Thank you Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as follow-up to my Member's statement, I have a few questions for the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. MACA offers community emergency planning workshops. How can the communities of Aklavik, Fort McPherson, and Tsiigehtchic work with the department to see these workshops delivered within the next four to six months? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the Member's statement, he used the term, I believe it was, "MACA's always there to help." That's his term. I really appreciate that, and I agree. MACA's whole job is to help communities. How do we get the emergency planning into the areas of his region? Simple, we need to get the community government to contact the regional manager. At that point, we'll get a facilitator to come in and help them actually develop or update their community emergency plans.
We also provide tabletop exercises that they can take advantage if they're interested in that, which will help to validate and make sure that they're on track for their plans. I should state as well that we actually were in Fort McPherson last week, and we have just worked with them. They are in the process of drafting their updated emergency plans. We're more than willing to help, and I appreciate the Member's comment.
Mr. Speaker, the Minister touched on this a bit. What other resources can MACA offer to small communities taking on emergency planning?
As well as meeting with the communities face-to-face, we have online training, and that is available to communities. The online training in this case are particular basic emergency management and the incident command systems. Those are the two courses that, actually, we start with to develop community emergency plans. Those are online.
We also work one on one with communities. If they need our assistance, we'll come in and we'll help them either create or update their plans. We have tabletop exercises that we'll go in and we'll actually do a draft emergency plan to make sure that they have the right responses and that their plan is updated. Those are the things that we can do to work with communities. Like I said earlier, just contact the regional superintendent, have the community governments contact the regional superintendents, and we'll be more than happy to help the communities.
When communities work on developing or updating their emergency plans, can MACA act as a liaison to other departments and territorial agencies, for example, to help communities install backup generators in local schools or other gathering centres?
Often, MLAs say to us, "Just say yes." In this case, I'm going to just say yes. We will actually work with them. Part of working and developing an emergency plan is having discussions on what resources are needed and what funding sources they have available. The regional superintendents and the management team will work directly with the communities, and we can also work as a liaison to work with other departments that they may need to access services from. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The answer's yes.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Sahtu.
