All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a Canadian podcast about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. Happy Friday. A dollar short and a day late, but these things happen in production studio conflicts.
All right, welcome back to Inside My Canoe Head. My name is Jeff. I am your host of this as we approach a monumental occasion. On the 28th of April, we're going to go live on Instagram.
I got about a thousand followers over on Instagram. I was going to do it on YouTube, but that's still a work in progress, and there's a grand total of 13 subscribers there. So we're going live at 1900 Eastern on Thursday, the 28th of April, because that will celebrate the second year anniversary of the launch of the first episode of Inside My Canoe Head podcast. So join us over there.
It's not going to be all that. We're just going to have some fun. I'm going to talk a bit about the history. I'm going to talk about the idea, hopefully motivate you and anybody else that is thinking about doing something innovative and new, challenging and fearful in the future, that there is nothing better than actually jumping in with two feet.
And while I may sound like an extrovert, I'm very much an introvert, so it was a big deal to take this step and the leap forward. And if I'm timing everything right, and I think I will, Thursday's episode of the podcast that goes out on the 28th of April will be the 100th episode of Inside My Canoe Head podcast. So next week is pretty monumental, and I'd really appreciate you joining us on that Instagram live. So what we want to talk about today is, like the title says, Government Capacity.
And I know we've touched on this issue before, but we're returning to it at a really important time because we're approaching the annual Emergency Preparedness Week, which runs the first week in May every year. It's unfortunately the one week a year that a lot of bunch and basically an overload, overdose of emergency preparedness and emergency management information is sent out to the public writ large. It's like drinking from a fire hose. You just get so much of it.
Probably by day three, you're ignoring all the crap that's coming out. And the fact that they do choose to do this once in 52 weeks a year, I'm pretty critical of the current communication strategy. And it's more of a messaging strategy that comes out of the government. And the last episode of Government Communication talked a bit about that as saying, like, if you want to engage your citizens in a municipal level or at any level, you actually need to communicate with them.
And communicating with them means establishing a two-way relationship where they know they can ask questions, they'll get a response with a good answer, and that you build that trust and hopefully become one of their trusted sources when the shizzy hits the fizzy and they're looking for some assistance. So yeah, it's important to talk about government capacity because a lot of times in life, we've all run across people, and I've been guilty of it before, where your capability to execute a task is a little less than you think it is, right? Overselling yourself in some ways about your ability to do things. And this is unfortunately what we hear from municipalities, or the impression is that they are going to be there to save the day when bad things happen.
That your municipality, your government, your province, your state, they're all coming to your rescue. And reality on the ground, insignificant disruptions couldn't be further from the truth. The government simply cannot and does not possess that level of response capability. Now, this and everything I'll say today, please understand the caveat.
I have a lot of great friends and people that I admire who work in the emergency management space. And this is not about the lack of capability of the human beings that work in the space. It's the lack of structural response capacity that is built. And the limitations placed on them.
So you have a situation where you have, in most cases, properly educated individuals executing an important government function for which they have exceptionally low resources and capacity. But the message, for whatever reason, out to people has been that the government is there for you, that they're going to come rescue your butt when the shizzy hits the fizzy. But reality couldn't be further from the truth. So the first thing, and I've said this in some of my preparedness daily tips that come out on Instagram, buy me a coffee, and Twitter, is understanding your municipal capacity.
So you're a resident in a municipality. We all are. That municipality has some form of formal or informal emergency management response capability. You can first look at your traditional first responders.
We know the real first responders are your neighbors and your friends. But traditionally, we call first responders fire, police, and EMS. So what's the capacity in your area? Especially if you live in a suburban area and you look at the density ratio.
So the way we try to understand this is you take a density ratio. So the total population served divided by the on-duty staff. It gives you a per capita ratio of availability. Because while some cities are, quote, unquote, emergency busier than others, when you look at the standard operating practice, you look at the capacity ratio within a jurisdiction.
And that's what's on shift should the shizzy hit the fizzy. So, for example, if you live in a city of a million people like I do, and there are 20 ambulances on duty at any one given time, you're looking for, you basically have a ratio of one ambulance for every 50,000 residents. So let's just put that in perspective. And imagine you know your hazard profile.
