THE LOCKYER FACTOR
by Paul Palango
If you haven’t already noticed, something truly strange happened on the road to finding the truth about what actually happened before, during and after the Nova Scotia massacres of April 18 and 19, 2020.
Lisa Banfield and her $1,200-an-hour lawyer, James Lockyer, appear to have been controlling the show from the very beginning. The Lockyer factor as a not-so-hidden influencer on the news is important to address.
On April 19, 2020, just hours after Lisa Banfield arrived at the door of Leon Joudrey, she contacted lawyer Kevin von Bargen in Toronto to seek advice and help. The lawyer, a friend of Wortman and Banfield, put her onto James Lockyer.
From that moment forward, her every word has been treated as gospel. By the RCMP, by the Mass Casualty Commission, and by the compliant media. Even those who believe her to have been a victim of domestic violence at the hands of Gabriel Wortman (and she clearly was), but also believe she might know more than she’s letting on — and that what she knows might be important to the inquiry’s purported fact-finding mission — have been dismissed as cranks and conspiracists.
According to financial documents released by the inquiry after Lisa Banfield’s dramatic “testimony” on July 15, Banfield reported earnings of $15,288 one recent year.
That would cover a day, plus HST, of Lockyer’s valuable time.
He has been on the clock for 27 months or so, his fees covered by taxpayers through the Mass Casualty Commission.
Banfield’s finances, such as they are, would have been a juicy subject for any curious lawyer, but she wasn’t allowed to be cross examined. Too traumatic, remember.
Questions abound.
Why did Banfield hire an esteemed criminal lawyer? Did no one let her in on her status as a victim?
Lockyer seems like an exotic choice. He made his name from the early ‘90s onward representing men wrongly convicted of murder, such as Stephen Truscott, David Milgaard, Robert Baltovich and Guy Paul Morin. Morin was falsely accused of killing 9-year-old Christine Jessop in Queensville, Ontario, near Toronto.
I was the city editor at the Globe and Mail then. I was intimately involved in the story which was being covered by one of our reporters, Kirk Makin. I even at one point had a meeting with Makin and Morin’s mother, who protested his innocence. At the time I was wrongly unmoved and skeptical of her story, but Makin persisted in digging into it and worked closely with Lockyer. Morin was eventually exonerated. Kudos to all. I hope I got smarter after that.
Lockyer, who lived a block away from me in Toronto, went on to become a champion of the wrongly convicted and started the Innocence Project to work on their behalf. Among his many clients was Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the former boxer who was wrongly convicted of three murders in Paterson, NJ and was the inspiration for the 1976 Bob Dylan epic Hurricane.
In recent years, Lockyer and his Innocence Project became involved in the case of Nova Scotia’s Glenn Assoun, who was wrongly convicted in 1999 of murdering Brenda Way in Dartmouth four years earlier.
Lockyer worked along with lawyers Sean MacDonald and Phil Campbell to have Assoun’s conviction overturned after he had spent 17 years in prison. In the final years of that campaign an activist reporter named Tim Bousquet took on the Assoun case and wrote about it extensively for years, channeling and publicizing what the lawyers and their investigators had uncovered. To his credit Bousquet uncovered some things on his own.
Perhaps the biggest revelation in the Assoun case was that the RCMP had destroyed evidence and had mislead the courts about Assoun.
Bousquet joined with the CBC in 2020 and produced a radio series, Dead Wrong, about the case. As Canadians should know well by now, both the federal and Nova Scotia governments ignored what the Mounties were caught doing.
Fast forward to the Nova Scotia massacres and the news coverage of it.
As I wrote in my recent book, 22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-up and Obstacles to Justice In Nova Scotia, I had a brief fling with Bousquet and his on-line newspaper, The Halifax Examiner, in 2020.
After publishing an opening salvo in Maclean’s magazine in May 2020, I couldn’t find anyone else interested in my reporting, which challenged the official narrative. Maclean’s writer Stephen Maher introduced me to Bousquet. I knew nothing about either him or the Halifax Examiner.
