Nova Scotia announced Thursday that police now have direct access to the Alert Ready System to issue an alert without assistance from the Emergency Management Office (EMO).
Following the Portapique mass shooting in April 2020, the RCMP and the provincial government faced criticism for their failure to issue an emergency alert.
The RCMP said they used Twitter to communicate information instantaneously about the active shooter situation on April 19, 2020 and that the RCMP was in the process of crafting an alert when officers killed the gunman.
READ MORE: New timeline shows what RCMP knew — and didn’t share — about the Nova Scotia shooting spree
On April 2021, a former RCMP officer and retired Nova Scotia EMO incident commander Stephen Mills said that at the time of the shooting, the process of issuing a provincewide alert was cumbersome and police likely didn’t know how to get an alert issued at the time.
“The RCMP and any of the municipal police forces would never have used it,” said Mills earlier this year. “They were likely aware of the (emergency alert) system but wouldn’t have had any training on how to access it.”
As a way to ensure alerts get sent out quickly and more effectively, the provincial government said in a release Thursday that a committee of senior officials from the province and police worked together recently to “ensure consistency and protocols are in place for issuing police-related alerts.”
READ MORE: How confusion lingers around Nova Scotia’s emergency alert system one year later
Direct access to the emergency alert system is now available – 15 months after the mass shooting took place – to the Nova Scotia RCMP, Halifax Regional Police (HRP), and to other policing services across the province when and if they choose.
“RCMP and HRP have been trained to use the system and can send an alert for police-related situations where there is believed to be an imminent threat to the public,” the province said in a release.
EMO will continue to issue police-related alerts at the request of all policing agencies in Nova Scotia, and for non-police matters such as floods and forest fires.
-With files from Jesse Thomas