Geri Dixon and Alicia Bedford were guests of the House of Commons Oct. 18, as they were invited to speak directly to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security via video conference.
The pair gained widespread attention following a Sept. 17 Thompson city council meeting, where Dixon recounted her daughter’s (Bedford’s) experience this past summer, where she had to wait four minutes and 29 seconds to be connected with the RCMP while someone was trying to break into her home.
“There was the banging on the doors, there was banging on the windows, there was screaming outside, while me and my two young daughters are alone in the house,” Bedford recalled during a conversation with the Thompson Citizen Oct. 19.
Bedford repeated this story in front of the committee to broach the wider topic of crime in northern communities and emergency response times, since Thompson doesn’t have a local dispatch centre.
Instead, calls for police assistance in the Hub of the North are relayed through a dispatch centre in either Brandon or Winnipeg, depending on if someone dials 911 or 204-677-6911, respectively.
“We don’t have a local dispatch, we don’t have a local 911, and I think it’s unacceptable that we have to be on hold,” Bedford told the committee directly on Oct. 18. “Our lives don’t seem to matter as much as somebody who has 911 that will get through right away.”
According to Dixon, the geographical disconnect between caller and dispatcher inevitably compromises the RCMP’s ability to respond to reports of an active crime scene in a timely fashion.
“Because you’re dealing with [people] down south, they do not know the area of Thompson, they don’t know the different places or the streets or anything and you have to give them so much information,” she said.
Dixon also talked about how the unreliability of these dispatch centres is exacerbated by the sheer volume of calls they receive, referencing Thompson’s number two ranking on Canada’s Crime Severity Index.
“I live on Martin Bay and in the last two-and-a-half years, just in my household, we have called at least four to five times and three times, for sure, we have actually been hung up on,” she said. “And the next three times we were put on hold and this was the incident where we watched a stabbing taking place, and we couldn’t get through.”
Despite the heavy subject matter, both Dixon and Bedford said the Oct. 18 meeting was a productive experience, since the bipartisan committee members seemed to be taking their complaints seriously.
“You could tell we had their support and they agree that they have to do the change,” Dixon said on Oct. 19. “They have to work on this, they have to make things better. So that was a good feeling after our meeting yesterday.”
In the meantime, the mother-daughter pair is still working to raise awareness about public safety issues at a municipal level by circulating a petition that calls for the establishment of an emergency call centre right here in Thompson.
“We’ve gotten tons of signatures, just to bring to the new mayor and council and say, ‘Let’s start fresh here. Let’s make a change. Something’s got to be done. The system that is in place right now is not working,’” said Bedford.
Dixon and Bedford said they plan to bring this petition before Thompson’s new mayor and council during their inaugural meeting Nov. 7 at City Hall.
To listen to Dixon and Bedford’s full testimony in front of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, please visit www.ourcommons.ca/Committees/en/SECU.
