Everybody complains about Canadian weather, but at least we don’t get hit by as many tornadoes as the Americans do. Which is perhaps why we’re so much more complacent. They get about a thousand tornadoes a year; we get between 60 and 80.
Complacency often leads to vulnerability, and despite all those American tornadoes, Canadians are probably more vulnerable than Americans to quick-hitting emergencies.
For a start, 60 tornadoes is only a small number if you’re not spinning around in one. But there are a lot of other emergencies that call for quick personal responses — gas leaks, poisonous train crashes, chemical spills, escaped convicts, abducted children, power failures, terrorist attacks.
The Americans are vulnerable to all this stuff, but so are we. The difference is the Americans get some warning about what’s coming.
Last May, the Canadian Red Cross warned that Canadians are not well prepared for emergencies and that the situation is getting worse — the agency was called on to help four times as many people in emergency situations in 2013 as it was in 2012.
The U.S. has a network that alerts its citizens through just about every communications device possible when natural or man-made disasters hit.
Not us lulled Canadians. Albertans can boast they’re in pretty fair shape after the establishment of the Alberta Emergency Alert, created after a tornado swept through Edmonton in 1987, killing 27 people. Alberta is ready. The rest of Canada isn’t.
It isn’t that government authorities aren’t aware that there are yawning gaps in Canada’s emergency-warning systems. The problem is lethargy in addressing them, which inevitably boils down to lack of political will at the top.
In 2007, Scott Hutton, now executive director of broadcasting of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, promised the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence that if the Canadian broadcasting industry had not come together to build and operate a national emergency alert system by March 1, 2009, then the CRTC would designate an entity to do so and “ensure the system is funded by the industry.”
The committee had issued a report calling for a comprehensive system three years earlier, and members were thrilled to hear Hutton’s commitment.
But Hutton’s deadline came and went more than five years ago and we still don’t have comprehensive warning system.
Meanwhile, the Americans have put the finishing touches on a comprehensive matrix of emergency warning mechanisms that send out danger alerts in a way that is moving to come to grips with fractured 21st-century information sources. The U.S. has developed warning systems that involve sirens, interventions of TV and radio broadcasts, of wired cable systems, wireless cable systems and satellite broadcasts, plus tweets, texts, the works. It is becoming difficult for Americans not to be warned, unless they opt out or turn off all their communications devices and put pillows over their heads.
The system has been driven by an infusion of many millions of federal dollars, which has not been the case in Canada.
How smart is the American system? So smart that cellphone service providers target their alerts to towers in locations in which a phone is being used rather than the phone’s home base, so if you have a Maine area code and are travelling in Texas, you will receive Texan emergency alerts.
CBC recently quoted an Environment Canada official as saying that there are hopes that such an intelligent cellphone system might be introduced in Canada “in a couple of years.” By that time, Environment Canada might also have overcome its problem with bilingualism: it can’t seem to figure out how it can tweet warnings in both French and English simultaneously, as required by law. Unable to overcome such an incredible hurdle, it doesn’t tweet them at all.
Seven years, ago the CRTC set a deadline for all broadcasters. That deadline came and went five years ago without being met. The CRTC is now proposing to set another deadline for the end of this year. But that deadline isn’t firm — it’s just being “proposed.”
And even if the proposal comes to fruition, it won’t produce nearly as comprehensive a system as the Americans have, because the federal government isn’t funding Environment Canada to perform what should be one of its main roles: keeping Canadians alert to danger.
Those folks may run a bit scared down there. But at least they’re not asleep.
Colin Kenny is former chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence.
