Alert Ready

Alert Ready (French: En Alerte), formally the National Public Alerting System, is a national warning system in Canada. The system consists of infrastructure and standards for the presentation and distribution of public alerts issued by government authorities (including Environment Canada and other provincial public safety agencies), such as weather emergencies, AMBER Alerts, and other emergency notifications, across all television stations, radio stations, and broadcast distribution undertakings in the affected region.

The system is based upon the , and uses the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination system (NAAD), a platform operated by Pelmorex Media, as its backend for distributing alerts to broadcasters, in consort with a style guide that dictates when and how alerts are to be broadcast.

In development since 2010, the system officially launched on March 31, 2015; the system is legally backed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), who enacted a mandate in August 2014 for all broadcasters and broadcast distribution undertakings in Canada to relay emergency messages that are distributed through NAAD as of that date. Beginning April 6, 2018, wireless providers will also be required to participate, utilizing a Canadian variant of the Wireless Emergency Alerts framework utilized in the United States.

Various attempts had been made in the 21st century to establish a public alert system in Canada, by both departments of government and by television broadcasters. In 2001, Pelmorex, owners of The Weather Network and its French language counterpart MétéoMédia, applied to the CRTC for an amendment to their licenses to encompass a mandatory "All Channel Alert" system, requiring all television providers to relay emergency messages on behalf of governments across all of their channels. The service would have used proprietary hardware developed by Pelmorex, and would have been funded primarily by a $0.13 increase in carriage fees for the two channels. However, its initial proposal was denied by the CRTC, citing the need for consultation with broadcasters, television providers, and other parties on how the system would be designed, along with its costs. Establishment of such a system in a voluntary form was also hampered by CRTC rules at the time, which required television providers to obtain consent from broadcasters before they could overlay emergency notifications onto their programming.

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