SUMMERSIDE ­– Union officials are breathing a little easier following a meeting this week with the Office of Public Safety.
The Summerside police and firefighters union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 1174, along with the Prince Edward Island Police Association, met with Aaron Campbell, director of the Office of Public Safety over the government’s Request For Information for service providers of a central 911 dispatch system.
The union felt unionized jobs could be in jeopardy under the plan.
“We heard what we wanted to hear,” said Bill McKinnon, CUPE national representative. “But we had to ask some very pointed questions at one point,” McKinnon said. “We danced around the system and where it works and from they think it may not work, the statistics and all of that stuff,” he said. “Statistics are very sterile. They don’t give you the real story so we had some debate about the reality of those statistics.”
McKinnon said the stats were not at the heart of the discussion.
“The crux of the meeting was to find out are we only talking about the call/answer transfer piece, which is government jurisdiction under the 911 system – the piece where people call and say ‘I have a police emergency, fire emergency, an ambulance emergency’ and then that information is given to the police, or fire, or ambulance dispatchers to dispatch, which is the way it is now.”
McKinnon said meeting participants, on the other hand were talking about “the whole ball of wax; the call/answer transfer and the physical dispatch of the service after that.”
McKinnon said the confusion arose out of discussions surrounding the most ideal scenario, which would be to have everything in one central location.
“There was a realization that in reality you have municipalities that have their own dispatch service (Summerside and Charlottetown),” McKinnon said. “The RCMP have their own dispatch service and, unless those municipalities and RCMP wanted to work together to create one system, the government will not interfere with that. But there were concerns from their perspective about the call/answer transfer in three different locations —  Charlottetown police, Summerside police, RCMP — as opposed to one central location for that part of it.”
McKinnon said the Province is within its authority to  centralize the call/answer transfer component only.
The union representative said  Campbell  answered his question directly that there is no intent on the part of government to force the municipalities to give up their police and fire dispatch or the RCMP through legislation.
“If that ever did occur it would have to be by mutual consent between those parties and their employees, which is exactly what we hoped to hear and expected to hear — that government is not intent on legislating or breaking our contract,” he said.