Municipal police forces will still route their alerts through the provincial EMO unless they also want to make a case for direct access.Tim Krochak/The Canadian Press
Nova Scotia is giving police direct access to a system that can sound alerts on all cellphones in the vicinity of a crisis, a change that comes 15 months after communications breakdowns kept the warning system silent as a gunman killed 22 people.
The province announced on Thursday it has trained the RCMP and Halifax Regional Police on how to directly use the national public warning system known as Alert Ready. This means officers at these forces can reach out to the public without having to work with the province’s emergency management organization (EMO).
The statement announcing these changes did not mention the RCMP-EMO communication problems that occurred during the gunman’s 13-hour massacre in April, 2020. A public inquiry into what led to Canada’s worst mass shooting is to release reports next year on several issues, including the breakdowns in alerting.
Police forces in Nova Scotia have worked more closely with the provincial EMO over the past year. The province now sounds more warnings about active shooters than all other jurisdictions in Canada combined.
Following last year’s mass shooting, Nova Scotia changes course on public emergency alerts
“The alert system is something we have every confidence in, whether alerts are issued by police or EMO,” Nova Scotia Municipal Affairs Minister Brendan Maguire said in a statement announcing heightened access for police.
During the massacre, a gunman wearing a Mountie uniform and driving a replica cruiser rampaged overnight across Colchester County, eluding police as he selected victims. He was shot and killed by officers hours later.
No jurisdiction in Canada had ever issued an alert about an active shooter at that point, even though the technological capabilities to put out such warnings had existed since 2018. During the final stages of the attack, provincial officials and local RCMP officers discussed putting out an Alert Ready warning together that could have gone to all cellphones, and TVs and radios in the area.
But confusion about how to exchange information and craft the alert left that message incomplete. Instead, the Mounties put warnings about the gunman on Twitter. Lawyers representing families of the victims have said these decisions were inexcusable. “It is preposterous that the emergency-alert system wasn’t utilized. It would have arguably reached a whole lot more people in a timely manner,” Sandra McCulloch said in April.
Fallout from the Nova Scotia massacre has prompted a public discussion about how governance gaps may undercut the service’s potential. Statistics show that Alert Ready is used at starkly different rates by different provinces. The system remains most often used for weather warnings and natural disasters.
Last year, The Globe and Mail reported on an unreleased 2017 review that canvassed knowledgeable insiders about the system. Some critics suggested even then that improving technology might mean little if the provincial EMOs did not allow police sufficient access. “Many policy issues will have to be dealt with once wireless [alerting] is in play, such as what is an alert, who issues it and when can police forces use the system,” one stakeholder was anonymously quoted as saying.
But these issues escaped public attention until the Nova Scotia massacre. Before then, many people in Canada did not know much about the national public-alerting system or that it was upgraded in 2018. During a crisis, provincial EMOs across Canada can issue alerts to all cell phones that combine loud alarms with popup messages about the situation.
What’s changing is that the province’s biggest police forces are being given more autonomy to do this. “The Nova Scotia RCMP and Halifax Regional Police (HRP) now have direct access to the Alert Ready system,” the province’s statement said. “Direct access gives police the ability to issue an alert without assistance from EMO.”
Municipal police forces will still route their alerts through the provincial EMO unless they also want to make a case for direct access. “The option is available to other policing services across the province when and if they choose,” the statement said.
Nova Scotia is not the first province to do this. In 2020, Ontario and New Brunswick announced that their biggest police forces police would have direct access to the national public alerting system. These provinces have since issued several active-shooter alerts.
The B.C. government has not yet issued such an alert, but says it may be in a position to do so soon. Local Mounties and the provincial government “have developed an alerting protocol for active shooter situations,” Susan Williams, a spokeswoman for Emergency Management British Columbia, said in an e-mail.
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Colin Freeze