The extensive preparations authorized and set in motion by the Diefenbaker Government in1958-59 were put on indefinite hold by the 1968 Trudeau Government cabinet decision to stop or delay all civil defence spending.
This ‘freeze’ basically officially continued for the next two decades of the Cold War (with the occasional minor deviation in some of the sub programs to respond to particular international crises). The construction of ‘bunker’ facilities was never resumed.
The result was that all facilities, equipment, procedures and other arrangements completed and in place at that time (1968) were to be retained and maintained but no further expenditures were to be committed to their completion or upgrading.
Continuity of Government versus Continuity of Constitutional Government (and the Central Emergency Government Headquarters – the ‘Diefenbunker’)
The Continuity of Government (CoG) Program was originally presented to Parliament by Prime Minister John D. Diefenbaker in 1958 and, as the excerpts from the August 21, 1958 Parliamentary record Hansard show, his statement was unreservedly supported by the then leader of the opposition, Lester B. Pierson. That in itself demonstrates the importance that out parliamentary leaders at the time attached to this matter. Other NATO nations made similar preparations. The primary purpose of the CoG program from its inception was to protect and support the essentials of ‘executive’ federal government in order to preserve a ‘thin thread’ of legitimate government through the chaos of a nuclear attack on North America. All that was required to pass whatever ’emergency regulations’ would have been required to deal with the situation was the assent of four federal cabinet ministers and the signature of the Governor General.
A primary responsibility of Emergency Preparedness Canada (the agency charged with actualizing the CoG) was to support the implementation and readiness of the program as it was set out originally by Parliament and elaborated upon in PCO’s Emergency Planning Orders.
Then in 1988 the new Emergencies Act came into being (to replace the somewhat heavy handed – and infamous -War Measures Act) and, more pertinent to our CoG readiness activities, the Emergency Preparedness Act was passed. The latter had a very significant impact (one that probably had not been fully anticipated by the authors of the new legislation) on the Emergency Government Facilities aspects of the CoG. As a result of the fact that the ‘new’ act called for Continuity of Constitutional Government, we had to rethink the numbers aspects of our Central Emergency Government Headquarters protective accommodation arrangements. We consulted a government lawyer who was expert in constitutional law to try to determine what was the minimum we had to do to meet the requirements of the new legislation. The word ‘Constitutional’ meant that government by executive decree was out and that representatives from the legislative and judicial branches of government had to be included in our protected locations.
After much analysis it was concluded that we had to provide for a quorum of each of the House of Commons, the Senate, the Federal Court and the Supreme Court. A quorum of the House of Commons is 20 (including the Speaker), of the Senate is 15, of the Supreme and Federal Courts five each plus various minimum support staffs gave us a ‘doable’ number. As I recall it the total number of ‘new’ occupants that needed to be provided for was only about 55 or 60. We checked out the environmental systems in the bunker and found we were OK for the increased numbers of bodies involved. The main problem was sleeping even with “hot bedding” the norm (and to a lesser extent, suitable ‘office/working’) spaces. In room 457A (across from the EPC HF Emergency Radios Room) we experimented with converting the double bunks to triple bunks. We calculated that there were sufficient civilian double bunked rooms that if modified to triple bunks could accommodate the extra people involved. (Locker space would have been tight). We never got around to sorting out where the quorums of Parliament/Judicial bodies would have met (presumably they could have made use of the War Cabinet room and the 400 level conference room. Nor did the potentially thorny question of whether or not, or to what extent members of the opposition parties would have had to have been included.
The end of the Cold War and the shutting down of the then “new” Continuity of Constitutional Government Program in the early 90s followed eventually by the closing of the Emergency Government Facilities by 1994 put an end to this planning process. In my humble view as a senior emergency planning official we ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’ when we closed and disposed of the EGFs and stopped related planning. In 2001 it became clear (to me anyway) that that doing so was a mistake. Who knows what current arrangements exist to serve the same purposes as did the CoG program (if any) and how effective they would be in a nuclear-type crisis compared to the extensive and expensive original EGFs and their associated activation plans. We can only hope!
-Dave Peters
