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You’d be wrong. People telephoned 911 to complain about the alerts. Social media and talk-radio lit up about people griping about having their entertainment disrupted, or simply that an alert shouldn’t have been issued in the first place.

If you’re really so devoted to your favourite programming that an alert about a child being abducted is some kind of hardship, you are a failure as a human being

Both these arguments are flawed. The first is particularly stupid. If you’re really so devoted to your favourite programming that an alert about a child being abducted is some kind of hardship, you are a failure as a human being. As to the second, I’d argue this was actually a perfect use of Ontario’s Amber Alert and emergency broadcasting systems. Yes, the child was never in danger, but the ability of the police to rapidly confirm that is huge. Think of the public anxiety that would have resulted from people in Orillia believing a child abductor was loose in their city. Imagine the police resources, in money and man hours, that would have been invested in a needless search operation.

But there actually was something bad about Sunday night. And we are lucky that we had a chance to test the system when a child wasn’t actually in danger — or when the emergency alert system wasn’t being used for another of its intended purposes: warning of a chemical/radiological release, threatening weather systems, public order emergencies (read: riots) and the like.

The problem with the system, bluntly, was that it wasn’t very good at delivering information. The entire purpose of an Amber Alert, or an emergency broadcasting system more generally, is getting information to the public as rapidly and as clearly as possible. Automatically saturating TV and radio signals with the information is good. Social media and cellphone blasts should also be looked into (and are, I’m sure). But the delivery system is just part of the puzzle here. You also need to make sure the information you’re delivering is useful.