The emergency alert system was never used during the shootings
During the final stages of the violence, provincial officials and local RCMP officers were trying to put together such a message, one that could have gone directly to people’s cellphones in the affected area. But issues surrounding communications protocols and how to craft the alert meant that it was never completed. Instead, the Mounties put out warnings about the gunman only through Twitter – a social-media service that most people don’t use in rural regions.
The regulatory body conducted interviews with “key stakeholders,” including representatives of broadcast and telecom corporations and also federal and provincial public servants.Their voices were quoted but not named by the CRTC in a bid “to encourage openness and the sharing of information.” The critics canvassed in the report pointed out that police often lack authority to initiate alerts because the overall responsibility for doing so rests with provincial EMOs.
Others criticized the arrangement as the ultimate abdication of responsibility, given how public officials in Canada had never themselves come together to craft effective policy and funding arrangements for the alert system. “I was worried, quite frankly, we would be without a system and the blame would fall largely on the CRTC,” Konrad Von Finckenstein, the commission’s chair at the time, told The Globe.
Public Safety and Emergency Management Canada “does not lead in this space,” a stakeholder told the CRTC.
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