Province meets with Telus after man dies during 911 outage

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This article was published 15/05/2025 (458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One Manitoba man died of a heart attack while family and friends tried — unsuccessfully — to reach 911 for 90 minutes. Another man was put on hold by 911 while a fire threatened his home.

The two failures of the emergency system had the Opposition Progressive Conservatives asking heated questions in the legislature Thursday. The NDP government said it has spoken to Telus about a multiple-day outage that occurred in March.

“Manitobans obviously expect good reliable access to emergency services, which includes 911,” PC MLA Derek Johnson, who represents Interlake-Gimli, said Thursday.

“It is pretty much part of our public safety necessity, especially in rural Manitoba and it can mean the difference between life and death.”

Fisher Branch-area resident Dean Switzer, 55, died of a heart attack on March 23.

Switzer’s family couldn’t be reached Thursday.

Johnson said family and friends tried to help Switzer while calling 911 on their cellphones.

“They placed 22 calls and they just didn’t get routed to 911,” Johnson said, arguing it wasn’t an outage.

“There is a difference between an outage because their cellphones still worked for every other phone call. They could call neighbours for help so it wasn’t an outage… So when they are trying to save their loved one, they did CPR for an hour and a half, they were still trying to call 911. Friends and neighbours are now over there helping, while she is doing CPR on her husband, trading off with friends and family, trying to resuscitate him and keep him alive.

“(They) ultimately ended up reaching out to an off-duty RCMP officer on his cellphone.”

The officer went to the RCMP detachment and an ambulance was called.

Johnson said he is calling for the province to hold a public inquiry about what happened with the 911 service.

“How many (other calls) were there? Without an inquiry by the minister, how are we going to know?

“If there is a failure in that, maybe with a specific provider, that is not holding their end of the deal up, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to remain in Manitoba.”

Meanwhile, Willy Ginter, who lives on a farm near Zhoda in southeast Manitoba, said he saw a fire near his property and immediately called 911.

“They put me on hold,” Ginter said. “I hung up and I tried again — they put me on hold again.

“I figured there was no time to wait so I called the municipality. When they asked if I called 911 I said I did, but they didn’t answer.”

Ginter said the municipality contacted the fire department and soon the fire was out. His house was spared, but a vacant farmhouse on the neighbouring property was destroyed.

“911 should be available 24/7, every minute. This was a matter of life and death — it was an emergency. It’s not a toy, it’s not a joke. If it doesn’t work, shut it down and let us call our own fire department.”

Tory MLA Konrad Narth, who represents LaVerendrye, said he wants to know why Ginter was put on hold.

“It’s concerning for my constituency right now, being under immediate risk of active wildfires, as people’s homes are under threat, that they won’t be able to access 911 services,” Narth said.

He said he is even more concerned after speaking about the 911 service with fire chiefs at a fire evacuation centre in the RM of Piney.

“There were eight different fire chiefs there,” Narth said. “They say in the last 12 months it is commonplace that staffing shortages are not allowing 911 calls to go through to the rural 911 service in Brandon.

“All the fire chiefs are greatly concerned there is going to be a loss of life one day if the province doesn’t address this.”

Innovation and New Technology Minister Mike Moroz said he had a meeting with officials from Telus late Thursday afternoon.

“We are deeply concerned about the situation,” Moroz said. “911 should be there when you need it, particularly in a medical emergency, like the one experienced. We had a long and very comprehensive conversation with Telus.”

Moroz said he has asked Telus to notify the province if there are future outages.

He said Telus didn’t give him all the details of its investigation because the company is still looking into it and will submit a report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

He said Telus told him the outage, which hit all of its equipment linking cellphone users to 911 service, began on March 22, at 8:15 p.m. and lasted until March 24 at 11 a.m. The company refused to say how many Manitobans were affected, citing business confidentiality.

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The outage did not affect Manitobans with different cellphone providers.

“We know the system was down, we know one family was tragically impacted by it, and we know Telus needs to do better,” Moroz said.

“We’re going to be there to insist that they are.”

Moroz said the province’s justice minister is investigating how the Zhoda-area resident ended up on hold with 911 and hopes to provide more information Friday.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Kevin Rollason
Reporter

Kevin Rollason was a general assignment reporter at the Free Press.