Father of Manitoban who died when 911 failed says new 2-hour deadline for reporting outages falls short

A grieving padre in Manitoba’s Interlake is ruinous a young demand that provinces must be told within deuce hours of a 911 outage, arguing a shorter timeline is needed to potentially save lives like his son's.

Raymond Switzer says telecommunication companies should be alerting provincial emergency management organizations as soon as possible.

On March 23, Raymond’s family and friends frantically tried to help his son Dean Switzer, 55, after he had a heart attack. They performed CPR and called 911 more than 20 times, but no calls went through.

“If we could have help within the first half hour, he may even still be with us,” Raymond said of his son.

Raymond is joining the province in demanding faster notifications of 911 outages.

Last month, Premier Wab Kinew wrote to federal industry minister Melanie Joly to say the recent Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decision to mandate a notification within two hours “does not go far enough.” He also wants an “alliance of like-minded public officials” to work together to ensure 911 access is never at risk again. 

In the case of Dean Switzer, an ambulance eventually arrived one hour after 911 was first contacted because a family friend asked an off-duty RCMP officer for help.

Dean Switzer died later that night.

The outage lasted nearly 40 hours and prevented phones connected to the Telus network from calling 911 between the late evening on March 22 and the early afternoon on March 24, according to a report sent to the CRTC.

During that time period, Telus didn’t inform its customers or the Manitoba government of the service failure.

Dean’s father Raymond said it’s baffling his phone warns him immediately of bad storms, “but nobody got the warning from Telus that the phones were going to be out through that period.”

All the people in Dean’s household who were calling 911 the night of the fatal heart attack were Telus customers, he said. 

Starting in November, the CRTC began mandating service providers notify it and other government authorities, including provincial EMOs, within two hours when they experience a major network outage. The new regulations are in response to a consultation the CRTC launched in 2023.

Kinew told Joly in his Nov. 18 letter the new rules are insufficient. 

“The recent tragedy in our province demonstrates these are urgent situations where the safety and well-being of Manitobans are at stake, and a two-hour period where key organizations are unaware of an issue and unable to help those in need is unacceptable,” he said.

The premier added his government recently voiced its concerns with members of the federal government. 

“I am raising it with you now in the hope of building an alliance of like-minded public officials that want to work with municipalities, Indigenous communities, the provincial government and telecommunications companies to ensure that every single Manitoban has access to 911 during their time in need. Our success can be a model for others,” he wrote to Joly.

Manitoba’s Minister of Innovation and New Technology Mike Moroz said in an interview the province is open to exploring ways to ensure continual 911 service, such as the building of additional cellphone towers.

He said uninterrupted service is vital whenever an emergency strikes.

“How far can a wildfire travel in a two-hour span?” Moroz asked rhetorically. 

But he believes the telecom companies don’t always grasp the life-and-death weight of their service, noting, for instance, the lack of cell coverage in some rural areas of Manitoba.

“What I sometimes hear is there isn't a business case for it,” Moroz said. “That's the bottom line for private companies. It's not the bottom line for government, right? The safety, the needs of Manitobans, that's our bottom line.”

In regards to the March outage, Telus wrote in its report to the CRTC it was caused by equipment failure at the Bell facility, where Telus's 911 system connects with Bell's 911 network. 

The failure only lasted about four minutes, but it had a ripple effect that caused eight network circuits. 

A Telus technician was paged to respond within minutes of the outage, but did not follow company protocols to alert Bell and Telus about the 911 circuit outage. The technician also failed to escalate the issue within the company, and was later disciplined, Telus said.

The company said 59 people made 177 calls to 911 during the service interruption.

Telus has since added an alternate route to send emergency calls from Telus to Bell's network in case a similar failure happens again, according to the report.

Provincial affairs reporter

---

---