Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don’t think any jurisdiction leaves firefighting up to the private sector when it comes to deploying the air resources, land resources, the heavy equipment. What we have right now is a contract with a private contractor to manage and operate the 215s, for example, and we have a contract for some land-based. That equipment becomes available to the Government of the Northwest Territories for us to deploy where it’s needed. So they are there and they are sent to where they’re needed, same as our fire crews that we have with the communities and our own fire crews are deployed where they’re needed and on an as required basis.
Fighting fire is like a military campaign. There are a lot of variables. There’s the fire, there’s the terrain, there’s the wind, there’s any precipitation. Is there wet ground nearby? Are there cutlines? What do you need to do to back burn? There are all those things that the Member talked about. It’s very, very fast moving, so you need a type of command and control that is very nimble and versatile, but still have the big picture, and planes are a critical part of that.
We need to ensure that our folks on the ground, if they had no aircraft, they would be extremely disadvantaged. Not only disadvantaged, I would say that they would be at risk because they wouldn’t have air support to come in to help them where they may be caught or there may be circumstances that they can’t control just by on the ground.
When we talk air services, of course, we also spend a lot of money on rotary wing helicopters and those are privately owned and they are costing thousands of dollars an hour, $3,000 or $4,000 an hour depending on the size of the helicopter. We try to make sure that we spare no expense when it comes to protecting the interests of Northerners and making sure that our folks on the ground, the thin line of really hard work on firefighters, men and women, that they have all the backup they need, so they can in fact be like the infantry and the Air Force and then the armored division, which would be the heavy equipment. They all play their critical roles to win a battle.
I think if you look at Kakisa and those other places, it was a tremendous job that they will probably study that fire to see now as a textbook example of how you fight fires. What happens if a community FireSmarts themselves, which Kakisa did, what role that played in protecting their own community.
The Member asked if there are different levels of protection depending if you’re in the north or in the south. I would tell you unequivocally that there’s not. I will tell you that when a community is threatened, it doesn’t matter if it’s Inuvik, Tulita, Deline, Kakisa, Yellowknife or Fort Smith, we pull out all the stops. We spare no expense and we bring our forces and every other place that we can beg, borrow or steal air support and ground support to come in, incident commanders, firefighters, planes, to assist us. The Member can well remember not that long ago in his community that some of them were threatened. We look at moving people. We evacuate. We do everything we need to make sure that we protect Northerners.
Regardless of where you are, people should know and sleep with comfort at night knowing that if they were in need, the forest fire division will be there and will be there like the cavalry. We will be there with everything we have to protect them.
But we are a huge territory. We had over 300, almost 400 fires. We fought about 150 or so, 130 of them, so it was physically impossible with 3.3 million square hectares under fire to fight all the fires. There are those in the hinterland and those that are near values at risk that were allowed to burn because we had to pay attention to those values that were most imminently at risk.
We had one fire crew in the Member’s riding that was disbanded at the request of the group in Norman Wells, but we’ve trained an additional, I think, 400 firefighters last summer to fill in the gaps. This is something that we’re very, very committed to. The 802s will be a critical part of that going forward. That is some of us more long-in-the-tooth folks going out to pasture maybe, if we don’t run again, so too the 215s’ time is reaching the same point in the cycle and there’s a newer, younger generation of equipment there to make the life of the firefighters safer and more productive.
As it comes to the issue of water monitoring, we are ramping up, as the Member knows. I rattled off all the monitoring stations. The issue of a lab to test and do the tests on the fish and random tests on wildlife, we don’t have that physical capacity yet. We are working on doing some of it. We sent out samples. So the Member’s request is not unreasonable as we move forward here into the future.
In regard to office space, specifically, I will mention Deline. That the community is very interested, as the Member well knows, in a combined pooling of resources with ENR and Public Works and
Housing, and I think the community government, to see if we can build a common compound that would have work space, garage space, office space, and allow us to put all of our scarce capital dollars together to build one energy-efficient, coordinated, integrated facility. We are seriously looking at that. I’ll ask the deputy to speak a bit further to the other office space in Colville and Fort Good Hope and maybe fill in any of the other gaps that I may have missed.