Manitoba mayors say 911 outage shows need for contingency plan

The Manitoba RCMP say they’re not aware of any emergency response that was negatively impacted by the 911 outage that lasted approximately two hours on Wednesday afternoon.

But local and provincial officials are concerned about what could have happened, saying the system needs to be more reliable.

Outside of Winnipeg, Manitobans had to call their local emergency departments directly to get help during the outage. Steinbach Mayor Earl Funk says this exposed flaws in the province’s emergency system.

“What we need to do now is make sure that we’re proactive, and that we’re ready for this if ever happens again — hopefully it never does,” says Funk.

In Brandon, Mayor Jeff Fawcett says they were able to mitigate the interruption with their backup software called RapidSOS.

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“It was able to see calls were coming and return them,” says Fawcett. “Couldn’t take them, but could return them.”

He says dispatchers were able to call most people back within minutes, and ambulances continued to respond to emergencies during the outage.

A statement from Bell says the outage happened after a fibre cable was cut by a third party doing construction. The company says it uses backup systems if an outage occurs, but this time, that system was also experiencing a technical issue unrelated to the cable cut.

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Fawcett this incident shows the whole system needs to be looked at.

“If it was just one cut somewhere that put the whole province outside of Winnipeg out, we need to have that reviewed quickly and say, what are the alternatives to that,” he says.

At the premier’s summit in Prince Edward Island, Wab Kinew said Prime Minister Mark Carney committed to raising the issue with the CEOs of the telecom companies.

Bell says by the end of 2026, all emergency dispatch centres in Manitoba will transition to a new system called Next Generation 911, which will have more fail-safes built in. In the meantime, the CRTC requires Bell to submit a post-outage report within 14 days of service being restored.