Police in N.S. were offered control over public alerts years before mass shooting

New documents released by the public inquiry into Nova Scotia's mass shootings show the RCMP had turned down the ability to directly issue emergency alerts multiple times in the years before the tragedy.

The documents also show that an active shooter situation did not meet the criteria for sending an emergency alert two years ago.

At the time of the massacre on April 18-19, 2020, all Nova Scotia police agencies had to send a request for an alert and the accompanying text to the provincial Emergency Management Office (EMO).

But the head of EMO said the office didn't hear from the RCMP about the possibility of sending an alert until minutes before the gunman was killed. That request came after multiple attempts by EMO staff to reach the RCMP and offer the service.

The Mass Casualty Commission examining the mass shootings in which a gunman killed 22 people released new documents Tuesday reviewing the history of the Alert Ready system in the province and what happened during the tragedy.

According to the documents, the executive director of EMO told commission investigators in a February interview that while he's immensely sympathetic to police, he's confounded by the fact that his department wasn't asked for an alert.

"If someone had said to me … that you would have an event go on for 13 hours where there was an extremely dangerous person who has shown that they have no qualms about killing people at random, and they're going to roam around the province … and an alert would — nobody would think to request it of us. I wouldn't have believed it," said Paul Mason.

"We've been testing this thing for 10 years and you never even [thought] to call us?" 

Nova Scotia first introduced the Alert Ready system in 2011, when it could only broadcast across participating radio stations. Ontario-based Pelmorex owns the software system and operates it on behalf of the federal government, the documents state.

"Broadcast immediate" alerts — issued in "emergency situations where life and safety are under immediate threat and time is critical, according to the documents — are now distributed via television, radio, the Weather Network app, and LTE devices such as smartphones.

Pelmorex has a governance council on public alerting that includes representatives from emergency management offices, cable and satellite companies, and radio and TV stations.

Discussions with the RCMP about having "direct access" to issue alerts without going through EMO date back to roughly 2011. Mason said the option was offered because EMO officials don't have the situational awareness on what police are doing, and the office isn't staffed 24/7.

Even though EMO has on-call teams that can spring into action for an alert request, its policy sets a target of sending an alert within 15 minutes, so Mason said "it takes time."

At least one RCMP officer thought the system might be useful to police: former justice minister Mark Furey wrote a briefing note on the issue in 2012 when he was an RCMP staff sergeant.