Expanded emergency planning eyed by private company as Red Cross agrees to underwrite platform memberships

George Lee,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

A small Alberta logistics company has joined forces with the Canadian Red Cross to leverage the power of community — before, during and after emergencies strike.

Effective immediately, the Red Cross is underwriting several categories of Alberta memberships for one year on a searchable, directory-based platform created by Emergency Management Logistics Canada, the company announced today.

The 24/7 system is designed as a mutual-support network that connects members to up-to-date information on each other’s needs, products, services and other resources. Proponents and users said it improves members’ ability to cooperate and respond quickly in the event of wildfires, floods, train derailments, hazardous spills and other emergencies, sometimes even connecting them to resources in their own backyards they might not otherwise know about.

The Red Cross deal is open to municipalities, First Nations and Métis communities, local businesses, and community-sector groups like not-for-profits, churches and volunteer organizations.

Scott Cameron, an EMLCanada cofounder, said he and his team hope the Red Cross arrangement “is the tipping point we’ve been looking for.”

Cameron told The Macleod Gazette that the arrangement “isn’t just good news for us. It’s a further demonstration of the great work being done by the Red Cross, and it’s an excellent opportunity for Alberta communities to put another preparedness tool in their toolkit.”

Sarah Sargent, vice-president of risk reduction and resilience programs for the Canadian Red Cross, said the two parties to the agreement “are working together to support local communities (to) be better prepared through connection, education and coordination.”

Her emailed response continued: “The Red Cross recognizes that communities that build relationships and share information in advance of a situation are often better connected and more resilient.”

The Canadian Red Cross said it was unable to share financial details of its partnership with EMLCanada. But based on plans published on the EMLCanada site, the support would work out to more than $200,000 worth of memberships if every municipality and First Nation in Alberta took the Red Cross up on its offer.

Three shareholders with EMLCanada and two subcontractors currently run the platform, which was created and launched in 2020. The platform counts on members maintaining their own data. But all content is curated, and the site prompts members for regular updates and picks up on things like bounced emails. Communities and agencies use the site to source local and close-by solutions, and to expand their searches farther afield as necessary.

Cameron classified EMLCanada’s website as a 21st century solution to a problem that’s persisted for as long as governments and agencies have dealt with emergencies.

Municipalities tend to have spreadsheets or even just business-card files with source information to use in an emergency. But their system doesn’t necessarily align with what others have collected and may not even be up to date, said Cameron, who has about three decades of management experience in the municipal, not-for-profit and emergency management sectors.

“There’s a saying in the emergency management world that exchanging business cards at a disaster is too late,” said the Calgary-based consultant. “If you really want to build capacity and advance resilience in your community, you need to establish those relationships in advance.”

Cameron added: “When you’re in a disaster, you need stuff, we used to say, from blankets to helicopters. And you need it right away.”

Municipal staff typically have responsibilities beyond emergency preparedness. “It’s often basically done off the side of the desk. So if you imagine that 10 per cent of your job is emergency management, then identifying your resources and maintaining some sort of current list is probably 10 per cent of that 10 per cent,” Cameron said.

Cofounder Pauline Mousseau said the emergency management sector is “renowned for being siloed.” She and Cameron decided they could change that, starting with a base technological platform they were already using for other projects.

Their system builds upon worlds they both know. Mousseau’s municipal government experience spans about 15 years, and her career overlapped with Cameron’s at the City of Red Deer.

EMLCanada uses the principles of community development to create bridges between companies, agencies, municipalities and emergency management organizations, Mousseau said.

“We are a business with a social purpose, so we’re grounded in wanting to make the lives of those working in emergencies better. And doing so makes the lives of their residents better and also the lives of those who are in their care,” she said. “What can we do to assist in any way possible, to help lighten that impact on them?”

Mousseau continued: “We always want to go local first, because that is what kickstarts recovery and economic resiliency. But this is also about knowing who else and what other services are available.”

She pointed to the “established trust” and best practices members share, as they build a community of communities over time. EMLCanada verifies the legitimacy of its business members, for example, so emergency officials know they aren’t dealing with fly-by-nights set up to capitalize on vulnerability.

And the agreement with the Red Cross adds even more credibility to the mix, she said.

Drayton Bussiere was Lacombe County’s fire chief and director of emergency management when EMLCanada came on the scene. “The biggest attraction we saw really was one-stop-shop-ability,  plus that the onus was on businesses and providers of services to make sure their contact information is accurate,” said Bussiere.

Lacombe County’s emergency management department was “significantly smaller” at the time, Bussiere said. But the county — a major petrochemical, agriculture and transportation hub — still needed a “robust and accurate” resource list.

“It was attractive for the municipality to have a service that did a bunch of that work for you,” said Bussiere, who is now the fire chief for Red Deer County and its deputy director of emergency management.

Lacombe and Red Deer counties are among a core of early adopters onboard before today’s announcement. Also in that core are Ponoka and Kneehill counties, the Village of Delburne, and a regional partnership called SREMA, for Stettler Regional Emergency Management Agency. SREMA comprises Stettler town and county, Big Valley, Donalda, Botha and Gadsby villages, and White Sands and Rochon Sands summer villages.

Dave Brand, Red Deer County’s director of community and protective services, said a “whole-of-society approach” is one of the keys to the platform’s value.

“A good example is that Red Deer and Lacombe counties are simply divided by a river,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t resources available in Lacombe County that wouldn’t be usable here. But we wouldn’t necessarily know about them because we tend to reach inside our own boundaries.”

And the concept works no matter the size of the emergency or the time of day it strikes, Brand said. “Say it’s two o’clock in the morning, and our fire department is responding to a call and needs resources that are outside typical fire department resources,” he said.

“Do you want to have to pull out a Rolodex or a binder full of business cards? Do you want to have to go to the Yellow Pages or do a Google search on your phone?

“Or do you want to be able to go to a system and say, hey, here are the people we know. We’ve been able to vet them through a procurement process, because as a municipality we’re required to do that. We know the services they can provide, and look at that, there’s a 24-hour contact number for them, and we can reach them.”

Brand continued: “That’s something that we just really love.”

Bussiere pointed to the flexibility of the system to build community through regional partnerships, like the one for Red Deer and Lacombe counties.

Smaller municipalities in the region don’t have the resources to do a lot of upfront work. “But their regional partnership does,” Bussiere said.

“So for me, that’s one of the best examples of building community — the platform’s ability to work in a regional way and not just an individualized way with each municipality forced to repeat everything. Instead, they can just leverage off their partners and work together that way.”

Supporting EMLCanada rather than building its own similar system supports the Red Cross’s philosophy, Sargent said in the emailed comments. “Efforts to address risks and build resilience need to recognize the contributions of all actors and the roles we each play,” she said.

“Through a whole-of-community approach, we are better able to complement and strengthen trusted community partners and structures. We are stronger when we work together, and by supporting organizations such as EML, we are contributing to sustainability.”

Deputy Premier Mike Ellis said he’s interested in seeing how the Red Cross deal plays out. “We’re supportive of any effort that’s going to ensure that communities have the tools and resources that they need in an emergency,” said Ellis, the minister of public safety and emergency services.

He noted that Alberta Emergency Management Agency, which falls under his ministry, acts on a larger scale, dealing directly with the federal government, for example, and offering education and training to municipalities. “We’re kind of the middle person,” he said.

Arrangements the municipality makes involving the Red Cross or other groups are bound to help, he said. “So I guess we’ll wait and see what the feedback is going to be.”

For more information, visit the EMLCanada site at https://emlcanada.ca.

George Lee,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Macleod Gazette