Canadian military involvement in humanitarian assistance: progress and prudence in natural disaster response

Understanding Donor Behaviour: Actors and Processes in Disaster-Relief Decision-Making

“…The Government of Canada did not face similar pressures during the Given that the earthquake was a sudden-onset natural disaster, there was a clear start-time for the Canadian disaster-relief system to kick into gear. In fact, mobilization of the whole-ofgovernment community involved in Canada's natural disaster responses occurred only minutes after authorities received news of the Haiti earthquake (Mamuji 2012). With flooding, however, it is harder to pinpoint when the situation moves from being bad to serious.…”

“…The deployment of DART corresponds to Canada's largest disaster-relief interventions (Mamuji 2012). Path dependent factors, however, cannot explain why the magnitude of Canada's aid is not always comparable when Canada responds to natural disasters in Haiti and Pakistan.…”

“…Once Cabinet had made it apparent that they would engage in a robust response to the flooding in Pakistan, they pushed for extra media coverage to ensure that their efforts were well publicized (Mamuji 2012).…”

“…Lessons-learned reporting and respondents have both raised issues with the fact that media representatives were sent to Haiti on military flights at a critical time (see Mamuji 2012). Although journalists are generally free to report at their own will, a recent study on the coverage of the earthquake indicated that on average the CBC's online coverage printed nine separate articles on Haiti per day, with reports of Canada's "gift" of foreign aid overshadowing information about the earthquake's damage and suffering (Mason 2010).…”

“…Although it is a thin manual, the SOPs have proven to be extremely powerful for facilitating Canada's disaster-relief interventions through structural and ideational coherence, and joint decision making (Mamuji 2012). The SOPs "are designed to streamline standard actions in response to a major crisis and to anticipate turn over in staff amongst the various stakeholder units and organizations" (DFAIT 2005: 59).…”