National Public Alerting System (SNAP) - Quebec Alert: Quebec Alert Zones

To recognize the importance of interoperable emergency communications in the context of protecting Canadians, a Specifications Committee for the Common Alert Protocol Canadian Profile (PC-PAC) 1.0 was formed by the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Interoperability Working Group (GTI FPT) of Senior Emergency Management Officials (CSRGU), with the support of the Interoperability Development Office (BDI) of Public Safety Canada (SP). The members of the PC-PAC 1.0 Specifications Committee, including the Quebec Ministry of Public Security (MSP), are responsible for developing, approving, and managing technical content requirements based on the specification documents for PC-PAC 1.0. For more details on the committee: https://www.securitepublique.gc.ca/cnt/mrgnc-mngmnt/mrgnc-prprdnss/capcp/index-fr.aspx. The PC-PAC is currently published in three documents: 1. Introduction to the PC-PAC and set of rules; 2. Lexicon of events; 3. Location lexicon. The content of the PC-PAC location lexicon is controlled independently of other documents, as it is expected that it may have more frequent updates over time, independent of PC-PAC 1.0. As part of the update of the PC-PAC location lexicon of version 1.0, the MSP decided to generate itself the list of location references, called geocodes, and associated polygons for the province of Quebec. The dataset of alert zones used in the National Public Alerting System — called Quebec Alert by the MSP — is the result of the generation of this list based on the official territorial boundaries of the Government of Quebec (http://geoboutique.mern.gouv.qc.ca/PDF_ZIP/Structure_CADM-20K.pdf). Geocodes and polygons are associated with the reference material from the PC-PAC location lexicon that accompanies PC-PAC 1.0. They are divided and generalized according to the territorial boundaries of regional county municipalities (RCMs) as well as municipalities, indigenous territories and unorganized territories. The generalization of polygons was decided in order to ensure complete coverage of territories and reduce the weight of polygons for rapid processing by distributors during an alert. Each polygon contains 1,500 vertices and has a buffer zone of 250 m around its true limit. The data architecture is the same as the lexicon of PC-PAC locations, which is that of Statistics Canada's Standard Geographical Classification system. Thus, the zone layer based on the territorial boundaries of MRCs is associated with that of the census division (“CD”) and the layer of areas based on the territorial boundaries of municipalities, indigenous territories and unorganized territories is associated with the census subdivision (“CSD”). The Ministry of Public Security strongly recommends that organizations that want to broadcast or distribute emergency alerts compatible with PC-PAC 1.0 in Quebec use these geocode and polygon datasets.This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).