Bell MTS connects NDP minister, Tory critic, union leader… in anger over 911 outage

More than 50 people were unable to get through to 911 because of a Bell MTS service outage last month, a report to the national broadcast regulator reveals.

Bell Canada filed its report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on the April 28 outage Wednesday. It said a power failure caused by issues with a generator cooling system and the depletion of backup batteries, as well as issues with surveillance tools that didn’t trigger alarms, are to blame for the outage.

The report said the outage resulted in a loss of power to telecommunications equipment and impacted voice, broadband, transport and 911 services. During the incident, 53 callers to 911 got a busy signal.

Bell Canada said surveillance tools didn’t trigger any alarms because they were not functioning at the time of the incident, and “incident diagnosis could have been faster if there were manual checks being done while alarming was compromised.”

The union representing Bell MTS technicians in Manitoba said the problem would have been noticed and fixed before service was lost if technicians based in Winnipeg were continuing to monitor alarms in the province.

“These alarms would normally have been monitored here in Manitoba but they’ve taken those jobs away from our folks and moved them elsewhere,” International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 435 business manager Richard Ferris said Wednesday.

“It’s pretty serious when you lose 911 service.”

“When the generator didn’t kick in, there’s backup batteries that typically will last six or eight hours — maybe longer — that would give them enough time to dispatch the technician and at least start on the repair and hopefully prevent this outage,” Ferris said. “In this case, as far as I know, nobody got that alarm or saw it or was monitoring it. By the time anyone realized what was going on, it was too late.

“It’s pretty serious when you lose 911 service.”

In March of last year, 55-year-old Dean Switzer died of a heart attack in the Interlake while his family and friends tried in vain to reach 911 for 90 minutes while they performed CPR — not realizing their Telus service was not working. It didn’t operate normally for two days.

In a report to the CRTC, Telus blamed the outage on “an equipment failure on the Bell facilities, that are part of the 911 network that Telus interconnects with Bell to send calls”. Bell responded saying only Telus, and no other cellphone carrier, was affected by an outage to its 911 calls, after one of its two gateways for emergency calls did a four-minute reset.

Ferris said the recent loss of 911 service could have resulted in tragedy.

“Definitely, we got lucky.” He called on the federal government to pass legislation that protects Manitobans, and for the province to lobby Ottawa for protection from interrupted service.

Manitoba Innovation and New Technology Minister Mike Moroz said the province has found a “willing partner” in the federal government that is preparing to take actions that he wasn’t at liberty to discuss.

“I’m deeply frustrated by Bell’s continued cavalier approach to this outage and to previous ones, as well,” Moroz said in an interview Wednesday. “Frankly, accessing life-saving services through 911 isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s unacceptable that these services were down at all.”

Progressive Conservative technology critic and rural MLA Josh Guenter said his constituents are fed up with what he described as “the acute cell service shortages” across Manitoba.

“We have some of the worst coverage areas in North America. This is a long-standing issue that the telecommunications companies need to fix. It has to be addressed now,” said Guenter (Borderland).

“Fifty-three calls to 911 didn’t get through. That’s a pretty astounding number but it doesn’t talk about the impact of that outage,” he said. “In how many of these 53 calls did the situation worsen? Manitobans deserve answers to that, as well.”

“Accessing life-saving services through 911 isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s unacceptable that these services were down at all.”

Moroz called out the telecommunications giant for poorly communicating with the public about the outage by posting its report written in technical language on an “obscure corner” of the CRTC website.

“This is a major teleco. They surely to goodness had a better way to communicate what happened and what they’re doing about it than simply posting it on a website,” Moroz said. “That’s unacceptable. That’s not transparency.”

The union lamented changes to service since Bell purchased MTS in 2017 for $3.9 billion. At the time, the IBEW had 610 technicians; it now has just over 300 in Manitoba. Last year, 76 positions were eliminated through voluntary separation packages, Ferris said. Since 2021, the company has moved its wireless, IP network, voice and transport operations centres out of the province.

He said that MTS was built with Manitoba tax dollars and was once a “very successful and proud” provincial company.

“When Bell purchased MTS, they touted that this would be the western Canadian headquarters and talked about expansion,” Ferris said. “It’s been exactly the opposite.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday by a 5 p.m. deadline.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

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