Page 6-15, Municipal and Community Affairs, information item, directorate, active positions.

Page 6-17, Municipal and Community Affairs, activity summary, public safety, operations expenditure summary, $1.629 million. Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Under the Fire Prevention Act, they appear to review plans for new construction. Can the Minister explain how this gets done if you happen to be somebody who lives in a community?

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. We’ll go to Mr. Williams.

What region specifically is the deputy minister referring to?

How do we deal with site inspections on these particular initiatives? When the plans are submitted, sometimes site inspections are required.

What is the cost of that particular travel based on, or who actually pays for it if you’re outside of the specific community the assistant fire marshal is placed?

What types of requirements or parameters are put on timely visits? There must be some constraints as to when something is filed and needs to be reviewed in person. What type of travel requirements or constraints around the code causes the travel or necessity to get out to site visits?

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. For that we’ll go to Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Usually when there’s a request to have a site visit, we would go in. If the Member wants more detail, then I’d be happy to have a briefing note put together for him.

I’d be happy to hear that. The travel is $165,000 on this under the public safety division, but I’m not sure if that’s all applied to fire prevention. Maybe if I could get a sense of what the travel budget is for the five regions that need to make these community visits.

I’m sure you’ll notice in MACA’s budget that we have travel in there, and part of our duties as MACA is to get out and visit all the communities and work with the communities as many times as is requested for us to go in and work with the communities. They prefer face to face as far as the public safety division goes. They have to go travel around for helping communities with their emergency plans and helping put together their emergency plans. We get a lot of requests from the communities for our staff to go in and meet with communities. That’s why our travel budgets are the way they are.

Under fire prevention section to do community visits on the five regions, what type of travel budget is associated with this?

I’ll get the detail and provide it to the Member.

Under emergency management, a few years ago one of the safety management people, personnel, under EMO section was laid off due to setbacks in the government. I think there were 100-and-some positions; 130 were originally eyed to be rolled away. I’m just wondering, under the scale-back, has emergency management grown or, specific to it, what is its present composition of personnel? I’ll start with that.

We did a reorg and we re-staffed that.

What is its present composition of staff?

I believe the actual positions are in the budget document a few more pages over. I’m not sure if the Member wants to wait until we get to 6-19 before I answer that question or should I just answer it now and say we’ve got six.

The problem with page 6-19 is it doesn’t break it out in detail so you just see it as headquarter positions without that…(inaudible). What community or public activities do the emergency management folks take on about public engagement and planning, so that the public know and understand what they do, as well as public relationship of the preparation and planning for emergency measures? I suspect that this is a high intensity area where you spend a lot of time developing policy and relationships with community, community organizations, peoples, partners, et cetera.