Western Standard - Ex-Alberta emergency chief says Ottawa destroying national security agencies - as a matter of policy

00:00:00.000 Good evening Western Standard viewers and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the

00:00:21.420 Western Standard. It is Thursday, April the 2nd. We live in uncertain times. A lot of people are

00:00:28.700 living hand to mouth. A third of us Canadians are apparently buying groceries on credit

00:00:32.900 and our gas prices are all over the place, driving inflation largely thanks to the situation

00:00:38.500 in the Middle East. How concerned should we be? What should the prudent citizen be doing on his

00:00:45.720 own behalf? With us tonight is Colonel Dave Redmond, formerly in charge of emergency management

00:00:52.140 in Alberta. Welcome, Colonel Redman. Good evening. Thank you for having me. You are very welcome

00:00:59.240 here. You may recall Colonel Redman as the author of the excellent pandemic plan that the government

00:01:04.820 of Alberta simply ignored in their COVID panic, and we'll come back to that in a few minutes. But

00:01:10.360 first, is there anything in the international situation that people should be alarmed about?

00:01:17.860 Time to stock up on essentials, maybe.

00:01:21.600 So from my point of view, one of the things that people do every day in their lives is manage risk.

00:01:28.600 And it's very important that as citizens of Canada, we get back to understanding that risk is ours to manage and not the government's.

00:01:35.880 And so when we look at the things that are happening in the world right now, we simply have to restock on a daily basis what is the risks to us.

00:01:45.760 In emergency management, we always broke risks into two major categories.

00:01:50.760 First of all, natural hazards like geological, biological and environmental.

00:01:56.760 But we also look at human-induced hazards, both intentional and unintentional.

00:02:01.760 And in times like this, we may be interested in looking at the intentional hazards a little more.

00:02:06.760 But in my opinion, at this point in time, Albertans should carry on with their lives

00:02:12.760 lives with confidence that they can manage the risks in their lives and that there's orders of

00:02:18.620 government to help them. So maybe if we refine that just a little bit. In emergency management,

00:02:24.780 we always have stated very clearly that it's up to an individual if they're not directly

00:02:30.820 impacted by a hazard. So let's use a flood as an example. A flood is going through a town and it

00:02:37.240 floods some homes, but it doesn't flood other homes, but it might take the power out. So if

00:02:42.400 your home is flooded, you're directly impacted by the hazard. But if you lose your power, you're

00:02:47.960 indirectly. So what you should be prepared to do as a citizen of Alberta or any province or

00:02:54.540 territory in Canada is to manage the first 72 hours of the hazard on your own and allow the

00:03:03.240 response agencies to look after those who are being directly impacted. So 72 hours, one of my

00:03:10.220 colleagues used to joke that in Canada, all citizens were always prepared for 72 days

00:03:15.840 because we always prepared for winter. Somehow now it's down to 72 hours. So Albertans need to

00:03:22.180 take that seriously. Now there's lots of tools to help them prepare for that 72 hours. And if you go

00:03:28.500 to the Government of Alberta website, to the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, there is in

00:03:33.780 fact, both the documents to help you make a plan for your family and yourself, and what type of

00:03:42.120 supplies you may wish to have to prepare yourself for that 72 hours. What I'm not encouraging is

00:03:49.120 hoarding. What I'm not encouraging is panic buying. We should do the opposite to make sure everyone

00:03:55.140 has access to what they need. But you should pre-stock the essentials like water and food,

00:04:00.560 etc to get yourself through that 72 hours. Now if you are directly impacted the way emergency

00:04:06.960 management work is it goes up in steps. So the next step is first responders and first responders

00:04:12.960 are also watching the situation that's developing in the world and preparing to respond should

00:04:18.160 something happen in Alberta. And so those first responders, fire police, EMS are there to help

00:04:23.520 those who are directly impacted. But next in Alberta and in most provinces and territories

00:04:29.680 in canada the next order of government is the municipal order of government

00:04:34.480 emergencies are always local and the municipal order of government in alberta is charged by

