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—

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.

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

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

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

Status of Women committee  Do you mean to set up an account?

Status of Women committee  We don't issue the alerts. We give an interface. They type it in. We don't touch it. It goes in five seconds. The provincial government would say to the first nation that they can have an account and give the instances for which they can issue an alert—

Status of Women committee  Because we're operating—

Status of Women committee  We don't let the OPP do it. The Ontario government lets the OPP do it.

Status of Women committee  Yes. I hear that. We train on how to use the technology. We're not public safety officials, so we don't train on what the threshold is for when an alert should be sent or what the content should be. Although we provide examples of what you typically put in an alert, we don't do

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—

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

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

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.

Status of Women committee  I don't know. What we do presently in terms of privacy is well beyond what's required under current privacy laws, so in our case we wouldn't need any additional incentive. We would never jeopardize any privacy at all.