HALIFAX - Ottawa pledged Wednesday to speed up payments to regions hit by natural disasters following years of complaints from the provinces that it can take years before funds are handed over.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said he and his provincial counterparts agreed on several steps that could expedite the flow of money to areas damaged by things like hurricanes and floods.
"It should mean that provinces will be getting cheques not four, five or six years after the event, but in a much compressed time,'' he told reporters as he wrapped up a meeting in Halifax of ministers responsible for emergency management.
Those measures include new standardized forms that might cut through some of the bureaucracy and confusion the provinces say have dogged the process.
Years after a series of disasters, like the 1997 ice storm, hurricane Juan and wind storms that battered national parks from Halifax to Vancouver, the ministers said they will develop audit guidelines to help provinces with all the documents required in filing a request for aid.
Jamie Muir, Nova Scotia's minister of Treasury and Policy, said the changes were long overdue and should hopefully improve a process that has left his province waiting for assistance more than four years after hurricane Juan.
"The monies which we believe we're entitled to flowing from that disaster have not yet flowed,'' he said.
"We welcome the money, there's no question, but getting it to flow in a more timely way would remove a lot of the tension.''
The province said last March that it was still waiting for more than $30 million in relief funding, most of it related to hurricane Juan which destroyed thousands of trees and damaged homes when it tore ashore in 2003.
Day said some of the measures should come into effect immediately, while others will take years to put in place.
Officials said the eligibility for the federal funding will also be expanded to cover more cases under the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements.
And, money might be made available before the final bills are tallied if provinces can provide a rough estimate of how much funding they will ultimately require, Day said.
"If a catastrophe is of a certain order of magnitude you can (say), `Look it's going to be at least this amount of money' and you can advance those dollars,'' he said.
The minister also discussed creating a truly national public alert system that would be used to warn of potential disasters.
As well, the ministers have decided to set up a consultation process to identify Canada's most critical infrastructure and how those sites can be protected in the event of natural or man-made disasters.
