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Nouvelles

The agency and its mission

According to the Civil Protection Act, local municipalities are responsible for ensuring that an emergency 9-1-1 call centre serves their territory. It's also their responsibility to finance the costs of these 9-1-1 call centres.

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The municipal tax for 9-1-1 service

The municipal tax for 9-1-1 service is a monthly payment of 40 cents that must be paid by every customer of a given telephone service, regardless of the physical mode (landline or wireless, including internet phone service and prepaid card services), if that service allows users to call, directly or indirectly, an emergency 9-1-1 centre. This tax came into effect on December 1, 2009.

This tax replaces the former municipal 9-1-1 user fee of 47 cents, which has been in effect since 1995. However, the former 47-cent fee was not collected by all telephone service providers but only by those which had signed agreements with the various municipalities. Most cellular telephone service providers had not signed such agreements, so that only some of the customers of a given phone service (roughly 4.4 million out of a total of 8 million) were contributing toward the financing of the emergency 9-1-1 call centres. This raised a problem of fairness. It also caused a problem of under financing for the emergency 9-1-1 call centres, particularly in contexts where some people replaced their landline phones with other telephony modes.

Similar conditions exist in other Canadian provinces.

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New quality and accreditation standards for emergency 9-1-1 centres

Higher standards regarding norms, specifications and quality criteria will apply to emergency 9-1-1 call centres when a new regulation (Règlement sur les normes, spécifications et critères de qualité applicables aux centres d'urgence 9-1-1) will come into force. In June 2008, the Civil Protection Act was amended so as to require local municipalities to ensure that their territory would be served by an emergency 9-1-1 call centre, and the government was given the power to adopt a regulation imposing quality standards on the 9-1-1 centres, respecting response time, continuous service, number of staff on duty, personnel training, equipment, security in the call centre building, and so forth. According to the Law, 9-1-1 call centres from now on will be subject to an accreditation process that will enforce compliance with these standards. The Ministère de la Sécurité publique will be responsible for establishing and monitoring compliance with these new standards, but the inspection costs will be charged to the Agency.

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