Feds need to have telecom backup plan for climate emergencies, northern Manitoba MP says

George Fontaine remembers waking in the early hours of the morning a few weeks ago to find all phone and internet service down in Flin Flon.

There was a wildfire nearby, and as mayor of the northern Manitoba city of 5,000, Fontaine knew officials had to find a way to communicate with residents.

"There's no phone, no landlines, no cellphones, no internet service … and we had no way of transferring information to the general public," Fontaine told CBC in a phone interview.

"It was very interesting, and a little bit frightening."

It is scenarios like this that prompted Churchill-Keewatinook Aski MP Niki Ashton to call on the federal government to have telecommunications backup plans in place for northern Manitoba, especially during times of climate emergencies.

"We need to be very clear that our telecoms are critical services that need to be there for our communities at all times," the northern Manitoba NDP member told CBC.

"We know that climate change is becoming more and more serious, which poses a threat to all our communities, [and] we need to make sure that communication is possible."

Ashton brought up the issue in Parliament a week after it was reported that Flin Flon went days without its primary source for phone and internet service following a massive wildfire east of the city last month, which also forced residents in the nearby community of Cranberry Portage to evacuate their homes for more than a week.

Flin Flon's telecommunications went down after the fire caused significant damage to eight kilometres of fibre line, severing phone and internet access to the city.

The mayor and other officials ended up collaborating with the local radio station to break into regular programs, while also gathering Starlink satellite systems for the police service, fire department, hospital, airport and local hotel.

The satellites came from a patchwork of what the northwestern Manitoba city already had in its inventory, along with some from Saskatchewan.

"They were being purchased, and it was quite a scramble to find where they were and how to get them set up and running quickly," Fontaine said.

Telecoms lost during N.W.T. fires

Flin Flon is not the only city in the north that has faced a telecommunication outage during a wildfire.

Last August, phone and internet service went down in the Northwest Territories as fires forced more than two-thirds of the territory's population — including about 22,000 residents in Yellowknife and the surrounding area — to flee their homes.

But due to the outage at the time, not everyone was aware of the orders in their communities — including Lloyd Chicot, chief of the community of Kakisa, who told reporters at the time he learned about the evacuation order after hearing about it on CBC.

It happened again this past May after wildfire damage to fibre optic lines affected telecommunication services in northern B.C., N.W.T., Yukon and Nunavut.

Bell MTS, the primary telecommunication provider in northern Manitoba, sent an emailed statement during the May outage in Manitoba saying the company has several approaches to mitigating the impacts of severe weather.

Those include keeping the company's generators and trucks topped up with fuel during and immediately after weather events, and communicating with the province, key federal minister and local partners, the telecom company said.

Ashton says it's a federal responsibility to make sure telecommunications and critical services are in place.

"We just can't have hospitals and health centres running off of hastily put together satellites," the MP said. "We also can't leave it to private companies to keep an eye on things."

CBC sent a request to the federal government for comment.

Flin Flon's mayor says this time, things worked out for his city.

"Had the wind been from the east and brought [the fire] directly towards us, we would never have been able to call in for help in enough time," Fontaine said.

"It was actually a very dangerous situation for this community."

He'd like to hear from experts, and see fail-safes for northern communities, including collaboration with other provinces.

"We've got good communications when the communications are good, but when they get blocked off and there's only one single path that's blocked off, I would consider them — well, zero. We got nothing."