Over the next several weeks, Bousquet published five of my pieces and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Examiner punched well above its weight. Its stories were being picked up and read across the country. Although I had never met the gruff and the usually difficult-to-reach Bousquet, I thought we had a mutual interest in keeping the story alive as the mainstream media was losing interest in it and were moving on. At first blush, Bousquet seemed like a true, objective journalist determined to find the truth. Hell, I was even prepared to work for nothing, just to get the story out.
“I have to pay you, man,” he insisted in one phone call.
I felt badly taking money from him. I had no idea what his company’s financial situation might be, and I didn’t want to break the bank. He said he could pay me $300 or so per story and asked me to submit an invoice, which I did.
Soon afterward, a cheque for $1500 arrived. I cashed it and then my wife Sharon and I sent him $500 each in after tax money as a donation. Like I said, I didn’t want to be a drag on the Examiner.
Once we made the donations, Bousquet all but ghosted me. He was always too busy to take my calls or field my pitches. I couldn’t tell if I was being cancelled or had been conned.
I began to replay events in my head and the one thing that leapt out to me was Bousquet’s defensive and even dismissive reaction to two threads I thought were important and newsworthy which I wanted to write about.
One was the politically sensitive issue of writing objectively about all the women in the story. There were female victims who had slept with Wortman, which I though was contextually important in understanding the larger story. Bousquet had made it clear that he wasn’t eager for me to write about that. (Be trauma informed!-ed.)
There was also the fact that female police officers were at the intersection of almost every major event that terrible weekend. The commanding officer was Leona (Lee) Bergerman. Chief Superintendent Janis Gray was in charge of the RCMP in Halifax County. Inspector Dustine Rodier ran the communications centre. It was a long list that will continue to grow.
I believe in equal pay for work of equal value but that comes with equal accountability for all. I am gender neutral when evaluating performance.
But it didn’t take psychic powers to detect that gender politics was a big issue with Bousquet – his target market, as it were.
I really wanted to write about Banfield. My preliminary research strongly suggested to me her story was riddled with weakness and inconsistency, but nobody in the mainstream media would tackle it. Hell, for months her name wasn’t even published anywhere outside the pages of Frank magazine.
Bousquet’s position was that Banfield was a victim of domestic violence and that her story, via vague, second-hand and untested RCMP statements, was to be believed. No questions asked.
“You’re going to need something really big to convince me otherwise,” Bousquet said in one of our brief conversations.
Afterward, I did have one face-to-face meeting with him in Halifax. He actually sat in the back seat of our car because Sharon was in the front. We met up because I wanted to tell him about sensitive leads I had which, if pursued, would show that the RCMP had the ability to manipulate its records and destroy evidence in its PROs reporting system.
Considering his involvement in the Assoun case, where that very issue was at the heart of Assoun’s exoneration, I thought Bousquet would be eager to pursue the story.
As I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I could sense his discomfort and lack of interest. So could Sharon who was sitting beside me.
“That was weird,” she said.
Bousquet got out of the car, walked away and disappeared me for good.
It was all so inexplicable. If this was the new journalism that I was experiencing, there was something terribly wrong with it. I couldn’t believe that a journalist like Bousquet who aspired to be a truthteller felt compelled to distill every word or nuance through a political filter first or even something more nefarious.
Later, while writing for Frank Magazine, I broke story after story about the case. Incontrovertible documents showing that the RCMP was destroying evidence in the Wortman case. The Pictou County Public Safety channel recordings showing for the first time what the RCMP was doing on the ground during the early morning hours of April 19. The 911 tapes. The Enfield Big Stop videos. That Lisa Banfield lied in small claims court on two different occasions.
Bousquet either ignored or ridiculed most of those stories in the Halifax Examiner or on his Twitter feed, as if I were making the stories up.
For the most part throughout 2021, the Halifax Examiner didn’t even bother covering the larger story.