00:04:40.160 legislation to have a municipal emergency plan and to test those plans regularly so whatever

00:04:47.440 community you live in in alberta there's 314 covered by the act and they all have a municipal

00:04:53.120 emergency plan and so you should as a citizen understand how you fit into that plan contact

00:04:59.440 municipal government understand what that plan looks like and be prepared to do your part

00:05:04.640 to help in that emergency plan if that's required now if i could just cut in there for a second

00:05:10.880 what i'm hearing you say is that other than maybe prudently keeping your gas tank topped up

00:05:17.840 there is nothing that's happening in iran in the straits of hormuz or anywhere else

00:05:25.200 that is an emergency for people living here in Alberta.

00:05:30.180 This is not likely to touch us in any way?

00:05:34.540 Not directly at this point in time.

00:05:38.060 So as well, one of the things the government of Alberta runs

00:05:41.460 is the Alberta Emergency Alert System.

00:05:44.400 And if you haven't got that on your phone, you should.

00:05:47.340 It's an easy app to install, and the government can keep you apprised

00:05:51.180 when situations change, and it's very geographical

00:05:54.260 based on where you actually live.

00:05:56.620 So if you've got your 72-hour preparedness kit for you and your family,

00:06:00.980 if you are connected to your community

00:06:04.140 and understand how your community responds in emergencies,

00:06:08.060 you're as prepared as you can be for now

00:06:10.300 in order to be looking at what's happening in the world.

00:06:14.140 Well, given that there's a huge onus on the provincial government,

00:06:17.440 the municipal government, and ultimately Ottawa itself,

00:06:21.460 enough to be prepared for whatever people need after 72 hours.

00:06:28.020 If you were still advising the government of Alberta, and they called you in and said,

00:06:34.140 talk to us about the situation, what's going on out there that we need to be factoring

00:06:39.020 in as we make our decisions, what would you tell them?

00:06:42.500 Well, first of all, we need to be looking at the provincial order of government and

00:06:47.460 all of the hazards that could impact Alberta.

00:06:50.780 Alberta is an oil producing organization for the world, not just for Albertans, not just for

00:06:57.360 Canadians, but we have a massive impact in terms of our production of oil and natural gas to the

00:07:02.380 world. And can we actually refine enough for our own daily needs? We have enough refineries. We

00:07:08.740 have four refineries in Alberta and we could meet Western Canada's needs and continue to do so on a

00:07:14.820 daily basis. If we were talking about another jurisdiction in Canada, that may not be the case,

00:07:19.740 But certainly here in Alberta, we have the ability for self-sufficiency.

00:07:25.360 Good. So is there anything else that the provincial government would need to be thinking about today?

00:07:32.940 The provincial government should be looking at all of the critical infrastructure, not just oil and gas, but in particular oil and gas,

00:07:40.020 and dusting off what is the critical infrastructure protection plan, which is and has been built for our province,

00:07:46.300 to look at all the different ways that impacts could be felt,

00:07:50.560 and not just from human-induced intentional,

00:07:53.340 but across all of the different types of hazards.

00:07:56.280 And so that plan exists.

00:07:57.400 It should be being reviewed right now in detail.

00:08:00.940 Okay, well, we were talking earlier about the number of IRGC,

00:08:06.720 Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps,

00:08:08.900 about 8,000 members of this organization.

00:08:13.360 I mean, it's a terrorist organization.

00:08:15.040 that's designated as such but somehow they're here in canada and what they're doing and what

00:08:21.520 they're preparing for we don't know but what are you how concerned are you that we have this

00:08:30.640 cadre of people with no friends of ours who might try to upset our apple cart during this situation

00:08:38.560 or do you think they'd maybe be trying to work their way down into the states and commit some

00:08:42.640 outraged there. I'm very concerned. I've always been concerned in particular for the past 11 years

00:08:49.600 as I watched every element of our national security being devolved I think is the nicest

00:08:55.280 way to put it. So maybe if I can just sort of step back and look at national security.

