Ruby Works, a friend of mass stabbing victim Wes Petterson, speaks to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer outside Petterson's home in Weldon, Sask. on Sept. 6, 2022.LARS HAGBERG/AFP/Getty Images
In September, as an inquiry in Nova Scotia probed the RCMP’s failure to use Canada’s alerting system during a mass shooting in 2020, an unprecedented number of direct-to-cellphone alerts sounded out from the Mounties in Saskatchewan.
A mass murderer struck on Sept. 4, this time with a knife. The first 911 call came in just before dawn. Two Mounties raced up gravel roads at 170 kilometres an hour to the James Smith Cree Nation. The killer had left 11 dead and 18 injured.
The officers tended to the wounded as they called in details. “They were actually working on people at that time, working to try to stop people from bleeding out, and talking on a radio to say, ‘This is what’s going on,’” Saskatchewan RCMP Superintendent Teddy Munro said in an interview.
Information was relayed to a police communications centre in Regina, which passed it on to alert issuers at the RCMP who told the local public to seek shelter. That alert popped up on cellphones at 7:12 a.m. – 90 minutes after police received the first 911 calls, about an hour after they arrived on the scene. “This is pretty quick for an isolated rural area,” Supt. Munro said.
A 78-year-old in a nearby village was killed around the time of the first alerts. But from that point forward, no other victims were hurt.
As the fugitive suspect fled in a car, follow-up cellphone alerts started pinging provincewide and even into neighbouring provinces. The text messages relayed details about the man, his vehicle, and his presumed whereabouts. Police sounded a total of 10 “broadcast intrusive” cellphone warnings in Saskatchewan, three in Manitoba, and one in Alberta before the manhunt ended four days later, when the man was arrested and later died.
Nowhere else in Canada have authorities sounded the national public alerting system so much to contend with the threat of a dangerous person.
Myles Sanderson was known on his reserve as a violent criminal. Yet an outstanding arrest warrant against him and his criminal record had not come to the attention of RCMP officers who worked out of a detachment 45 kilometres away. Some Indigenous communities say First Nations-led policing is a more effective way to handle such situations. “We ask that we have our own tribal policing,” Chief Wally Burns of the James Smith Cree Nation said in a speech made days after the crimes and the series of alerts.
Provincial emergency officials who control access to alerting technology have kept a relatively tight lid on their systems, often reserving them for the most severe weather or natural disasters.
The Prairies have a different culture.
After the 1987 Edmonton tornado killed 27 people, regional officials got serious about emergency communications. Provincial civil servants learned best practices, looped in local officials who know their communities best, and started cycles of collective training. In 2018, a federal official told Parliament that many Canadian jurisdictions are catching up in terms of alerting. “We have great leadership from Alberta and Saskatchewan,” Public Safety Canada’s Patrick Tanguy said.
Tamie Vandeven, the director of Saskatchewan’s emergency-communications program, says it just makes sense for a province to train police and delegate alerting access to them. “Government agencies, RCMP, local police, they can all sign up,” she said.
But the price of admission is constant training, she said, so that all alert issuers have honed their skills and are less likely to make mistakes when a crisis arrives. “They are required, every single one that wants to issue an alert, to send quarterly practice alerts.”
In Saskatchewan, 13 RCMP officers are authorized to issue cellphone alerts, and they do planning exercises with police peers. “It’s really important for the public to understand this isn’t just issuing or sending a text message,” says Mandy Maier, an RCMP civilian employee trained to issue alerts since 2017. “These are people entering this information, knowing the event is unfolding, and new information is coming in, and we’re wanting to notify the public and give them instructions.
“And the stress and anxiety associated to that is very real.”
Intrusive cellphone alerting is not a singular tool, given that officials also use apps and social and broadcast media to amplify warnings. The national public alerting system, known as Alert Ready, started years ago by flagging severe weather through interruptions to TV and radio broadcasts. Direct-to-cellphone warning technology was rolled out nationally in 2018.
In April, 2020, a gunman in Nova Scotia shot dead 22 victims. But the Alert Ready system never went off during his 13-hour rampage. RCMP police communicators who responded to that crisis testified at a public inquiry over the summer that they had no idea until the crisis that they could have issued cellphone alerts.
Emergency officials in Nova Scotia said they had tried for years to initiate discussions about Alert Ready, but were rebuffed by that division of the RCMP.
The province’s former justice minister made that same point. “There was very clear opposition to the concept of Alert Ready,” Mark Furey told the inquiry. In an interview transcript released last month, he said he himself had been Nova Scotia Mountie until 2012, when he resigned in frustration because his superiors were so unreceptive to alerting initiatives.
Before the 2020 massacre, no dangerous persons alerts had ever sounded in Canada. Now, the RCMP and other large police forces do issue such Alert Ready messages, although they are rare. Last year, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police said too many forces still struggle to navigate a disjointed policy patchwork in which the responsibilities, criteria and message content for police-initiated alerts are unclear. The group called upon Ottawa to develop and fund a national strategy.
Dangerous persons warnings are reserved for suspects who police consider “uncontained” and indiscriminately violent. They may be rarer in cities than the countryside. About one in five Canadians live in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, but authorities there put out their first-ever Alert Ready dangerous persons message only a few weeks ago.
Chief Nishan Duraiappah of Peel Regional Police says public alerting may be less important for metropolitan jurisdictions like his, located west of Toronto. Compared to rural regions where police an have little or no backup, he said, city police forces work “shoulder to shoulder” to pursue suspects.
In an interview, he acknowledged criticism that his police force faced for the Alert Ready message it put out last month. “People desired more detail. The only thing I have to say to the public is, if they want more detail it’s going to equate to more time.”
On the afternoon of Sept. 12, a gunman killed a police officer and then two other people in shootings kilometres apart. The Alert Ready message told the public to be on the lookout for a stolen vehicle and not to approach it. “Police are investigating an active shooter – armed and dangerous,” the message said. It included a link to a website that gave a Jeep Cherokee’s license plate.
The message was sent to millions of cellphones in Southern Ontario. It did not indicate the killer’s whereabouts or where he had struck. The shooter’s violence started at 2 p.m., but the public warning went out at 4:30 – as police caught up with him and shot him dead.
Peel Regional Police did not directly issue the alert. The Ontario Provincial Police has exclusive police access to the province’s alerting systems and acts as a relay for municipal forces by vetting and distributing prospective alerts.
The OPP has put out nine dangerous persons cellphone alerts over the past two years in the rural regions it patrols. “We are having ongoing conversations to be able to allow some of the largest police services in the province to be able to issue their own alerts,” OPP Inspector Todd Pittman said.