Time and time again, “new” stories would be published which were essentially no different from previous ones but all with the same theme: as Ray Davies of the Kinks put it in his masterpiece Sunny Afternoon: “Tales of drunkenness and cruelty.”
The Monster and the Maiden stories, as I called them, reinforced in readers' minds that Banfield was a helpless victim controlled by a demonic Wortman, a narrative that, upon reflection, seemed to perfectly suit Lockyer’s strategy.
For 27 months the RCMP and the Mass Casualty Commission played along, sheltering Banfield as part of their “trauma-informed” mandate, even though there was plenty to be skeptical about her story.
Banfield was beside Wortman for 19 years during which he committed crime after crime. She was reportedly the last person to be with Wortman and her incredible, hoary tale of escape should have been enough to raise suspicions about her.
From the moment she knocked on Leon Joudrey’s door she has been treated as a victim, which to this day astounds law enforcement experts and others who have monitored the case. Many observers, including but not limited to lawyers representing the families of the victims, have serious questions about how Banfield spent the overnight hours of April 18/19. Not helping matters is that she doesn’t appear to have been subjected to any level of normal criminal investigation or evidence gathering. Her clothing wasn’t tested. There were no gunshot residue tests. She wasn’t subjected to a polygraph or any other credible investigative procedure.
Enter James Lockyer of the Innocence Project.
The puppetification of Tim Bousquet
As we moved closer to July 15, the day that Banfield would be “testifying” at the MCC, it is also important to consider what Bousquet and his minions were doing at the Halifax Examiner.
In the weeks and days leading up to Banfield’s appearance, the Examiner’s reporting and Bousquet’s Twitter commentary began to take on an illogical, more contemptuous and even hostile approach to anyone who refused to buy into the RCMP and Banfield’s official version of events.
In a series of hilariously one-sided diatribes, Bousquet lashed out at Banfield’s critics whom he wouldn’t name. Some (likely us) were “bad-faith actors.” He decried the “witchification” of Banfield.
He tweeted: “And just to repeat for the 1000th time: I’ve read transcripts of interviews with dozens of people. I’ve read three years’ of emails between Banfield and GW. I’ve read her Notes app. There is ZERO evidence that she had any prior knowledge (of) GW’s intent to kill people…. The notion that she is ‘complicit’ is pulled out of people’s diarrhetic asses and plain old-fashioned misogyny.”
Oh, misogyny, that old woke slimeball to be hurled at any male who dare be critical of any female.
One can’t help but sense the deft hand of a clever and experienced defence lawyer running up the back of Bousquet’s shirt. That makes sense.
Look at what has transpired on Lockyer’s watch.
Since April 2020, the RCMP and the federal and provincial governments have wrapped themselves in a single, vague and inappropriate platitude – trauma informed.
The original selling point was that this approach would prevent the surviving family members from being further traumatized by the ongoing “investigation” into the massacres.
What actually happened is much more sinister.
Lisa Banfield was coddled and protected the entire time not only by the authorities but also by Lockyer’s friends in the mass media. The wily old fox had the opportunity to mainline his thoughts into the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, CTV and Global News who unquestioningly lapped it up.
At the MCC, Banfield wasn’t allowed to be cross examined because, as Mr. Lockyer so eloquently explained, cross examination would just lead to more conspiracy theories.
That’s rich.
The search for the truth will only confuse matters -- it’s better for everyone that Banfield spin a much-rehearsed tale without challenge. That’s clearly a $1,200-an-hour lawyer speaking.
The whole world has gone topsy-turvy. The Mass Casualty Commission, the federal and provincial governments, the RCMP and Lisa Banfield are now aligned on one side of the argument.
Meanwhile, the re-traumatized families find themselves agreeing with this magazine and other skeptics and critics.
The final irony is that the Halifax Examiner bills itself as being “independent” and “adversarial.” It seems to be neither these days.
