’ll be a fairly good response, but then the response people and so on is going to start to fizzle off. And so I don’t think even in Ontario in the emergency service side that we’re fully equipped to handle something such as a pandemic where everybody is sick. If a building falls down on somebody, we have a ... team that responds with millions of dollars worth of equipment and are well-trained. The training is something that we have been talking about, it's still probably weak, I would say.

Dunham: It’s an interesting question, because from my perspective, are we talking about the citizens, or are we talking about industry or are we talking about our governments?

If it’s a sudden disaster, for the most part I think as citizens, I’m fairly comfortable with the ability to support our citizens across the country. I also believe that governments will have a capability to continue to operate.

I am not so confident that businesses are even factored into a lot of these plans. And their assumptions about the support they’re going to be receiving and the actuality of the support that they are going to be receiving from government is misleading. And that they will have a lot of difficulty and I suspect a lot of them are either looking at being self-sufficient or not counting on it or don’t appreciate or understand.

So it’s this dichotomy of the citizens and the government supporting the citizens is one thing. The business community seems to be not as integrated into that, and planning it. That’s what I would like to see.

Morton: I think the key issue for me, especially given this conversation as well this morning, whether we talk about municipalities that aren’t necessarily prepared for everything they’re gonna need to deal with, whether we talk about communication plans and how well we are communicating with our employees and with the communities at large if a disaster were to strike, and the overall issue of communication between the governments, the federal government, provincial governments, municipalities. The biggest concern I have about our preparedness – and John mentioned that some of the large organizations are doing a pretty good job in being ready and the concern is in small and medium sized businesses – but even within that continuum the biggest issue for me is how effectively will we approach a major issue in an integrated fashion? That’s my biggest concern, and I think the biggest area of need at this point in time that will really help us prepare for whatever major disaster is on its way. 

Harkness: I agree. I think when we talk about the community, citizen perspective – government perspective – the weak link in this chain is the business community. How can we encourage organizations to be more preventive. I mean, our world is prevention. If we look at the uptake on products and services from the prevention side of our business, it generally is not as popular or available from the perspective of others that might be more legislatively driven and such. So you have some of that kind of concern that goes with this.

Naturally organizations, I think they are making assumptions. I come back to John’s point that even the organization that is stockpiling and building its own resources and believes that it’s self-sufficient is not prepared to have that material equipment confiscated because it’s going to be in the greater good of the community that it’s going to be driven from.

So you have some of those aspects of saying we truly haven’t created an integrated approach to look at how does the business community and my organization, how does it fit in to what the overall plans would be. That’s the kind of thing I think we would be trying to encourage further dialogue in, is to look at those kinds of viewpoints.

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