Canada faces a future of more frequent, larger, and increasingly complex disasters, driven by a changing climate. Recent years have underscored the pace of Canada’s evolving risk landscape. In 2023, the country experienced its worst wildfire season ever, with more than 45 million acres burned and the near-total destruction of Lytton, BC. In 2024, the Jasper wildfire destroyed a third of the townsite, forced the evacuation of 25,000 people, and burned over 32,000 hectares in Jasper National Park. This year over 8.3 million hectares of forest burned, with significant fires and evacuations across the west, making 2025 the second worst wildfire season in Canadian history.
The economic toll of climate-driven disasters is escalating rapidly. Insured losses from catastrophic events reached a record $8.5 billion in 2024—the costliest year in Canadian history for weather-related damage. This figure is nearly triple the total insured losses of 2023 and twelve times the annual average of $701 million recorded between 2001 and 2010. Insured losses typically represent less than half of total economic costs, as damage to public infrastructure, uninsured properties, and indirect economic disruptions often aren’t covered by insurance.
By 2025, climate-related disasters are expected to erode $25 billion from Canada’s GDP—equivalent to half a year’s projected economic growth. These escalating costs divert critical resources away from innovation and productivity, undermining Canada’s ability to invest in future-oriented sectors. Over the long term, this persistent and growing drain can create economic headwinds, as funds that could fuel research, technology upgrades, and business expansion are instead spent on response, recovery and rebuilding.
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Canada’s traditional disaster response approach relies on local communities to lead response and request help from higher levels of government only when overwhelmed. Yet local governments often hold the least capacity and capability relative to the scale and tempo of today’s disaster events. Even provincial governments can struggle to effectively respond in the face of Canada’s increasing disaster risk landscape, leading to more frequent requests to the federal government for assistance. The Canadian Armed Forces now responds to natural disasters roughly twice as often as five years prior, a demand trend that has “broadly doubled every five years since 2010.” This pattern is unsustainable as a default solution to bring response surge capacity to disaster events.
No province or territory can manage the largest events alone. Wildfire mutual aid works better than most disaster domains because it is nationally facilitated: the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) enables resource sharing, mutual aid, and information exchange across jurisdictions and borders. However, resource scarcity and uneven readiness still limit outcomes, exemplified by the record-breaking 2023 season which required unprecedented levels of international assistance. Other hazard domains lack any comparable institutional mechanism, leaving Canada exposed when multiple regions are under stress and critical surge support is required beyond firefighting.
The Current State
Jurisdictional Innovations Worth Building On Globally, disaster response coordination models vary, ranging from centralized resources with stockpiles of assets to decentralized volunteer-heavy systems. Europe’s rescEU framework has proved effective with member states build capabilities, then earmark and prepare a portion as an EU-level strategic reserve, fully funded and deployable when national pools are strained. The mechanism doesn’t replace domestic systems, but complements them, adding a layer of protection against overlapping crises.
In Canada, some provincial governments are stepping up with modernized legislation and investments in programs to strengthen readiness. These initiatives offer promising blueprints for a more resilient pan-Canadian disaster response framework:
- Quebec: The creation of the Réserve d’Intervention d’Urgence en Sécurité Civile (RIUSC )—a 200-member civil security emergency reserve—marks a strategic shift. This scalable, civilian-led alternative is designed to support municipalities during crises, lessening the routine reliance on the Canadian Armed Forces for domestic disaster response.
- Ontario: Ontario Corps, coordinated by the newly created Ministry of Emergency Preparedness and Response, brings together volunteers, NGOs, the private sector, and First Nations partners to deliver essential services such as shelter, debris management, food distribution, and flood protection. This collaborative model strengthens community ties while enhancing readiness for diverse hazards.
- Nova Scotia: The Nova Scotia Guard, a province-wide volunteer corps supported by a newly established Department of Emergency Management, mobilizes citizens to provide care and comfort, logistics, and specialized skills during emergencies, reinforcing local capacity and coordination.
- All-Hazard Incident Management Teams: Teams of highly trained emergency response personnel have been established at local and regional levels (e.g., Canada Task Force 1-6), to help manage complex emergencies when local resources are overwhelmed.
While these efforts reflect the right impulses, they remain largely siloed and untested at scale. Canada has yet to integrate these innovations into a cohesive, pan-Canadian system with shared standards, harmonized training pathways, and a real-time national picture of deployable capabilities. Bridging these gaps presents a critical opportunity to build a more unified and effective disaster response framework.
