HALIFAX -- Not being able to access phone and internet service after post-tropical storm Dorian left some people concerned and scared and others angry.
Politicians have been hearing the frustrations of people who felt there wasn't enough information provided after the outage, and Nova Scotia's NDP believes the situation can be prevented in the future.
In the aftermath of post-tropical storm Dorian, one of the greatest frustrations for many Nova Scotians wasn't the clean-up of debris, but rather the lack of phone and internet service.
It's something many Maritimers consider an essential service.
"If your power goes out, your phone's gone, you're history," said Dave Parsons. "So, your cellphone, I would say, would have to be essential to have."
The Progressive Conservative Party says the outage was a scary experience for some people.
"It was pretty terrifying for most Nova Scotians," said PC leader Tim Houston. "They were literally cut off from the world without their cellphones, without their Wi-Fi, and that's something that we need to try and avoid."
On Tuesday, the NDP introduced legislation in response to last month's widespread telecommunications failures.
The bill requires provincial and municipal emergency management teams to include a plan for continuous telecommunications for the public.
It also mandates that telecommunications companies provide information to EMO following a storm or emergency.
"They were not as involved, frankly, in the emergency planning as we thought that they ought to have been and that they ought to be in the future," said NDP MLA Claudia Chender. "So this bill basically codifies that and says these telcoms have to come to the table, be part of an emergency management plan, the same way that Nova Scotia Power was."
Premier Stephen McNeil says having telecommunications companies in the command centre during events like post-tropical storm Dorian is important, but he hasn't said if he'll support the bill.
"All three of the major telecoms, Eastlink, Rogers, Bell, I've spoken to them and they all agreed to be part of comms centres," McNeil said. "That's an important step in how we ensure that we have a good overall plan."
The next step would be for the bill to be called for a second reading. As of now, there's no timeline in place for when that will happen.