You've gone through the process of understanding the risks that are presented to the city you live in. For example, I live in the city of Ottawa. There is a pretty significant seismic risk here. We've had bad earthquakes.
And when I mean bad, you've got to understand we live in a place where there's no seismic building code requirements whatsoever. And a lot of the buildings in the nation's capital are not structurally designed to sustain any kind of shake, rattle, and roll. So you look at that, and you realize that if an emergency hit, there are 20 ambulances available. Let's say two paramedics.
You have 40 paramedics. You can bring surge paramedics to reality. But you don't have surge ambulances. Like, you don't have 50 ambulances parked behind your emergency management headquarters to throw into the battle space when it happens.
You have the limited capacity that's on hand. And the reason that's important to understand is that informs you. You need to know a lot of medical assistance, at least a standard first aid course, and have some medical supplies on hand. Because if you're not one of those lucky, magical people that get one of those 20 ambulances, then you're not going to get any assistance.
Like, there's no other surge capacity that's coming in, except that surge capacity that will show up as a result of shoulder agreements with neighboring municipalities. But you're assuming the hazard that's realized has not affected that shoulder municipality. Because if it's a regional, then you're looking at probably a couple of days before you have significant surge capacity coming in from outside areas. And remember, these outside areas don't have extra capacity.
So they're putting their own citizens at risk by sending EMS access in. So you can see very quickly, just using EMS as a capacity. Or as an example, it's very, very easy to overwhelm the limited capacity that exists in your municipality. And it's designed that way because from a taxation and revenue point of view, it's exceptionally, an expense point of view, sorry.
It's exceptionally expensive to have unused surge capacity on hand. And I spoke to a brilliant emergency manager. And one of his comments was like, we are designed to have a surge capacity able to deal with a three to four hour event that happens only in our municipality and not in our shoulder municipalities, right? So I can call in part of the backup shift.
So part of the shift that's supposed to come in next, just part of them, not all of them. Because if I call them all in the second shift, then when that shift ends, there is no human beings to do the job anymore. So you call in a little bit of your surge capacity. You bring them in to deal with a short event that's lasting a couple of hours.
So I mean, you can do the same ratio with police. You can do the same ratio with fire. You can do the same ratio with public works to respond to major infrastructure issues. So you start to get a frame and an understanding.
Now, this research is in its infancy. So what we don't have is an average baseline or we don't have a generally accepted appropriate level of support. So we're working myself and other researchers in the field are working on building a model of the existing level of standard approaches and then look at some literature and some expertise to see what would be the appropriate level. You determine a baseline and then you can do a comparative analysis against that baseline.
But the point is, it just informs you. If you've got one ambulance for every 50,000 people, you have a significant event, you're out of luck. There's nobody coming to help you unless you're one of the magical people to get it. So this is why it helps to inform your plan.
And again, it's not against the municipal folks. It's not against the elected counselors. It's not against anything. It's just a reality.
So it's about understanding what we call the positive versus the normative. The positive is that world as it exists. Normative is the world as you wish it would or you think it should exist. So in a positive framework or through a theoretical positive lens, you look at the world as it's presented to you.
So you go through the process of understanding your municipal response capability and you write this down because this is really important. Next week's podcasting and preparedness tips are all going to be about you starting the planning cycle. So last couple of weeks has been all about you gathering a whole bleep ton of information to inform the planning cycle. So next week we're going to start.
And this is why it's important to look at your government capacity. And also the secondary step is to look at your government plans. So most municipalities do a very good job of having their local emergency management plan put out on their website. So you go to their website, you pull down the emergency plan, and it tells you how they intend to operate.
Now, unfortunately, quite a number of them are very, very shallow on response details. There's a few. So if you look at, for example, the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo in northern Alberta around the city of Fort McMurray has some fantastic detailed community level plans. But for the most part, you're at least going to get a structural idea of how your municipality intends to respond.
What are their priorities? Where are they going to put their limited assets? And again, this is not about challenging. You can challenge it later.