The Integration Imperative
A more unified and interoperable framework is needed to meet the growing demands of disaster response in Canada. A framework where assets, people, and information seamlessly flow across borders when the stakes are high. A pan-Canadian approach should emphasize common standards, real-time visibility, shared resources, adoption of technology and leading innovations, and a culture of continuous learning. Europe’s rescEU framework, tailored to Canada’s geography, fiscal context, and federated realities presents a useful template. Canada needs a whole-of-society model that helps provinces and territories develop emergency management capabilities among staff, volunteers, and specialized teams and declare them as part of a pan-Canadian pool. The goal of this model wouldn’t be to replace local leadership but rather ensure resources can move quickly and effectively across borders during catastrophic events.
A Practical Pan-Canadian All-Hazards Disaster Readiness Framework:
Elements of successful coordination models can be adapted and built upon to create a pan-Canadian structure for multi-hazard coordination, shared assets, and rapid deployment, ensuring readiness for floods, storms, heat events, and other complex emergencies. This framework would include the following key elements and characteristics:
People and Assets:
- Teams of highly trained provincial and territorial response teams with a portion of this capacity designated as part of a pan-Canadian asset pool for deployment anywhere in Canada.
- A pan-Canadian real-time registry of deployable personnel, teams, assets, and specialized capabilities across provinces, and territories. This registry should be integrated with existing programs such as Nova Scotia Guard, Ontario Corps, and Quebec’s RIUSC, and accessible by partners.
- Indigenous communities and knowledge systems included in planning and response, recognizing their leadership, expertise, and unique contributions to resilience. • Provincially/Territorial maintained assets that can be rapidly deployed to other regions when needed.
- A Federal inventory of assets focused on resources that provinces don’t need year-round but are critical during large-scale crises, such as specialized surge capabilities like heavy logistics, long-range transport, and advanced communications.
- Partnerships with the private sector to access scalable assets such as warehousing, transportation fleets, and supply chain networks, and leverage workforce capacity to strengthen national surge response capacity.
Technology and Innovation:
- A real-time, digital dashboard showing risks, requests, and available resources which can be accessed by partners.
- Communications interoperability across jurisdictions so teams can connect instantly during a crisis.
- Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, and predictive analytics tools adopted across partners to support early warning, resource optimization, and faster decision-making.
- Collaboration with private technology providers to enhance data platforms, emergency communication tools, and digital infrastructure.
- Identification and adoption of global leading practices in emergency management.
- Standardized review and sharing of learnings after significant events to foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
Interoperability
- Shared qualifications, checklists, and procedures for emergency response teams that align with Canada’s guidelines for interoperability so teams from different provinces and territories can work together smoothly and respond effectively to any disaster.
- Interoperable systems, including common channels, consistent operating procedures, and shared data models to allow teams to connect quickly and work together efficiently.
- A pan-Canadian cycle of joint exercises to build cross jurisdictional capability for large-scale coordinated response.
Coordination, Governance, and Triggers:
- A centralized all-hazards coordination entity that acts as a hub to quickly mobilize resources where they’re needed most,
- A coordinated strategic reserve of emergency resources to provide backup when provincial and territorial systems—and their mutual aid agreements—are insufficient, modeled on the European rescEU approach.
- Reinforce national coordination mechanisms linking federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and Indigenous partners. These mechanisms should enable shared planning, real-time information exchange, and joint decision-making during major emergencies, ensuring that resources, teams, and capabilities are aligned and deployed efficiently across jurisdictions.
- Defined minimum preparedness baselines across jurisdictions to help identify gaps, reinforce best practices, and foster transparent reporting on readiness levels.
- Clear thresholds to activate national coordination, such as multi-region saturation or large-scale evacuations.
- Pre-arranged cost-sharing mechanisms to enable rapid mobilization when multiple regions are under stress.
The Canadian Armed Forces Question—Answered:
While the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) will always be there for Canadians, the civilian system should not be designed around the assumption that uniformed personnel are the only surge option. CAF’s own materials emphasize finite capacity and the need to involve them only when no other organization is available. Building civilian surge capabilities protects CAF readiness while improving speed and specialization in disasters.
COVID 19 offers a powerful reminder that when civilian systems are overrun, the military becomes the last-resort backstop: in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Operation LASER saw troops deployed to help overwhelmed staff at long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec. The task now is to strengthen that civilian layer, so “last resort” truly means last resort.
Call to Action
Canada is vast, its tax base is limited, and the risks it faces are increasingly significant and complex. To be resilient to this growing risk profile, we must build on what already works: provincial reserves and rangers, emergency response teams, the depth of NGOs, proven coordination models, and emerging technologies that support faster decision-making and enhanced situational awareness. By weaving these elements together in a unified all-hazards preparedness framework—a national hub, a shared repository, multiple stakeholders, and a common preparedness system—we can move from reactive response to proactive resilience.
If we do this, the next time Canada faces simultaneous wildfires, floods, heat waves, or infrastructure shocks, we will respond faster, smarter, and together—with the right people, the right resources, and the right information, at the right time.
