Lawyer: Emergency alert could have saved lives
An emergency alert to warn Nova Scotians during the 13-hour murder rampage in 2020 could have saved lives, a lawyer representing family members of victims said Wednesday.
“We have this superior tool and it should have been used,” Sandra Mcculloch said in an interview Wednesday outside the public inquiry room at a Dartmouth hotel.
“There can be no question about it that we have the ability to reach a wide audience in a powerful way and nobody even turned their mind to using it and that has to change.”
That tool is the Alert Ready warning system that has been in place in the province since 2011 and can now send warning messages to people by way of cellphones and through television and radio broadcasts.
Mcculloch addressed the commission Wednesday afternoon after two days of testimony from a public warning expert and two members of the province’s Emergency Management Office (EMO).
“Our public alert system, Alert Ready, wasn’t utilized on April 18 and 19, 2020,” said Mcculloch, a lawyer with the Patterson Law firm. “The RCMP’S duty to warn the public was fulfilled largely only by social media messaging.”
She said that messaging was lacking in content and timeliness and that social media cannot convey the gravity and urgency of a shooting situation as effectively as a public emergency alert would.
‘OUGHT TO BE HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED’
“From our clients’ perspective and indeed we believe this is supported by much of the Nova Scotia public, Alert Ready ought to have been deployed.”
On Tuesday, Paul Mason, EMO executive director, told the inquiry that he was surprised that the RCMP hadn’t requested an Alert Ready during the rampage.
Mason testified that EMO eventually suggested to the RCMP that an alert was warranted and would be useful but the police force was still in the process of drafting the alert message when the gunman was killed by police at the Enfield Big Stop in the late morning of April 19.
Mcculloch shared her personal experience of playing with her children in the backyard that April 19 morning, some eight kilometres away from where the killer stopped for gas at the Elmsdale Petro-canada before he proceeded to the Enfield Big Stop where he was killed at approximately 11:25 a.m.
Describing her experience as “insignificant” compared with what her clients endured, Mcculloch said she got a text message at 11:25 a.m., from a friend advising her to stay inside and lock the doors because there was an active shooter in the area.
The friend had received a call from another friend who had family who were RCMP members and who had conveyed the private warning message.
“Commissioners, that’s how I learned about the mass casualty event, not through Twitter, not through Facebook, not through Alert Ready but because I was lucky to have a friend who had a friend who had a family member in the RCMP,” Mcculloch said.
“Had there been an emergency alert, I would not have been exposed with my children when the perpetrator was attempting to get gas minutes from my home. I would have had the opportunity to have been safely tucked inside and watching for danger but much, much more significant than that, had there been an emergency alert, quite likely individuals like Thomas Bagley, Kristen Beaton, Heather O’brien, Joey Webber, all of whom we know had a cellphone on their person when they encountered the perpetrator, would have had similar opportunity to be safely tucked inside their homes and watching for danger.”
Bagley, Beaton, O'brien and Webber were killed by the perpetrator on the morning of April 19 and their family members are among Patterson’s client group. Mcculloch said that is only a partial list of the people and victims who might have done things differently if they had known an active shooter was on the loose in the area.
RCMP RESPONSE ‘SURPRISING’
Mcculloch also read from Mason’s statement to the commission in which he described the RCMP decision making by saying, "it didn’t cross their minds."
“I find it surprising that we could have an event go on from like 10:30 or whatever on a Saturday night until 11:30 on Sunday morning and nobody (RCMP) thought of an alert until we called them.”
The commission will hear from the RCMP about public communications on those April 2020 days in two weeks time, but Mcculloch said by separating the two narratives, “we can’t today meaningfully analyze what type of emergency alerting could have been carried out that day and what content ought to have been conveyed to the public and at what times.”
Mccullough said police have a legal duty to warn but said going forward consolidation of deployment of the emergency alert system, too, should be a legal obligation, along with an accounting thereafter as to why it was deployed or why not.
INEFFECTIVELY GOVERNED
The commission heard earlier Wednesday from Michael Hallowes, the former national director of Australia’s emergency alert program and now an independent United Kingdom-based consultant advising European governments on public warning systems, who said Canada’s Alert Ready system is ineffectively operated and governed.
“The ownership and leadership of the ongoing (public alert) capability is extraordinary,” Hallowes said by Zoom. “In my experience, it should be owned and led by the federal authority (a federal government minister) responsible for public safety.”
Canada is the only country in which the public alert system is owned by a private company, Palmorex, and operated on behalf of the federal government and regulated by CRTC.
Hallowes said the supplier and regulator should be advisers only.
Hallowes said the police services on the scene of the life-threatening event should be responsible for sending out appropriate Alert Ready warnings and that individual officers who are working the scene should be delegated trusted user status for the alert system.
The alerts must be issued quickly, he said, because “saying nothing in this day and age,” allows inaccurate social media messages to fill the gap.
Hallowes said there have not been invasion of privacy issues in Australia in knowing where people are because of alerts being sent to cellphones and that Australians haven’t bombarded the system with their equivalent of 911 calls because the public has been educated about what to do when they get emergency alerts.
Hallowes said there has been an issue in Canada with the distributor of cellphone alerts choosing to use only the 4G cellular network and leaving those without that service out of the loop.
“It’s back to basics, if I may be so bold, about getting it right for the future and that is project program management, it is get your design authority in place with your governments,” Hallowes said of improving the Canadian emergency alert system.
“Get standard operational procedures in place and train people and give them the confidence that they can use the system effectively to save the lives of Canadians and people like me who love to visit.”