From protection to coordinated preparedness: A genealogy of critical infrastructure in Canada

Abstract

This article provides a genealogy of the governance of critical infrastructure in Canada. We focus in particular on a largely unknown and unexamined civil defense initiative introduced during World War II that sought to count, categorize and, under declaration of a national emergency, directly protect what were then known as ‘vital points’ from sabotage. Our analysis recounts major episodes and turning points in the deployment of this organizational apparatus by the various institutions responsible for civil defence and emergency management in which it was embedded. In the latter sections of this article we show how the problem of critical infrastructure was decoupled from the exercise of exceptional emergency power and reconstituted in the form of what we refer to as ‘coordinated preparedness’, through which the governance of critical infrastructure is accomplished in ways that are compatible with the constitutionalization of Canada’s emergency power. We conclude by considering what the governance of critical infrastructure in Canada reveals for critical understandings of emergencies and emergency power.