Thank you for your question.
I welcome the use of amateur radio for those who have the equipment and know how to use it. However, most of our citizens don't have that equipment or don't know how to use it. Our fire services and emergency preparedness services communicate over radio waves. However, our biggest communication problem is contacting our fellow citizens. It always comes down to money. Since our first role is to protect our fellow citizens, how do we determine whether they've left their homes, whether they're still at home or whether they need something? We have to be able to reach them.
During the ice storm in 1998, one of the tasks the mayor assigned me at the time was to call our citizens. We had a telephone book. Today, we don't know how to contact people. We can message people on all platforms when social media and the web giants are working, and that's a good thing, but it gets harder to contact our people when they aren't. That's why we go door to door.
What can be done? All telecommunications towers are under federal jurisdiction. Consequently, the federal government has to ensure that those towers can hold up under various hazards. We haven't discussed the floods we had in Vaudreuil-Soulanges in 2017, 2019 and 2023, or the violent wind storm in 2016, or the train derailment in 2018, all of which caused power outages in certain areas and across the entire MRC. When telecommunications towers go down in those kinds of situations, that causes major problems. So we have to find a solution. Is there a better technology? Perhaps, but I think it's up to the federal government to ensure that one telecommunications tower is equipped with a generator and at least batteries that can last several hours. That's the case of many towers now. However, batteries drain in two, three or four hours, and someone has to replace or recharge them. There should at least be one generator. However, there also has to be fuel at hand ready to be used and electricity so someone can go and top it up. That's already happened in our MRC.
Communications are still essential in every emergency situation. Having been in the municipal world for 15 years, I know that every event and hazard always presents a danger.
So the greatest danger is a lack of communication. We need to ensure that we have a more robust system. Our cell phone networks, our emergency telecommunications towers and even the communication systems of our fire services must be more robust, but all cell phone networks across the country even more so.