Phones are our backup. Our youth volunteers love Twitter and Facebook – that’s their favourite way of communicating. So if I need to communicate with our youth volunteers, that will be the tool I use.
 
But there isn’t one current tool out there that fits all. So whether it be for notification that there is an emergency happening – you can mass broadcast to all cellphones with a text message in a geographical area – but what happens if you have cellphones that don’t accept text messages.
 
So there’s a lot of technology out there. How it gets adopted into emergency management needs to be carefully looked at. And I completely agree with you, Andrew, you need to know the demographics of your workforce and what is the best methodology. And sometimes low-tech is the best solution because in some cases, if all of your solutions are high-tech and we lose infrastructure for a couple of days, you’ve lost all your solutions. So I’d also encourage redundancy. Whatever your solution is, always have a redundant system.
 
Morton: I agree with what John had said. I think the issue with technology, certainly within our emergency management standard, the issue of communication is a major part of it. What are you trying to communicate and how, and certainly with technologies like the Internet and Facebook and Twitter are certainly ones that we would want to consider, but again it has to be very carefully planned.
 
And working the other way, as John mentioned earlier, use of the Internet to keep your employees at home if that’s an appropriate thing to do, and have them work through the Internet through a VPN connection if that’s what it happens to be, is another aspect of it that’s becoming very important.
 
Parish: There are some municipalities, when you’re talking about the chemical spill-type thing, a few municipalities, not all of them, do have systems in place to try to meet those needs.
 
A lot of municipalities don’t have that sort of thing and they are relying on the knocking on the door. You can do it ten times and there’s ten different people in the same place that you didn't evacuate because you didn’t get them all. So emergency things like that of trying to communicate with people no matter what you do becomes very, very difficult to actually cover everybody so you need a combination of different systems in place to do that, and dealing with the closest to the need. Well, you may have to do that several times before you actually get everybody that you want out of those areas.
 
So in the emergency services system we always say that our poorest thing that we have in place across Ontario is communications. And that’s within the emergency services. The fire, police and EMS do not communicate well together because they all have different communication systems. And even at an emergency, the same thing happens there: you have a command centre and everybody has got a different communication system, so there’s a big delay in time of actually communicating so when we talk about communication in the business, in the emergency services, in the municipality, it’s always the thing I guess that we really haven’t got in place to work properly eventhough we have all these different tools that we try to rely on.
 
So there is no consistent communication in emergency in Ontario or I can safely say probably in Canada. I know for sure in Ontario.
 
Hollands: I think we need to lever other technologies as well. Consider the internet and these things are very common but you don’t consider things like smart meters and they’re becoming very pervasive across the province. And wireless technology that can be triggered from the central command post to a blue light, out in the hallway. There are things we can be doing that we really don’t have that overall public plan in place, but there is technology that’s becoming more and more reliable and more integrated into the systems that the public uses.
 
This is one thing I think we need to talk about is how do we leverage the technology, partner with the utilities for example who are running that so that we can use those tools.

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