Maria Canton
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (Apr 24/00) - The $142,000 dispatch services contract between Emergency Services and the RCMP will likely come to an end by the summer.

In a letter the mayor sent last week to the RCMP, he asked for clarification as to when the police plan to begin operating their own dispatch centre from the detachment.

Emergency Services director Neville Wheaton says if the police don't have a firm date, the town will exercise the 90-day termination clause in the contract, which was signed only six months ago.

"They have given us a date of July 7 and we've asked them to qualify if this is the legal date," said Wheaton, who is also Iqaluit's fire chief.

"If they can't do that or give us one, and because of our need to train and staff our centre, we'll exercise the termination clause.

"But we also said that if they aren't ready on July 7, we have an interest in public safety and we will help out."

However, Inspector Dan Fudge says the RCMP is tentatively planning to have the new $500,000 state-of-the-art dispatch centre up and running by June 1.

Fudge says while having two emergency telephone numbers won't be ideal for the community, their new centre has to be located at the detachment.

"I felt that we would be better off having one dispatch service, but the problem we ran into was that we were very fortunate to have Ottawa fund this operation centre, and in order to keep one service, dispatch would have to move from the present location to our detachment," said Fudge.

"They had their reasons for not wanting to move, and we realized we had no choice but to go on our own."

Dispatch services is currently located at the firehall, and answers calls for fire, ambulance and police.

Once the police have their new centre operating, which features communication equipment capable of recording and instantaneously playing back calls, dispatch services will no longer answer calls for them. Between 60 and 65 per cent of the calls to dispatch are for the RCMP.

Reasons given by Emergency Services for not moving include having a faster response time when dispatch, fire and ambulance are housed in the same building and staffing concerns.

Wheaton also says this situation delays the possibility of getting a 911 number in Nunavut.

"Getting 911 was the biggest advantage to us staying together. We had police and fire dispatch integrated and it would have been just a matter of taking the 911 number and putting it in place, but that's on the backburner right now," he said.

"It can only be a minor setback, but it sort of takes away any plans of getting 911 seamlessly, because now there will be the extra step of having to be passed to a second dispatcher at the RCMP for something like a break-in."

The dispatch services contract between the town, Public Works and Government Services Canada, which administer the RCMP, has been in place since October 1993.