Thank you, Mr. Chair. As introduced, I'm Kurt Eby. I work at Pelmorex Corporation. I think most of you would know us more by our popular brand names The Weather Network and MétéoMédia in Quebec. These are our primary businesses.
What I'm here to talk about is another thing that we lead and do for the country. In 2010, as a condition of our broadcasting licence, we built what we call the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination system, or the NAAD system, which is the technical component of the national public alerting system. Originally it processed alerts that were distributed on TV and radio, so we're talking about Amber Alerts and alerts for tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, flooding and forest fires. I'm sure everyone is probably familiar with these now, especially because in 2018 we launched the wireless alerting component of that system. That's increased its presence in people's hands and in people's homes.
We're effectively the technical vendor of the alerting system. We have two roles. One is the technology. We take direction from authorized government agencies—basically all the emergency management organizations in the provinces, as well as Environment and Climate Change Canada and Public Safety Canada—on technical upgrades to the system. We are also the system administrator, which means we have agreements and manage the accounts of every province and territory and Environment and Climate Change Canada right now. That's what we're here to talk about.
We manage those accounts based on who has the jurisdiction to issue an emergency alert. Environment Canada issues tornado alerts anywhere in the country. Most public safety jurisdiction falls to the provinces and the territories, which is why we have contracts and accounts with the provinces and territories, and they decide who can and cannot issue alerts within those jurisdictions, and for what. There is a mix of ways in which those are administered. Saskatchewan has many issuers. In Ontario, the OPP issues Amber Alerts and active shooter or dangerous person alerts on behalf of other police agencies, and then everything else is through the provincial EMO. It varies from province to province, for a number of reasons.
On a jurisdictional basis, we can't give an account to a police agency, because if you were an emergency management organization for a province and all of a sudden a police agency started issuing alerts and you didn't know, obviously they would be jumping over that jurisdiction.
What we are here to discuss today is something we have been discussing internally and with some of our colleagues and those we work with: It's the concept of Pelmorex taking on administration of accounts for first nations that want them, for which we would get direction from the federal or provincial governments or some combination of the two. This is where we're uncertain.
We understand that first nations do have an amount of sole jurisdiction. First nations and indigenous affairs fall largely under the federal government; right now public safety on first nations falls largely under the provincial government. That's something we wanted to start talking about to see how we could do that. We would be taking on greater responsibility for administering accounts and helping folks get up and running on the system.
The alert system is very customizable, so any issuer can have permissions set for them. Those might say that they could issue alerts for only, say, forest fires and floods and that police agencies would handle other types of alerts, or something like that. There is a lot of customization available. Definitely one thing to keep in mind is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in any account across the country. We see a variety of approaches used and we help to facilitate those.
This is something I'm really looking forward to speaking with the committee members about.
Thank you.