Thank you very much for your presentation.

The couple of questions I have are with respect to our firemen volunteers. Of course, many small communities, like the one I come from, deal with volunteers for the most part.

I liked your comment. You said that preventative measures in planning should take place not during an emergency, but before one happens. You applauded, of course, the minister's announcement regarding a task force to determine how to strengthen emergency response capacity.

It seems to me that when one is dealing with various capabilities, various resources across the country, it becomes important particularly, perhaps, on an issue we have in my city where we have a transload facility. Before one goes into a city you generally want to be sure you have an emergency response plan that is effective for that, yet somehow we find that these do take place while discussions are taking place about response capacity.

I know in the instance I'm looking at there were some issues about the water supply on site, and you mentioned that was a fairly important thing. Whether the couplings in the water containment facility match the fire department's equipment was an important one, and whether the city had a water line coming in or not was an important consideration. They're still talking about that.

Let me ask you this. For the emergency response plan that the task force will be talking about, would there not be some objective standards where you would say that you would have to have (a), (b), (c), and (d) in place before you had a transload facility? What might (a), (b), and (c) be, and is that something that should be incorporated when you're dealing with various kinds of goods?

Would you like to make a comment on that?

Ed Komarnicki

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