In the end, Tim Bousquet’s approach to covering the Nova Scotia Massacres is, to use his words: “Dead Wrong.”
paulpalango@protonmail.com
Paul Palango is author of the best selling book 22 Murders: Investigating the massacres, cover-up and obstacles to justice in Nova Scotia (Random House).
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Andrew Douglas
Frank Magazine
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The Nova Scotia shooting encapsulates all that's wrong with the RCMP
Paul Palango: What happened in Nova Scotia was an example of a cascading failure for the Mounties and there are horrible questions for which answers are needed now
Officers at the scene of the crash between Stevenson’s car and Wortman’s fake RCMP vehicle (John Morris/Reuters)
Paul Palango is the author of three books on the RCMP and a frequent commentator over the past 27 years on RCMP issues
When I awoke that Sunday, my wife, Sharon, was already having a coffee. She told me that she had just seen a Facebook posting that a gunman was on the loose near Truro, N.S.
“Since when?”
“Last night.”
“Any details?
“No. It says the guy may be driving a RCMP vehicle.”
I made myself a coffee and then started scouting around for details. There were hardly any. Scraps of information really. There had been no warning put out to the public. From my experience in dealing with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police over the past 27 years or so, I got that sick feeling that comes from having seen this all before.
“This is bad,” I told her. “Worse than you might think. The RCMP has gone into its shell trying to protect itself and its image. This is probably going to be really bad.”
When the news finally dribbled out, we learned that 22 people were dead, including Mountie Heidi Stevenson. The gunman was also shot dead in a gas station by a Mountie. A messy story resolved. The mourning began for the Mountie … and the others. Tributes went out to the first responders. Flags were ready to be lowered. Funerals, such as they were in this age of COVID-19, were ready to be held.
I talked to a few people and quickly learned some unpublished details. The shooter had tied up his ex-girlfriend or wife to a tree, I was told at the time (though that turned out to be not quite accurate).
There were many dead. When the shooter was taken down at the Irving gas station north of Halifax International Airport, a source told me, the RCMP and Halifax police were in a state of chaos. No one knew who was in charge or what they were supposed to do. “It was a shit show.” One police officer figured out that someone who looked like the shooter was at a gas pump and was acting “hinky.” The shooter knew he had been identified, reached for a weapon and had been shot by the curious and alert officer. Story over, right?
READ MORE: The Nova Scotia shooting and the mistakes the RCMP may have made
In situations like these, I have often been called upon to provide comment—Spiritwood, Mayerthorpe, the Dziekanski death and so on. When three Mounties were murdered in June 2014, I was called by Global TV to comment. I told them I was travelling at the time and couldn’t make it. Actually, I was on my way to Prince Edward Island and was less than 40 minutes away. I had learned from experience that there was no value in trying to point out the shortcomings of the RCMP soon after an event.
“This is not the time for recriminations or criticism,” I had heard more than once.
This time, CBC Radio in Halifax called. I got a little emotional about what had happened. I was extremely critical about the force and asked out loud why Stevenson a 48-year-old mother of two was alone in a car in the situation that got her killed. It had been at least 13 hours since the events had begun in Portapique, spread the next morning to Wentworth and elsewhere.
“Where was the cavalry?” I asked. “Getting gas at Enfield?”
How did it all go so wrong?
Of course, the recriminations began to fly. The mayor of Lunenburg, N.S., contacted me and gave me a dressing down. This was not the time for recriminations, she told me.
But my experience, if it has taught me anything, is the RCMP is adept at pulling at heartstrings during and immediately after an event, like they have over the past two weeks. We are told that there will be a time and place to discuss these issues, but that time never really comes. By then, it’s all old news and time to move on, they will say.
Even now, without all the details in, it has become clear to me that the Nova Scotia massacre encapsulated all that has been and continues to be wrong with the current structure, ethos and performance of the RCMP.
When the RCMP held its first news conference to announce what happened, the two people in charge of the Nova Scotia RCMP, Assistant Commissioner Lee Bergermen and Chief Superintendent Chris Leather looked understandably stressed on one level and like deer caught in the headlights on another. The information coming forth from them was thin and largely unhelpful.