00:09:02.960 There's 10 elements to national security which in my opinion over the past 11 years have been

00:09:08.160 intentionally destroyed or completely reduced in capability the first is the study of geopolitics

00:09:15.360 and geopolitics says canada lives next door to a superpower who has been and continues to be

00:09:23.360 our largest ally and trading partner i believe it's important for canada to strengthen that

00:09:29.440 relationship not chip away at it or try to destroy it so geopolitics defines that we have the comfort

00:09:37.440 of a superpower to ourselves but we also have the hazards and risks that come with that

00:09:42.320 and we need to recognize that the united states is our friend and ally and we need to be working

00:09:48.400 more closely in troubled times with them not stepping back from them in particular though

00:09:54.880 that means the people that are threats to canada number one china who is funding all of the

00:10:00.960 activities worldwide including the islamic republican guard which is operating in canada

00:10:06.800 and has been for some time we need to ensure that we look at all the hazards and risks so the next

00:10:12.560 step in in national security is our intelligence services which have been ignored and and

00:10:19.760 displaced as we know we're not even part of the five eyes significantly anymore

00:10:25.680 next is border services we should have been strengthening our borders and our border

00:10:30.480 services to make sure that we don't have people like the IRGC coming to Canada and operating in

00:10:37.320 Canada. Next is our immigration services and the immigration policy in this country has been

00:10:44.100 completely disrupted intentionally in my opinion in particular for the past five years and we're

00:10:50.240 seeing people who have no desire to be Canadians coming to Canada for no other reason than to

00:10:56.480 disrupt our country. We see the protests in all our major cities screaming death to all Jews,

00:11:03.180 death to all Christians, death to all Canadians with no reaction from the next step in our

00:11:08.840 national security, which is our policing services, which we should be strengthening and upgrading at

00:11:15.000 this point in time as we watch world events. Well, let me ask you this. You have said several

00:11:20.060 times, Dave, that this is intentional, that these organizations and these services have been

00:11:26.060 not merely allowed to fail out of negligence that was intended that they should fail.

00:11:35.940 Do I understand you correctly?

00:11:37.500 In my opinion, you understand me perfectly.

00:11:40.940 This has been an intentional erosion.

00:11:43.980 And when we see things like the Foreign Interference Inquiry not being even started for five years,

00:11:51.100 and then when it is started to be placed on a back burner, that's an intentional act.

00:11:55.660 To go from calling China the largest strategic threat to Canada one year ago and now calling it a very significant strategic partner is a completely intentional act.

00:12:08.640 You can't say it's not.

00:12:10.220 And so from my point of view, each of the steps in the degradation of the 10 elements of national security have been thought through and are intentional.

00:12:19.000 That implies, I mean, for nine years, the prime minister was just intruder.

00:12:24.500 and I think many of us have interpreted the decline of the effectiveness of these services

00:12:31.780 as something that happened not exactly by accident, but he did care about other things,

00:12:39.460 and so that's where the priorities went, and this was an unfortunate accident.

00:12:43.940 What you're saying now is that for nine years, it was actually intentional to bring about

00:12:50.900 a certain purpose. So what is the purpose and do you actually feel that Mr. Trudeau

00:12:58.880 had the competence to do it or that he merely watched other people do it?

00:13:04.580 No, I believe it was intentional. You and I are both old enough to have lived through

00:13:09.380 his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I joined the Army in 1972 and watched him try to destroy

00:13:15.860 our national security if you believe that china is your partner and the united states is not

00:13:23.060 you are taking intentional acts to change the form of government when trudeau jr stated that

00:13:30.180 we were a post-national state that was a clear definition that canada as a nation didn't exist

00:13:37.060 nationhood the national interests of our country were subservient to world interests of a post

00:13:43.380 national state i strongly believe that canada is a nation has a defined culture that we should be

00:13:50.580 fighting for our unity that we should be fighting for our national security because a country is

00:13:55.540 defined in simplest terms when a group of people who share common interests and values bond together

00:14:02.020 in a defined geographical region which they are prepared to defend so unity and national security

00:14:07.860 are the top two of the six national interests that define a country and when you take away or attack

00:14:14.980 the unity of a country by bringing in people who do not share your common interests and values

00:14:21.380 it's an intentional act in order to break the unity and to reduce the ability of a nation to

00:14:28.180 stand by itself i may have to reassess my opinion of mr trudeau as an effective politician

00:14:37.860 I'd like to take you back to earlier times in Alberta.

