TRURO, N.S.
Canada’s auditor general has requested to meet with Cumberland Colchester MP BILL Casey to discuss Casey’s concerns over the RCMP’s proposal to consolidate their Operational Communication Center (OCC ) in Dartmouth.
The meeting, which is set for Tuesday, came about after Casey requested that Auditor General Michael Ferguson review the RCMP’s proposal.
“I have asked the RCMP to provide an unredacted copy of their study, which recommends that the Communication Center NOT be located in Halifax because the risk is too high,” Casey said, in email to the Truro News on Friday.
Casey said he requested that Ferguson review the RCMP’s proposal following a recent perceived bomb threat that caused the closure and evacuation of the coast guard facilities in Dartmouth.
“If both of the communications centers and the RCMP Headquarters were closed and evacuated because they are all located in Dartmouth, most of the province would be without 911 service, fire or ambulance communications,” Casey said. “Police communications would be severely curtailed.”
Casey said he provided Ferguson with four reports by leading authorities in emergency communications which all state that redundancy is a key to ensuring a safe emergency communication system. The RCMP plan, he said, eliminates redundancy already in place.
The RCMP currently has one communication centre in Dartmouth and another in Truro, in an outdated, former RCMP headquarters.
Casey said that 100-km distance provides the geographic distance recommended in the reports in order to ensure that at least one facility is always operational.
“The RCMP proposal removes this safety measure.”
He said one source reports that in recent years Halifax Regional Police have investigated over 70 bomb threats and laid charges in five of those incidents.
Casey has also asked the RCMP to hold off on its decision until the auditor general has had a chance to study the four emergency measures reports and compare them to the plan proposed by the RCMP.
The following information relates to excerpts from the RCMP reports.
The 2004 RCMP Report specifically recommended that “the RCMP not locate their primary OCC within the Halifax Regional Municipality", and “the OCC Primary service delivery site be outside of HRM due to risks of placing two largest police communications centres in close proximity to each other". None of the facts that caused that conclusion have changed; if anything, the threats are even greater today.
Casey said the RCMP erased these “critical comments” in the copy provided to him.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) is considered the lead authority in emergency communications. Their recent report entitled the “2019 National Fire Protection Association #1221 requires that “ #4.1.6.1 The alternative communications center shall be separated geographically from the primary communications center at a distance that ensures the survivability of the alternative center.”
The RCMP proposal is just the reverse of this requirement, Casey said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 2009 report states: “Organizations should have adequate, separate locations to ensure execution of their functions. Physical dispersion should allow for easy transfer of function responsibility in the events of a problem at one location.”
Once again, Casey said, the RCMP proposal is exactly the opposite of this requirement.
The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) 2015 Report states: “Redundant and resilient systems are needed to continue operation when a failure causes the loss or damage of a needed resource”.
The RCMP plan is to eliminate that redundancy. The NENA Report recommends “two layers of redundancy” and also states that emergency call Centers “face more risks and threats than ever before”. “
Casey said Parliamentary Security Services examined the failure of communications during the 2014 shootings at the Canadian National War Memorial at Parliament Hill and that study concluded that a second, off-site communications center was required to provide redundancy.
"I am not an expert in emergency communications but these organizations are,” Casey said. “They can’t all be wrong.”
