A tense afternoon on the Mount Royal University campus Monday has sparked serious questions about whether the institution's emergency notification system actually works when students and staff need it most.
Around 4 p.m. on April 13, Calgary police descended on the northwest Calgary campus after receiving a report of someone carrying a large knife. Dozens of officers responded, prompting police to issue a shelter-in-place order while they investigated the threat.
But here's the problem: many students and staff members say they had absolutely no idea what was happening.
The Notification Nightmare
Second-year student Julia Finot was among those caught off-guard. "I was walking all around with my friends. We didn't see anything," she said. "So we had no idea that there was even a danger on campus."
Mount Royal University operates an emergency alert app called MRU Now, which students and staff expect will notify them instantly during crises—just like it does for fire drills or campus protests. But during Monday's incident, that system failed to deliver.
"Whenever there's a fire drill or whenever there's a protest on campus, it's always one of the first things to pop up on my phone," Finot explained, raising the obvious question: why not during an actual emergency?
"We have an emergency alert system, but it was not used! Instead a simple email with a description about an intruder. But the Calgary Police mentioned a weapon and to shelter in place."
Those words came from MRU political science professor Duane Bratt, who observed "lots of people walking around" campus while police were actively investigating a potential weapon threat. He also noted that MRU failed to inform the campus community when the lockdown was lifted—again, the information came from Calgary Police instead.
Who's Telling the Truth?
Here's where the story gets murkier. Calgary police initially stated that "the MRU notification system ... was not activated." But when pressed by reporters Tuesday, a police spokesperson clarified: "where we stated that to our knowledge, an alert had not been sent to staff and students—that was our information at the time."
Mount Royal University, for its part, insists it did send notifications. In a statement to CBC News, the university acknowledged it "did send several messages through MRU Now as well as through email and social media." However, the university also made a troubling admission: "like many apps, MRU Now can go into 'hibernation' or be off-loaded from devices if not used regularly."
In other words, even when the university did send alerts, many students and staff may never have received them because the app wasn't active on their phones.
The Real Issue
The university said it "faced challenges relating to the complex nature of the incident, and some of the tools used," but this explanation doesn't address the fundamental problem: an emergency notification system that relies on users keeping an app actively installed and regularly opened is not a reliable emergency notification system.
What started as a weapons alert turned out to be a false alarm—the person in question was a chef working on campus, and police lifted the shelter-in-place order once the situation was clarified. But the incident has exposed a serious vulnerability in how Mount Royal University communicates with its community during crises.
For a campus community of thousands, an emergency alert system that "hibernates" if not frequently used is essentially an emergency alert system that doesn't exist when you need it.
This article is based on reporting from CBC Calgary. Read the original story at CBC News.