But this is about you gathering the information necessary. So when you sit down and you want to build a preparedness plan, you have to understand what your government has the ability to do and how your government intends to act when something significant happens. Because you may identify through the planning process a capability gap that exists, something that you want to have prepared in your life. And you realize that the government is not going to be providing that.
So therefore, you've identified a capability gap in your own preparedness plan. And now you're going to go through the efforts and figure out, as a result of your preparedness planning, you're going to figure out, OK, now I got this identified. What do I need to do to address that capability gap within my own plan? And so I have a level of response personally that meets the means that I've identified.
So it's a very logical process. But this is why we take some time to have a look at municipalities and their capability to ensure that we understand exactly what they can do. Not necessarily what they say they can do, but the difference, you know, that always comes out. So then you've got to look at, like I said, I talked about the communication last episode and talked about understanding their social media feeds and where they are at.
So you have to determine at some point what you determine or what you believe to be a trusted source. So when the shizzy hits the fizzy in your area and there's a significant disruption, the question I'm going to pose to you is where do you go to get your information, right? You're going to have a preparedness plan that is going to set you up for success to deal with this disruption. But one of the things you're going to want to do is be able to draw in some important information from external sources.
So where are you going to go to get that? And part of government capacity is government communication intention. Where are they going to go? For example, I spend a lot of time in the upper Ottawa Valley, right?
And so there's one radio station there that always advertises that they are the voice of the municipality in an emergency. When something needs to go on the radio airwaves, believe it or not, in rural areas, the majority of people get their information from the radio. They're going to go to this radio station. So I know in the background when I live there that my intent, I had a radio, which we all do on our cell phones through data plans, et cetera.
But I also had an old school backup radio that I could pull out and click to my FM and have it running in the background because I knew if the municipality felt necessary to say something in accordance with their plan, and it should be in their plan that you've read, you know where they're going to go to say it, right? Now, this isn't about where they should be and what they should be doing. This is about the reality of where your municipality is going to speak to when it happens. Now, a lot of people get drawn in at the wrong level of government.
A lot of people look at government capacity of, you know, let's look at the federal government and the Canadian Armed Forces in Canada, for example, are going to be our largest response capacity. In the United States of America, they've invested untold billions in FEMA to have a FEMA capacity response. So people look at the big, big picture and look for the big muscle movements that are going to come. Those are not going to come for an important period of time.
It's more important in my mind to look at where those muscle movements are coming at the local level because I don't know how it works in all jurisdictions. Again, I'm in the middle of researching a broad spectrum of things within this field. The question is, it's probably going to be your municipality that's going to set up reception centers. It's going to be your municipality that is going to establish and set up water distribution points if there's something wrong with a potable water source, that type of thing.
So you need to know where they're going to go to say this stuff and where they're going to put the information, right? So you've got to, and then you've got to look at redundant sources because you can't just sit, I'm going to go to their website because they're going to announce it on the website if your data plan down or your local cell phone tower is inoperable for whatever reason because of the event. And then where are you going to go if you can't get access to the internet? So the important part of understanding government capacity is understanding through a positive lens what your government intends to do, what your government actually can do.
And I look at that from the ratio of establishing your response ratio, which is simply the number of first responders as a per capita based upon the population they serve. And then you have to look at whether you think in your mind that's appropriate. Like for example, you know, the example that I used, one ambulance for every 50,000 people is probably, it's less, it's probably reasonable on an average day, but it certainly is not going to be effective when a significant issue happens. Because for example, if we had an earthquake in Ottawa and a couple of buildings in downtown Ottawa had structural difficulties or structural failures, that's where all those first responders are going.
The excess fire department is going there, the excess police capacity, they're going to move a whole bunch of resources in there. I live in the burps, I live in the suburbs outside of Ottawa proper. They're not coming to me, right? I'm not, if I have somebody trapped in my house and I call 911, it may be 72 hours before somebody can come help.
So the idea of understanding government capacity, it's about arming yourself with the proper level of information. Now, the other part that I want to talk about is angry government. And I put this up on my Instagram feed as a tip two days ago, and it didn't go over all that well with some folks. And I talked about understanding the length to which your government is willing to interfere with your freedoms and rights.