In my CBC interview, I was asked about how long it would take the RCMP to respond to the scene in Portapique on a Saturday night. I said that it took them, based upon what I knew, 30 to 35 minutes.
In its first timeline, the RCMP said it took 12 minutes. The next day it changed the timeline and fudged the response time even more. Finally, it came out with another timeline which said it took 26 minutes. What is the real story?
The RCMP prides itself in being a national police force, but it’s not really a national police force, like say in France. It’s actually a federal police force that rents itself out to the provinces and territories outside Ontario and Quebec. Even then, the only urban areas it polices are Moncton, N.B., and the suburbs of Vancouver—and even there, it’s about to lose its local detachment in Surrey.
The fatal conceit of the Mounties is that every Mountie can do any job, policing is policing. There is no magic.
Here’s how that worked out in the Nova Scotia massacre. Nova Scotia, like other provinces that hire the Mounties to do their provincial or municipal policing, have no say who the RCMP puts in charge or hires in the province.
Bergerman, the officer in charge, spent almost her entire career in federal policing in British Columbia and Ontario. She didn’t do much on the ground in-your-face policing.
However, working on organized crime and counter terrorism is akin to the difference between cricket and baseball. Both have bats and balls, but they are fundamentally different games.
Leather, who started out as a street cop in a regional force outside Toronto, joined the Mounties and became what is known in the force as a “carpet cop.” He moved his way up through federal policing and the corridors of power in Ottawa to be appointed last November as head of operations in Nova Scotia. He was in charge of the police on the ground.
At the second RCMP news conference, the force trotted out the number three in the province, Superintendent Darren Campbell, who was in charge of support services. He’s the guy who makes sure everyone has what they need, especially in an emergency like this one. Where did he come from? As a Staff-Sergeant, he was at RCMP Corps, protecting the legacy and traditions of the RCMP, before he was promoted to Inspector as an assistant in Ottawa to an assistant commissioner. Another former carpet cop.
Instead of tackling the issue head on, they planned and planned, so that no one could be accused of breaching “best practice” protocols.
“This incident was dynamic and fluid,” said Leather in a statement on April 22. “The RCMP have highly trained and capable Critical Incident Command staff who were on site in Portapique. Operational Communications Centre operators assisting the response and police presence was significant. The members who responded used their training and made tough decisions while encountering the unimaginable.”
But as they planned, they failed to put out proper alerts, failed to draw on other forces for help, like Truro and Amherst, failed to set up a secondary perimeter and failed to shut down the very few roads in Central Nova Scotia where the killer was wandering on his deadly mission.
For the RCMP this was an example of a cascading failure that began on Portapiqaue Beach Road—there are suggestions that the Mounties may have been slow to respond there—to the ultimate climax with the accidental meeting between the police and the gunmen at the gas pumps. From the outset the Mounties appear to have become fixated on their own manpower problems and poor decisions at the original crime scene. They then evolved into magical thinking—the gunmen probably killed himself because that’s what a lot of these guys do.
Finally, there is the sad case of Constable Stevenson. She joined the Mounties and was sent to the Musical Ride, even though she hadn’t ever ridden a horse. She spent 13 years there. When she came back to Nova Scotia, she was a press liaison. She was a community support officer, like those who go into schools. She was a traffic cop in Enfield and she was a 48-year-old mother of two.
Yes, she died a hero, but did she have to die? How did she die? Was she sent to her death by incompetent overseers? The Mountie union says she crashed her car into the killer’s fake police car or was it the other way around? Look at the photos. The only car equipped to survive such a crash was the one driven by the bad guy. His vehicle was fitted with a push bar or ram package, as it’s called. The RCMP has resisted for years improving the safety of his vehicles after it became an issue in Spiritwood, Sask., in 2006. Back then two Mounties rammed a vehicle not equipped with a push bar. Their airbags went off and like sitting ducks they were each shot in the head by the person they were trying to apprehend. Did that happen to Stevenson, too?
