Rash of hoax bomb threats a chance to learn: Goodale
Warnings took toll on police on both sides of Canada-U.S. border
TORONTO — Law enforcement officials in Canada and beyond will be working to learn lessons about how to best respond to bomb threats after a rash of hoax incidents this week, the federal public safety minister said Friday.
Ralph Goodale said policing and security experts around the world will be scrutinizing the fallout from the wave of threats, which triggered varying responses from forces in Canada and the United States on Thursday.
The threats, delivered via email, touched off everything from quiet divisional-level investigations to full-scale evacuations of public buildings and deployments of specialized explosives investigators.
Police forces said probes into bomb threats are particularly time-consuming and resourceintensive.
Goodale said experts around the world would be looking for ways to limit the toll on those on the front lines.
“The level of international collaboration here is very high — police, security, intelligence across three continents making sure that we ... learn every conceivable lesson from that experience, including response capacity,” Goodale said in Toronto.
“We will go to school on all of that.”
Thursday’s wave of bomb threats swept across communities on both sides of the CanadaU.S. border.
Police departments in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa and Winnipeg, as well as Ontario’s provincial force and RCMP detachments in B.C. and Manitoba, investigated multiple threats that all proved groundless.
One busy subway station in downtown Toronto was briefly evacuated as part of the investigation.
City police said they received at least 10 false calls throughout the day.
In the U.S., hundreds of schools, businesses and government buildings received emails that triggered searches, evacuations and fear.
Investigators, however, dismissed the threats as a crude extortion attempt intended to cause disruption and compel recipients into sending money.
Some of the emails had the subject line “Think Twice.’’ They were sent from a spoofed email address.
The sender claimed to have had an associate plant a small bomb in the recipient’s building and the only way to stop it exploding was by making an online payment of $20,000 in bitcoin currency.
Goodale said experts in three continents have already begun analyzing Thursday’s threats for potential lessons.
For several Canadian police forces, the day’s events highlighted the difficulty of balancing public safety with limited internal resources.
Staff Sgt. Carolle Dionne of the Ontario Provincial Police said officers were called to at least 15 cities, adding all calls followed the same pattern as the threats detailed by U.S. authorities.
She said protocols dictate that a member of a local explosives disposal unit attends any bomb threat from the outset, adding police from local detachments are on hand as well.
Dionne conceded such an approach is resource-intensive and makes it challenging to react to genuine police calls.
Dionne said the public safety risk merits the strong response, however.
“We can’t gamble with public safety, so we really need to investigate to the fullest,” she said. “That means using all of our resources available to us.”
The RCMP echoed the need to take all threats seriously while focusing on equipping the public to cope with the situation.