Operation LENTUS and You: An Emergency Manager’s Guide to the CAF

Abstract

As the scale and frequency of natural disasters and other emergencies continues to rise in Canada, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) has increasingly taken part in domestic disaster assistance operations. Operation LENTUS, being the CAF’s name for all domestic natural disaster assistance operations, has seen the deployment of thousands of CAF personnel over recent years. The same is true for Operation LASER and VECTOR—the CAF’s operations in support of COVID-19 mitigation and vaccination efforts respectively. As such, emergency management (EM) practitioners are increasingly interacting with CAF personnel, both in headquarters environments for operational planning as well as in field conditions during the execution of specific EM tasks. Despite this, and by no fault of their own, many EM practitioners are unfamiliar with the CAF and are subsequently unsure how best to integrate CAF resources into their operations. Due to the complex nature of interagency EM operations, fostering mutual understanding and awareness is crucial to conducting effective EM operations. As such, this paper seeks to bridge this gap in the general knowledge of emergency managers towards their CAF partners during domestic operations.

In doing so, this paper will explain and discuss various aspects of the CAF in domestic operations across the complete spectrum of operations, from legislative/strategic considerations to aspects of local execution of EM tasks. These explanations will serve as a starting point for emergency managers to improve their understanding of the CAF and guide their considerations when working in partnership with the CAF. It is hoped that bridging this gap will improve the operational effectiveness of CAF-Civil authority interagency operations and subsequently benefit Canadians in their times of need.