An emergency alert intended for just one area went across Ontario. Nobody will say how

As people were returning home from work and settling down for dinner last Thursday, phone screens in Toronto, Barrie, Peterborough and beyond lit up and let out an urgent sound.

“Emergency alert,” the message appearing on phones read, warning the public to shelter in place as police investigated a homicide. The suspect: “Unknown male.”

The order to shelter in place was only an instruction for residents in one Pickering, Ont., neighbourhood, local police later clarified. While the alert included an address and reference to Durham Region, it did not mention the town or neighbourhood in its text.

The emergency alarm was triggered by the fatal stabbing of an 83-year-old woman in a neighbourhood in the northwest of Pickering. It was a stabbing police said was random, eventually arresting a 14-year-old boy and charging him with first-degree murder.

None of that information was in the alert, which told people across the Greater Toronto Area and beyond to lock themselves inside.

“The area the alert extends to and what information is released is at the discretion of the OPP,” a spokesperson for Durham Regional Police, the force which requested the alert, told Global News.

“My understanding is the reach of the alert went further than the requested area as the armed suspect was mobile and there was an imminent threat to public safety.”

Global News Crime Analyst Hank Idsinga said while the area was large, it made sense to rely on the broad power of an emergency alert.

“He was on foot. How far could he possibly get on foot? Right around the corner is where he might have had a car park,” he suggested.

“This is a great tool that really probably should be used a lot more, especially with murder investigations.”

The alert itself was also triggered almost three hours after the crime was allegedly committed.

Acting Staff Sgt. Joanne McCabe said the alert was triggered as quickly as could reasonably be achieved.

“It’s not always a matter of minutes, it’s a matter of: are they known to each other? Is there a threat to public safety? Where he might have gone, ” she said.

“There’s investigative steps that need to take place, those steps took place, and then that communication was done with the OPP, who essentially then issued the alert.”

OPP said the alert was issued quickly once Durham Regional Police requested it.

“Once the OPP received the request for an alert, it took less than 20 minutes to issue,” the force said in a statement. “During this time period the OPP is required to review and translate the request before it is issued.”

An as-yet-unidentified error even led to some versions of the alerts displaying on some devices as terrorism-related.

“The error regarding the alert being categorized as terrorism was a technical malfunction,” OPP said.

“Once this error was recognized, the OPP corrected the information. We are currently investigating the cause of this malfunction and are working on a resolution.”

The series of events left many asking for answers.

At Queen’s Park, during his most recent cabinet reshuffle, Ontario Premier Doug Ford created a new full-time Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response. The ministry was previously an associate minister as part of the Treasury Board.

The new minister, Jill Dunlop, however, told Global News on Monday she still hadn’t been briefed on the emergency alert and how some of the potential problems with it occurred.

“We have not had discussion on that, nor a debriefing on the situation, so I can’t comment on that right now,” Dunlop said on Monday, after being asked if she wanted to see more protocols in place to govern emergency alerts.

“Absolutely, we’ll have more discussions moving forward.”

Dunlop’s office said questions about the emergency alert should be handled by the Solicitor General and Ontario Provincial Police.

The solicitor general’s office, for its part, said the OPP determined factors like the radius of alerts and should answer questions.

Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles questioned the need to have a full minister responsible for emergency preparedness if she had not been briefed on the recent emergency alert.

“I’m concerned to know now that they’ve got a minister whose sole responsibility is these things. You would have thought that she would have been briefed,” she said.

“Literally her whole job is emergency measures, and she doesn’t know why and how this happened and doesn’t have an opinion on it?  I question why they even bother having a minister in that role.”

— with files from Global News’ Noor Ra’fat

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