00:14:43.220 You had, as the provincial government's emergency planner, written a complete plan.

00:14:54.560 Not just to cover pandemics, but to cover all eventualities.

00:15:00.600 Then came COVID.

00:15:02.720 We had a plan, but we didn't use it.

00:15:07.860 And I'm sure it would have been better if we had. For those of us, for those watchers who were younger and maybe didn't live through this or weren't particularly paying attention to it, what just happened here?

00:15:24.440 so maybe a quick look back at covid um back in 2005 the deputy minister of health who was charged

00:15:33.140 with the pandemic influenza plan came to me and asked if we would co-chair the rewrite of the

00:15:38.420 pandemic influenza plan and the reason she did that at that time was the world health organization

00:15:44.560 had just published a document which defined the 15 non-pharmaceutical interventions which we now

00:15:51.860 call lockdowns. So maybe just a quick, the 15 of them included things like school closures,

00:15:57.740 business closures, closing of borders, washing of hands, everything down that list that we saw

00:16:03.380 implemented. And what that document, and it was updated three times, said was do not use these.

00:16:11.400 They are only valuable as a very last resort, and in some cases simply never to be used because they

00:16:19.460 do far more harm than good. So we rewrote the pandemic influenza plan across all of government

00:16:25.600 involving all the departments like transportation, like infrastructure, like water supply to make

00:16:31.240 sure we built a plan that was not based on the use of NPIs we now call lockdowns. That plan was

00:16:38.700 updated in 2014. It's still on the government of Alberta's website and it was completely ignored

00:16:44.540 and disregarded starting in March of 2020.

00:16:49.100 We did exactly the opposite of what should have happened.

00:16:53.540 Things aren't ignored on their own.

00:16:55.640 Somebody chose to ignore it.

00:16:58.120 What happened?

00:16:59.400 Elected officials, in my opinion, across our whole country,

00:17:03.780 ignored all of the science and went for the fear.

00:17:07.700 And so we saw it happen, and it tumbled across our country,

00:17:10.600 and it got worse as it came across, and then it swept back,

00:17:13.320 imposing stricter and stricter and stricter lockdown measures the use of the MPIs and so

00:17:19.220 they gave into fear but I put it to you that there was no need to do that the country of Sweden

00:17:24.320 never used any of the MPIs and came out far better than any of the countries in Europe and in North

00:17:30.300 America some leaders were strong enough and brave enough like Ron DeSantis in Florida after the

00:17:37.060 first wave, stepped back and said, something doesn't feel right. He got Dr. J. Bhattacharya,

00:17:42.980 one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, to come. And he stopped and

00:17:47.540 stated very clearly in May of 2020, we will never use NPIs and lockdowns again in Florida.

00:17:53.100 And they didn't and came up far better than California, who had massive restrictions.

00:17:59.440 This was a choice by elected officials in cooperation with the medical officers of health

00:18:05.020 and done completely incorrectly, and we're still paying the price.

00:18:10.160 The increase in suicides, mental health issues,

00:18:14.640 the destruction of three years of our children's education,

00:18:17.600 which they have never going to be able to make up.

00:18:20.860 Studies show that the loss of one year of education in a child

00:18:25.040 reduces their lifespan by three to five years

00:18:28.420 and reduces their economic capacity by five to 10%.

00:18:32.920 We have done catastrophic damage, which is still showing in our society.

00:18:38.260 And unless we do a detailed recovery to recover from those use of MPIs, those dangers and consequences will continue.

00:18:48.740 Did you at any point have an opportunity?

