To recognize the importance of interoperable emergency communications in protecting Canadians, a Specification Committee for the Canadian Profile of Common Alert Protocol (CAP-CP) 1.0 was formed by the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Interoperability Working Group (FPT IMT) of senior management responsible for the Emergency Management (SORC), supported by Public Safety Canada's (PS) Interoperability Development Office (CIO). The members of the CAP-CP 1.0 Specification Committee, including the Quebec Ministère de la Sécurité publique (MSP), are responsible for the development, approval and management of technical content requirements based on CAP-CP Version 1.0 specification documents. For more details on the committee: https://www.securitepublique.gc.ca/cnt/mrgnc-mngmnt/mrgnc-prprdnss/capcp/index-fr.aspx. The CAP-CP is currently published in three documents: 1. Introduction to CAP-CP and set of rules; 2. Glossary of events; 3. Locations glossary. The contents of the CAP-CP Locations Glossary are controlled independently from other documents, as it is expected that it may have more frequent updates over time, regardless of CAP-CP 1.0. As part of the update of the CAP-CP Locations Glossary of Version 1.0, the MSP decided to generate a list of location references, known as geocodes, and associated polygons for the province of Quebec. The dataset of the alert zones used in the National Public Alerting System — called Québec en Alert by the MSP — is the result of the generation of this list based on the official territorial boundaries of the Government of Québec (http://geoboutique.mern.gouv.qc.ca/PDF_ZIP/Structure_CADM-20K.pdf). Geocodes and polygons are associated with the reference material of the lexicon of locations of the CAP-CP accompanying CAP-PC-1.0. They are divided and generalized according to the territorial boundaries of regional county municipalities (RCMs) as well as municipalities, Aboriginal territories and non-organized territories. The generalization of polygons was decided to ensure full coverage of the territories and reduce the weight of polygons for rapid processing by distributors during an alert. Each polygon contains 1,500 vertex and has a 250 m buffer zone around its actual limit. The data architecture is the same as the lexicon of the CAP-CP locations is that of Statistics Canada's Standard Geographical Classification system. Thus, the area layer based on the territorial boundaries of the RCMs is associated with that of the census division (census division “CD”) and the zone layer based on the territorial boundaries of municipalities, aboriginal territories and unorganized territories is associated with the census subdivision (CSD). The Department of Public Safety strongly recommends that organizations, which wish to broadcast or distribute emergency alerts compatible with CAP-CP 1.0 in Quebec, use these geocode and polygon datasets.

**This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).**