Last Thursday, as residents in Toronto, Barrie, Peterborough, and surrounding areas were arriving home after work and preparing dinner, their phones suddenly emitted urgent alerts.
The alert read: “Emergency alert,” urging people to stay indoors while police investigated a homicide involving an “unknown male” suspect.
Local authorities later clarified that the shelter-in-place directive was meant for residents in a specific neighborhood in Pickering, Ont. Although the alert included a general location and referenced Durham Region, it did not specify the town or neighborhood.
This emergency notification was prompted by the fatal stabbing of an 83-year-old woman in a northwest Pickering neighborhood. Police described the stabbing as random, and a 14-year-old boy was subsequently arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
However, the alert did not provide all pertinent details, instructing people throughout the Greater Toronto Area and beyond to secure themselves inside.
A Durham Regional Police spokesperson explained to Global News that the reach of the alert is determined by the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police). They emphasized that the alert extended further than initially intended due to the armed suspect being mobile, posing an imminent threat to public safety.
Global News Crime Analyst Hank Idsinga noted that although the alert covered a wide area, it was reasonable to make use of the broader emergency alert authority.
“He was on foot—how far could he get on foot? There might have been a car parked just around the corner,” he suggested.
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“This tool is incredibly effective and should likely be utilized more often, especially in murder investigations.”
The alert itself was issued nearly three hours after the crime took place.
Acting Staff Sgt. Joanne McCabe stated that the alert was activated as quickly as possible under the circumstances.
“It isn’t just a matter of minutes; you have to consider factors like whether the individuals involved know each other and if there’s a public safety threat,” she explained.
“There are investigative steps that have to be taken, and once those steps were completed, communication with the OPP occurred, leading to the alert being issued.”
According to the OPP, the alert was deployed swiftly after the request from Durham Regional Police.
“Once we received the alert request, it took less than 20 minutes to issue it,” stated the OPP. “During this time, we need to review and translate the request before it can be sent out.”
Some alerts even mistakenly indicated they were terrorism-related due to an unidentified error.
The OPP attributed this problem to a technical glitch and stated, “Once the error was detected, we fixed the information. We are currently looking into the cause of this malfunction and working on a solution.”
The situation raised many questions among the public.
At Queen’s Park, during a recent cabinet restructuring, Ontario Premier Doug Ford established a new full-time Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response, a role that was previously an associate minister position within the Treasury Board.
The new minister, Jill Dunlop, informed Global News on Monday that she had not yet been briefed on the emergency alert and the issues surrounding it.
“We haven’t discussed that, nor have we conducted a debriefing on the incident, so I can’t provide feedback at this time,” Dunlop said, when asked about establishing more protocols for emergency alerts.
“Absolutely, we’ll have further discussions moving forward.”
Her office indicated that inquiries about the emergency alert should be directed to the Solicitor General and the Ontario Provincial Police.
For its part, the Solicitor General’s office stated that the OPP would handle queries regarding the specifics of the alert’s radius.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles raised concerns about the necessity of having a dedicated minister for emergency preparedness if she was not informed about the recent alert.
“It’s alarming to know they have a minister focused entirely on these matters, yet she hasn’t been briefed,” Stiles noted.
“Her entire role is about emergency measures, and she remains uninformed about what transpired? I question the rationale for having someone in that position.”
— with contributions from Global News’ Noor Ra’fat
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