00:18:50.820 I don't think you were still the emergency planner when this happened in 2020.

00:18:55.440 But did you at any point have the opportunity to confront an elected official and say, why are we doing this?

00:19:04.280 We should be doing something different.

00:19:06.840 I was fully retired in 2020.

00:19:09.140 And what I did is I tried to contact, I did contact every premier's office in Canada, all 10 provinces and three territories.

00:19:18.060 And I did it monthly, begging them just to phone and talk to me.

00:19:22.140 Here in Alberta, I got responses saying, basically, no, we're going to do it differently, and thank you very much, don't call again.

00:19:30.560 So at the end of the year of constantly trying to contact premier offices, I wrote what I call Canada's deadly response to COVID-19 in the hopes that one day elected officials and MOAs will be held accountable, and it's published on the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

00:19:48.920 It's an astonishing story. Do you believe that if similar circumstances arose today,

00:19:59.160 the politicians would react in the same way? Could they perhaps have learned something from

00:20:04.040 what happened five years ago? Unfortunately, I believe that until an elected official

00:20:09.720 is held accountable for gross negligence and medical officer health similarly,

00:20:14.600 that we will do exactly the same thing again the world health organization has put out a protocol

00:20:20.520 which removes the powers of elected officials in countries and gives that power to the world

00:20:27.240 health organization and canada signed that document so i believe we will not only do it

00:20:33.320 worse we will do it immediately and longer well that's that's a given that given that

00:20:43.560 uh pandemics come around with depressing regularity i suppose we'd better return to the

00:20:49.560 emergency plan side of this next time there is a next time there is a medical emergency

00:20:57.880 we're going to have to be individually prepared for longer than three days i think

00:21:02.280 what do you think i believe that if individuals do their part and demand that elected officials

00:21:09.880 become more accountable and that they become involved in their local politics we still can

00:21:17.720 change this in time so you're right pandemics do happen there's been five in my lifetime

00:21:23.320 and and they will happen again but we need to far more than just the health emergencies what's

00:21:29.640 happening right now is we see a more and more authoritarian approach to our government at the

00:21:34.600 federal level now here in alberta thank goodness we have some protections against that and and a

00:21:40.840 government that doesn't believe in that but that's not true across our country and so i believe that

00:21:46.440 it's time for us to hold accountable elected officials for what i would call gross negligence

00:21:52.600 and that is chargeable in the courts and so we need to have citizens re-engage so when we talk

00:21:58.440 about emergency preparedness the individual needs to take responsibility for themselves and their

00:22:03.960 families far more i i always uh in in these type of discussions talk about helicopter parenting for

00:22:10.760 20 20 years and bulldozer parenting for the next 20 years and what's that done in my opinion is

00:22:17.240 it got citizens to think that risk wasn't theirs it belonged to government to manage that's not

00:22:24.280 true and we need to make sure that we are building resilient citizens starting in kindergarten

00:22:30.360 starting from birth but in the home and then all the way through their education process to say

00:22:36.440 take back responsibility for the risk in your lives then you can see things like having children

00:22:42.200 talking with their parents about a 72-hour preparedness kit and what their parents do

00:22:46.760 and instead of saying things like when a when a forest fire happens everyone flee and evacuate

00:22:52.680 All able-bodied personnel are built into a municipal response, pre-trained, and helped fight the forest fire instead of running away and allowing just the SRD firefighters and the military to be called in to save their homes.

00:23:07.260 It's time for communities to stand up and protect their communities in a trained and proper way, as is detailed in the Alberta Emergency Act.

00:23:17.840 you know dave what you're talking about is the pioneer settler mentality that

00:23:23.000 didn't look to government just got it done themselves we've got a long way to go to get

00:23:28.360 that back thank you for coming on the show it's been great having you

00:23:32.940 and for the western standard i'm nigel hannaford

00:23:47.840 Thank you.

Western Standard - April 03, 2026

Ex-Alberta emergency chief says Ottawa destroying national security agencies - as a matter of policy

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript