Canada’s police chiefs want more control of national alerting system

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Canada’s police chiefs say they want more control over the country’s direct-to-cellphone emergency alerting system, and a set of national guidelines to determine when and how to use it.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) passed a resolution this month at its annual convention urging Public Safety Canada to lead an immediate review of the alerting system to determine whether the way it is organized allows police to warn the public about threats such as gunmen or terrorist attacks in a timely and effective manner.

Law-enforcement leaders have sometimes struggled to navigate the system, known as Alert Ready, and expressed concerns about their level of access after it stayed silent during a mass shooting in Nova Scotia in April, 2020.

The system was expanded in 2018 from TV and radio warnings to allow authorities across Canada to broadcast jolting, pop-up messages about threats to all cellphones in a given area.

However, emergency management is a provincial responsibility, and civil servants at emergency management organizations (EMOs) in each province control how the system is used. The EMOs issue alerts at starkly different rates, most often for weather warnings. Many jurisdictions do not give police direct access to the alerting system.

Police commanders say this needs to change so that forces across Canada can work from the same playbook and sound alarms when violent catastrophes strike. “We need to formulate our response to as close to universal as possible, so that in instances where there is a severe event that overlaps the borders, our systems mesh,” said Ontario Provincial Police Superintendent Mike McDonell, who co-chairs the CACP’s emergency management committee.

We must not become inured to the presence of gun violence

The committee introduced the resolution that was passed on Aug. 9 at this year’s annual convention. Supt. McDonell also said alerting will improve only if law-enforcement agencies and first responders are part of federal-provincial forums that discuss the alerting system.

“We need to be acting as one,” Supt. McDonell said. Otherwise, “I’m worried that we’ll have a plethora of police agencies, emergency agencies, off in all directions with different systems that do not mesh.”

No cellphone warnings sounded last year as a gunman killed 22 people over a 13-hour period in rural Nova Scotia. During the attack, police and provincial EMO officials tried to craft an Alert Ready warning, but police abandoned the attempt and resorted to Twitter.

An inquiry into the April, 2020, massacre this week appealed for police and other first responders in the province to make submissions about what they experienced. During the overnight rampage, a gunman in a fake RCMP uniform drove a replica cruiser across swaths of the province, attacking people in their homes and their cars before Mounties shot and killed him. The inquiry is to complete its report by November, 2022.

Police chiefs at the annual meeting remained worried that communication breakdowns could continue unless the highest levels of government convene to review alerting. “The CACP calls upon Public Safety Canada … to urge its provincial and territorial partners to complete a comprehensive review,” the resolution says.

The chiefs are also urging the federal department “to commit financial, policy, and other human resources” and ensure this work is completed by next June.

The resolution says that while police in Ontario and B.C. and within RCMP divisions have been negotiating better access to the alerting system, a lot of smaller police forces are still unfamiliar with Alert Ready. “Local authorities are also struggling to navigate the Canadian public alerting landscape,” the CACP resolution says.

It adds that “governance gaps exist in many provinces and territories.”

The police resolution says law-enforcement officers need full, shared access across Canada to alerting in emergencies such as active shooters, bomb blasts and terrorist attacks.

But police still lack alerting templates and protocols, the resolution says, meaning they might lose time crafting messages. “While specific threat-to-life alert types have been identified by Alert Ready, the responsibilities, criteria and message content have not yet been clarified for these types of alerts.”

Earlier this month, police in Newfoundland warned the public about a gunman on the loose. Yet while the RCMP posted its warnings to social media around 11 p.m. that day, police and the provincial EMO were still discussing the possibility of sending a direct-to-cellphone alert when a man was arrested shortly before midnight.

“An Alert Ready notification was requested,” the RCMP said in a statement, adding that the suspect “was taken into custody just prior to the alert being issued.”

Madeleine Gomery, a spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, did not comment on the police chiefs’ proposal, but said the department is planning to strengthen governance.

“Public Safety Canada is working with all partners in public alerting,” she said.

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