Welcome to Volume 2, Number 1

Thank you for your commitment to our profession in the midst of another busy time for emergency managers in Canada. We commend you for never stepping back and for fully engaging your important role in your community, your province, and in Canada.

As we prepare this issue and start our new volume, Canada enters its third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Omicron variant rapidly spreading around the world. Still, other emergencies unfold and affect us in big ways: the system of atmospheric rivers that hit British Columbia in late 2021 still leaves it vulnerable to significant supply chain disruption, flooding, and landslides. This follows after an extreme fire season in the same province. Flooding impacted Alberta just as dramatically, and fires challenged the Prairies in one their busiest fire seasons ever.

Clearly, our profession is facing more challenges, not fewer of them. Clearly, our collective knowledge and skills need to be mobilized now more than ever.

That is why we are excited to offer a host of new knowledge to help the policy making and academic communities understand the challenges “on the ground,” and the practitioners to better inform their operations and planning. It’s also why in 2021, we bolstered our Editorial Board with three new outstanding members, and introduced the first Senior Contributing Editor of the organization.

Martin Laroche and Steve Plante suggest a new relationship focus for emergency preparedness and risk management in Saint-André de Kamouraska, Québec in an article that we proudly offer to harness our Québécois colleagues’ knowledge—a gap that has been open for too long. Alexander Landry writes about the rising important of volunteerism in emergency management in Canada—germane to the whole-of-society approach taken during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our colleague Scott Cameron of Emergency Management Logistics Canada ably suggests opportunities to connect emergency logisticians and aid in resource identification and sourcing. Kayla Pepper leads an important conversation on cultural safety in emergency support services. Finally, in a unique offering, Kaitlyn Boudreau, Melanie Robinson, and Zahrah Farooqi of our Operations section curate a briefing note on the sixth report of the International Panel on Climate Change.

Whether you are heading into 2022 to prepare for and respond to your normal hazard environment or are still steeped in pandemic response; whether you are a veteran of our field or a new student; whether a policy-maker in a government office, a scholar in a research institution, or a practitioner in an emergency reception centre, we believe Volume 2, Issue 1 of the Canadian Journal of Emergency Management has something valuable for you. We encourage you to read, analyze, and write your own research or “Bridging the Gap” article in our next issue. For now, we are honoured to present this issue to you and thank you once more for your professionalism, your commitment, and your service.

Ich Dien (I serve),