DEMCON 2024 highlights importance of disaster and emergency management

Oct. 25. 2024, Toronto — This week the annual Disaster and Emergency Management Conference was hosted at the International Centre in Mississauga, simultaneous to the Continuity and Resilience Today event.

There were about 250 emergency managers and 100 business continuity professionals in attendance, totalling around 350 delegates participating in sessions and visiting 25 exhibits.

Fire Fighting in Canada was present for day two on October 23, which opened with a surprise visit from Trevor Jones, the member of provincial parliament from Chatham-Kent – Leamington and the Associate Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response.

His opening remarks captured the policies and programs the government of Ontario has implemented to support emergency management, which were echoed by the first keynote speaker of the day Eric Everett, the Assistant Deputy Minister for Emergency Management Strategy, Monitoring and Intelligence.

Some of these programs and policies include the release of the Provincial Emergency Management Strategy and Action Plan, which Everett described as a first-of-its-kind living document in Canada that will modernize as threats evolve, as well as the introduction of the Community Emergency Preparedness Grant, which this year provided 113 successful recipients with funding.

Applications for the 2024 grant are still being accepted, with the window staying open until the end of October.

In a concurrent session, Brady Podloski, an instructor of disaster and emergency management at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, gave a presentation examining potential non-disasters and outlining some of the lessons that could be learned from these events.

The presentation included a number of case studies and an engaging question and answer period allowing those in attendance to dive further into the topic, with a particular interest in the #NoNaturalDIsasters campaign Podloski promoted, which aims to remove the term natural disasters from the societal nomenclature.

The session was followed by another concurrent session, this time hosted by Robert Daniel Girard, a senior emergency management consultant with Emergence Ltd. and former firefighter in Ontario. He highlighted the effectiveness of emergency citizen groups, their capability to assist in emergency events, and provided examples from an international setting on how Canadian emergency management coordinators could incorporate these groups into their disaster response.

After a break for a networking lunch, Fire Chief Dan Smith from Belleville Fire and Emergency Services shared the process his community went through declaring an emergency due to the overdose rates of the homeless population and the harrowing experience the first responders and citizens of Belleville have experienced.

Smith outlined the process for declaring an emergency, the outcome of that declaration, and the path forward for Belleville, which, despite making this declaration in February 2024, still have not received a provincial commitment for support. The emergency declaration remains in place to this day.

In the following presentation, another fire chief and a recent recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal, Chris Case, the fire chief for Chatham-Kent Fire and Rescue, shared his experience managing the Wheatley gas explosion that took place in 2021.

Case, in a presentation that elicited both gasps and laughter from those in attendance, detailed his journey in managing these gas emergencies, which were only solved the day before this presentation.

The day closed with a keynote panel titled “The show must go on – 17-hour Peel Regional Police standoff near Trillium Health Partners”, which documented the events of a hostage situation with an armed assailant right outside the Credit Valley hospital.

The panel included Peter Danos, the incident commander for Peel Regional Police who oversaw the standoff, Shalu Bains, the chief information and analytics officer for Trillium Health Partners who managed communications between the hospital and the police, Dr. Amir Ginzburg, the executive vice president of quality, risk and practice who managed the event from the hospital side, Farah Khan, the senior vice president of patient care services who managed the set-up of the emergency operation centre for the hospital, and Danielle Sanagan, the chief human resources officer and vice president of people services, who took over managing the event for the hospital as it stretched into the evening.

For a full list of speakers on both days of the conference, visit the DEMCON website.