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Status of Women committee I am a registered lobbyist. I do meet with government officials. I've met with members here. I reach out all the time. The thing I talk about most with MPs is the NAAD system, public alerting and how it works. A lot of people don't understand that The Weather Network operates th
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee Well, alerting is such an interesting field, because, like I said, public safety is a provincial jurisdiction, but certain federal agencies have their own jurisdictions. Environment Canada obviously can issue a tornado alert in any province, but mostly it's run by the provinces.
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee Right now, all the alerts also go over the radio and over the air on TV. We have the Weather Network app. We're working on another app more specific to alerting, because people might want to get alerts, not just on the Weather Network app—
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee Absolutely. I agree. It's really interesting to hear about all the different use cases, from billboards to “direct to land line”. Anything is possible. We can do anything. Right now, we work under a structure whereby we are directed on what to do, and we've been directed to do
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee Absolutely. Like I said, I think what the previous witnesses said about working directly with the communities on this issue, particularly, is key. Making sure that they have the power to issue these alerts and to use the technology to its fullest extent is super important. This
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee That's a great question. The way the systems works now means that there is no privacy concern because it's one direction. It's over TV and radio. The way the wireless alerts work is that they are sent from a cellphone tower directly to your cellphone, and there's no return path.
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee As I said, we don't decide to add those. We built a national system, so we—
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee It was the senior officials responsible for emergency management, SOREM. Basically, the senior officials for emergency management from all the provinces, territories and Public Safety Canada sit on a board. They meet and talk about all sorts of public safety issues and this is on
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee We have contracts with every province and territory, Environment and Climate Change Canada, NRCan and Public Safety Canada. Within every province, they decide how to use the system. I have a list here that shows all—
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee Public safety is a provincial jurisdiction, so it's up to them. Twenty-six first nations in Alberta have access to the system. Basically none—
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee No, they've just chosen not to. For instance, some provinces have one agency or two agencies in total that use the system, so you would want to talk to the provinces about why they aren't pushing that out further.
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee That's correct. About a year and a half ago I appeared before the indigenous and northern affairs committee and said that we would love direction from the federal government, provincial governments or both to work directly with first nations because of the nature of the jurisdic
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee We would need direction, which would come probably from SOREM. We would want the federal government and the provinces together to tell us to please go and start working with the first nations. Alternatively, another group works with the first nations and comes to us with the te
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee We have a piece of national, secure infrastructure. We can take other alerts and run them back through our system, if needed. Ideally, we would work with them directly and they wouldn't need another vendor or another private company to do it; they could use the system. To be c
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby
Status of Women committee Do you mean to set up an account?
March 19th, 2024Committee meeting
Kurt Eby