And it sounded, I think, a bit like I was a freedom right, freedom convoy kind of individual championing that. But it's. understanding that your government through this pandemic has taken a whole bunch of measures that it deemed appropriate. And those measures, and I don't care whether the legislative authority is there or not, but the government took a number of measures that interfered in your ability to operate your life as you saw fit.
They put restrictions on you that weren't there before. Now, this is not about whether you think it was a political decision. It's not about whether you think it was an appropriate decision. It's about understanding the extent to which your government is willing to intervene to control your life out of quote unquote, in order to help you or out of your best interest or out of the collective interest.
And that's an important part of your government preparedness, of your preparedness plan and government information that feeds that is understanding that should we have significant disruption in your area, what do you think your government's going to want to do? How far do you think they're going to want to control your movements, how you operate, the places you can go and the places you're restricted from going in out of their idea of being in a position of control, because you have to understand most of what the government issues is about being in control, they have a sense of responsibility to make things better. And so what they do is they try to control everybody's life to some extent in order to meet that goal. And I get it, it's all coming from a very reasonable perspective, unless you disagree with the fact that the government should be the one controlling, and then you have an issue.
And so you have a political spectrum there, and I'm not going to get into that. But the point is just understanding the extent to which your government is willing to intervene in your life in order to help you. You can see that as a positive thing, you can see that as a negative thing, and you can see it as a neutral thing. But it's a thing, and you need to know.
So take your time, stay armed, stay knowledgeable, gather all the government capacity information that you possibly can. And it just helps to inform the planning cycle. And if you don't quite get what I'm referring to, that's fine, record the information. When we get onto it next week, you'll really understand.
So what we're trying to do here in this new strategy that we're now finishing up week three at Inside My Canoehead is we have the website insidemycanoehead.ca. There is a link to a whole bunch of things that we're up to. So we're putting out daily preparedness tips. Each week has a theme, each day we'll have an idea related to that theme.
And you can sign up for the newsletter at insidemycanoehead.ca. So we wrap up the week, we talk about the big things that happened that week, we talk about the big thinkers. So I put some ideas out there and some links to some people in the space that you may not be tracking. And then I talk about what our intents are for next week and what we're trying to achieve next week.
And it's not a long newsletter. That's not the point here. The point is, it's just trying to take a little bit of time on a Saturday morning to send out to you, this is what we talked about this week, this is what we think it means for you, this is how we think it helps you, and this is what we're planning to do next week. Now, in reality, I have 342 of these preparedness tips prepared, so we've got a bit of time, well over a year's worth to kick out.
And this is just gonna be a regular thing. So follow me on Instagram, follow me on Twitter, go over to buy me a coffee slash inside my I am canoe head, and check out the feeds there. I've got a new option. Hey, listen, if you're looking for some personal consulting, there's an option there to hire me to do that for you, or just keep listening.
So everything that I want to do, and I think is important for you is going to keep staying free on this podcast and on the website. So this is so in case you haven't noticed it, as long as you're not an ostrich, you realize that the world is becoming more and more disruptive. I've read a lot of books that kind of foretold this. And I think the 2020s are going to be a significant disruptive period in human history.
We're looking at a lot of disruptions at your individual level, not necessarily the and I don't deal with the apocalyptic end of the world crap that you see all over YouTube and everywhere else. But there are significant disruptions coming. And they're going to keep coming. And we need to keep learning and we need to keep educating.
So the purpose of these preparedness tips and everything that's out on InsideMyCanoeHead.ca is all about that, providing the information that I think is appropriate and necessary to help you take the steps to build an incredible preparedness plan for you and your family. So as I've said all the time, you're not running in the woods to build a year. You're staying in the urban suburban environment. You're going to continue on your job working from home or wherever that may take you.
You're going to still carry on with your sports. Your kids are going to go into minor sports. You're going to rock an incredible life. You're just going to wrap it with a bit of a blanket of preparedness to make you a bit more self-reliant.
So thank you very much for taking the time to listen to us this week at InsideMyCanoeHead. I'll remind you again, 28th of April, 1900 Eastern, InsideMyCanoeHead goes live on Instagram. So join us there. Take care of yourself and have a great weekend.