Ontario’s test is scheduled for next week
Local testing times for May 8:
Alberta: 11:55 a.m. MT
British Columbia: 10:55 a.m. PT
Manitoba: 1:55 p.m. CT
New Brunswick: 2:55 p.m. AT
Northwest Territories: 9:55 a.m. MT
Nova Scotia: 1:55 p.m. AT
Newfoundland and Labrador: 3:25 p.m. NT
Nunavut: 1:55 p.m. ET
Ontario: 12:55 p.m. on May 15
Prince Edward Island: 12:55 p.m. AT
Quebec: 1:55 p.m. ET
Saskatchewan: 11:55 a.m. CT
Yukon: 10:55 a.m. YT
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Canada’s National Public Alerting System (NPAS) is running tests on television, radio and compatible wireless devices across most of the country Wednesday as part of Emergency Preparedness Week.
“Testing provides an opportunity to raise awareness about the Alert Ready system and to validate that it works as intended in case of an actual emergency.”
The sound will simulate the tone of an emergency alert, the news release notes, and radio and television broadcasters may use an audio version of the test alert message through a text-to-speech (TTS) software.
Minister of Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan announced that during this exercise, Public Safety Canada will test its own public alerting capability in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut and Yukon.
In a news release, Public Safety Canada said regular testing and evaluation of the NPAS is necessary to ensure that, “when an emergency or disaster falling under federal responsibility occurs, the Government of Canada is prepared to deliver urgent and lifesaving warnings to the public.”
The CRTC notes that cellphone service providers and broadcasters send out two test alerts per year to make sure the system is working properly — one in May and another typically in November.
The original article contains 321 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 40%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good opportunity to test if my phone will now ignore those alerts, after the modifications I had to do using adb because it’s not permitted to disable those annoying alarms on my own devices.
I don’t have much faith since none of the modifications I tried ever worked and the alarms kept blasting, without me wanting to, but maybe one day I’ll find THE thing that finally disables those.
Otherwise I’m thinking of ditching phones completely, since I can’t control when it’s gonna blast an end of the world alarm for a silver alert about an old person 100 km away from me. So far my only solution is to keep my phone muted al all time. I’m missing calls but at least my phone is not hurling a nuclear type alarm whenever the government feels like it.
I’d like to slap the person that decided to send everything in Canada as presidential alerts, even for silver alerts. Or is it just a Quebec thing?!
The real problem is that all alerts are sent at the highest priority ‘presidential alert’ or ‘disaster warning’. Missing persons / Amber alerts should obey volume settings and do-no-disturb, but we don’t appear to have the technology to do that.
There was an incident in Ontario where an elderly grandparent was missing for 12 hours – so they sent the alert to a 1200km radius… at 2am. Then again a few minutes later. Then again 30 minutes later. Then again at 3am, then again at 4am. The OPP woke up several million people, several times, for an entire night. The result? A police officer saw them on Lakeshore Blvd. in Toronto, less than 60km from their home. There was zero benefit to waking up every household with a cell phone across most of the province – and I’m willing to bet there was a HUGE increase in traffic accidents the next day (because losing just ONE hour of sleep to daylight savings time has this effect).
You’re right to be mad, but you’re fixing it the wrong way.
How should I be fixing it?
I’ve already written an email to the CRTC about this. Should I also write to my provincial MP?
What’s the “correct” way to decide if I want my phone to randomly blast an end-of-the-world alarm or not?
And for anybody finding this, uninstalling the cellbroadcastreceiver package via adb finally worked for me. If successful, the emergency alerts menu on your phone should crash, and no more end-of-the-world alarms.