Why was she alone there, 13 hours after the rampage had begun? Why were the heavily armed specialists still gassing up almost half an hour after she and another Mountie had been shot in Shubenacadie 20 minutes away? And the Mounties only got their man after one alert officer’s instincts—his Spidey sense—told him something wasn’t right about the guy sitting in a Mazda at a gas pump.
There are a thousand horrible questions for which answers are needed.
But Nova Scotians and Canadians must get over suspending their disbelief and their fond memories of the Musical Ride to do the hard work of addressing this very important issue.
The time has come for recriminations.
MORE ABOUT NOVA SCOTIA:
The Nova Scotia killer had ties to criminals and withdrew a huge sum of cash before the shooting
New evidence including a video of the killer raises questions about his activities prior to the Portapique shooting and RCMP transparency around the case
A still from a video showing Gabriel Wortman in the Brinks office on March 30, 2020.
The man who murdered 22 people in a two-day shooting rampage in Nova Scotia in late April withdrew $475,000 in cash 19 days before he donned an RCMP uniform and started gunning down his neighbours, contacts and random strangers.
Gabriel Wortman withdrew the money from the Brink’s office at 19 Ilsley Ave. in Dartmouth, N.S., on March 30, according to a source close to the police investigation, who provided Maclean’s with two videos.
The first video shows Wortman driving what appears to be one of his decommissioned white police cruisers into the fenced yard of the security facility. He is wearing a baseball cap and leather jacket. In the second video, taken inside, he conducts a transaction, then walks back to his cruiser with a carryall apparently filled with 100-dollar bills, according to the source, and stashes the bag in the trunk of his vehicle.
A uniformed Brink’s employee at the Dartmouth location said recently: “People are always surprised by how much money like that takes up so little space.”
That amount of hundreds would weigh less than five kilograms.
Wortman, a 51-year-old denturist, is said to have arranged the withdrawal from Brink’s after transferring the cash from an account at a major Canadian bank.
In Wortman’s last will and testament, a handwritten document he wrote in 2011, which was published last week, Wortman declared a number of properties assessed for about $700,000. The true real estate market value would likely be higher. He also declared about $500,000 in personal property, RRSPs and insurance policies.
The withdrawal of $475,000 suggests Wortman may have converted all of his liquid assets into cash or that he had a hidden stash of cash.
It is not clear what happened to the money from the moment the killer took it out of the Brink’s location to the time he was shot by RCMP officers during an attempted arrest at a gas station in Enfield, N.S., on April 19.
The lawyer for family members of the killer’s victims said Wednesday that the estate filing at probate court lists a large sum of cash, which he believes was recovered by the RCMP.
“I assume the public trustee has it,” said Robert Pineo, who is suing the estate.
Wortman’s common-law spouse filed a court document May 25 renouncing any claim on the estate, heading off a legal dispute with relatives of the victims.
“The goal is to liquidate his entire estate and have it made available to the family members,” he said.
On Tuesday, Pineo filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the RCMP and the province, alleging that the force failed to “protect the safety and security of the public.”
Nova Scotia RCMP did not respond to questions on Wednesday about what became of the money or whether Wortman was connected to any organized crime investigations.
A still from a video showing Gabriel Wortman in the Brink’s yard on March 30, 2020.
The officer who swore the RCMP’s first search warrants was Sgt. Angela Hawryluk. A 28-year veteran of the RCMP, Hawryluk stipulated in the documents that she is experienced in outlaw biker gangs, drug trafficking and confidential informants.
Superintendent Darren Campbell seemed to rule out the possibility that Wortman was a confidential informant for the RCMP at a press briefing on June 4. “The gunman was never associated to the RCMP as a volunteer or auxiliary police officer, nor did the RCMP ever have any special relationship with the gunman of any kind,” he said.
However, according to one law-enforcement source, Wortman often spent time with Hells Angels, and he had at least one associate with links to organized crime.
Sources say he was friendly with Peter Alan Griffon, a Portapique neighbour linked to a Mexican drug cartel. Sources say Griffon printed the decals that Wortman used on the replica RCMP cruiser he used in his murders.
In 2014, Griffon, then 34, was arrested by Edmonton police as part of an operation against a drug trafficking ring operated by the Mexican cartel La Familia and elements of the ruthless multi-national El Salvadoran gang MS-13. He pled guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison on Dec. 12, 2017, for possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking and weapons charges.
At the time of the arrest police said they had seized from Griffon’s home: four kilograms of cocaine, ecstasy, $30,000 in cash, two .22 calibre rifles, one with a silencer, a .44 calibre Desert Eagle handgun, a sawed-off shotgun, thousands of bullets and body armour.
Police issued a second warrant for Griffon’s arrest in 2015 after he returned to Nova Scotia, in violation of his bail conditions. He is believed to have been living in Portapique with his parents since 2019.
Sources say Griffon, who was friendly with Wortman, was working at a print shop and that he printed the decals without the permission of the business owner. Another law enforcement source says Wortman and Griffon were part of a group of drinking buddies in the Portapique area.
Griffon is no longer working at the print shop. RCMP said in May that the business owner and the person who printed the decals have co-operated with their investigation.
Griffon did not respond to Facebook messages and calls seeking comment on his relationship with Wortman.
Griffon is the second cousin of one of the victims, Sean McLeod, who was murdered along with his partner, Alanna Jenkins, on the morning of April 19 in West Wentworth, N.S.
According to obituaries, Griffon and McLeod’s mothers are sisters.
McLeod was a corrections officer at the Springhill Institution, a federal medium-security prison, while Jenkins worked in a federal corrections institute for women in Truro.
It is not known if Griffon was imprisoned at Springhill.
McLeod and Jenkins were the first two victims of a total of nine in the second day of Wortman’s rampage. The night before he had killed 13 people in Portapique and gave the RCMP the slip, escaping on a dirt road in his replica cruiser while much of the small seaside community was in flames.
Wortman appears to have spent several hours at the home of McLeod and Jenkins. He murdered the couple, set their home on fire and then murdered neighbour Tom Bagley, a volunteer firefighter who is believed to have approached the property to investigate the fire.
Family members of victims and law-enforcement officials have raised questions about the RCMP’s handling of the event. The force failed to contain Wortman, did not block the highway links to Truro and Halifax and did not issue a provincial alert. Two officers also shot up the firehall in Onslow.
A former neighbour of Wortman has expressed frustration that the RCMP did not act earlier. Brenda Forbes, a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, told the RCMP in 2013 that he had a stash of illegal weapons, and that she had heard three male witnesses had seen Wortman strangling and hitting his common-law wife. Forbes said the RCMP abandoned their investigation because witnesses were unwilling to come forward. The RCMP have said that privacy law prevents them from commenting on complaints that do not result in charges.
An RCMP officer, speaking off the record because the officer is not authorized to discuss the case, said this week that the RCMP’s inaction on the complaint from Forbes seems odd.
“There’s zero tolerance, if we get called in to a domestic, somebody’s got to go, if there’s enough evidence,” the officer said. “It’s a simple 487, a search warrant to go get those guns. I would have wrote it off the statement from the two military people.”
Forbes’ complaint was not Wortman’s first run-in with police. Two years earlier, a source told a Truro police officer that Wortman was armed and wanted to kill a police officer. This information was sent to police agencies throughout Nova Scotia as a bulletin, but RCMP have not provided information on how they acted on it.
Wortman’s father told Frank magazine that he told police about 10 years ago that he had heard his son was threatening to kill him, but that after his son denied the threat and the existence of firearms to police, police did not investigate further. Years before that, he says, while on vacation in Cuba, without warning Wortman had repeatedly punched him in the head until he was unconscious. And in 2002, Wortman pleaded guilty to assaulting a 15-year old boy, but received a conditional discharge if he completed nine months probation and paid a $50 fine. The boy, now grown, has told Global news reporters that he wishes more had been done.
A number of current and former RCMP members familiar with the way the force handles undercover operations but not privy to details about this investigation have speculated that Wortman’s case has the hallmarks of a police informant operation.
Officers are struck by a speeding ticket the RCMP issued Wortman at 5:58 pm on Feb. 12, 2020, on Portapique Beach Road. Wortman was driving one of the former police vehicles in his collection.
At the time the ticket was issued, the RCMP was in the midst of undertaking multiple arrests of Hell’s Angels and their associates in Halifax and New Brunswick. Officers speculate that if Wortman was a confidential informant that his cover had been blown.
“The ticket stinks” said one current RCMP member. “At 6 o’clock at night in February in rural Nova Scotia nobody is doing radar. But it’s a standard trick used to pass messages to informants or create cover to prove to the targets that the informant and the police are on opposite teams.”
To date, both the federal and provincial governments have deflected calls for a public inquiry into the worst mass shooting in Canadian history.
Last week, Nova Scotia Attorney General Mark Furey indicated that a joint federal-provincial inquiry would be announced, but that has not happened. Furey, a former RCMP Staff-Sergeant, has said in the past that he believes he can be objective in dealing with the force and does not have a conflict of interest.
A number of current and former police officers have told Maclean’s that they are suspicious about the motives behind the delay in calling an inquiry.
A current RCMP member who is aware of the inner operations of the RCMP said the real story about the lead-up to the shootings and what actually happened on the weekend of April 18 and 19 would likely be contained in internal documents within the force. The RCMP member pointed specifically to a digital document called a Form 2315. In those forms the RCMP in any province would typically describe in candid language the status of any ongoing major investigation or project. The information in these forms is emailed to a working group, likely under the Deputy Commissioner in charge of Operations, and then on to the Commissioner.
“In those forms the RCMP will speak freely about what happened,” the Mountie said in one of several interviews. “You have to get your hands on them. That’s where the real story can be found.”
The unwillingness of the RCMP and governments to provide a more detailed account of what happened has frustrated and angered some family members of the deceased.
On May 31, Darcy Dobson, whose mother, Heather O’Brien, was murdered by Wortman on April 19, expressed anger in a Facebook post: “If this is the worst massacre in Canadian history why are we not trying to learn from it? What’s the hold up in the inquiry? Why hasn’t this happened yet? Where are we in the investigation? Was someone else involved? Why can’t we get any answers at all 40 days in?! The fact that anyone of us has to ask these questions is all very concerning and only makes everyone feel inadequate, unimportant and unsafe.”
RCMP say they are still investigating where Wortman got the four illegal guns he used in his rampage, declining to release details because of the ongoing investigation.
An RCMP officer not authorized to comment said investigators appear to be trying to avoid public scrutiny.
“They’re closing shit off as fast as they can. They don’t want to open up everything else.”
CORRECTION, JUNE 17, 2020: An earlier version of this story misidentified where Alanna Jenkins worked. It was a federal corrections institute for women, not a provincial one.
CORRECTION, JUNE 18, 2020: Peter Griffon is the second cousin of one of the victims, Sean McLeod, not a first cousin as stated in an earlier version of this story.
Contact our reporters:
Stephen Maher: stephenjamesmaher@gmail.com
Shannon Gormley: shannon.n.gormley@gmail.com
Paul Palango: paulpalango@eastlink.ca
The Nova Scotia shooter case has hallmarks of an undercover operation
Police sources say the killer's withdrawal of $475,000 was highly irregular, and how an RCMP ‘agent’ would get money
A still from a video showing Gabriel Wortman in the Brink's yard on March 30, 2020.
This story was last updated on June 23, 2020
The withdrawal of $475,000 in cash by the man who killed 22 Nova Scotians in April matches the method the RCMP uses to send money to confidential informants and agents, sources say.
Gabriel Wortman, who is responsible for the largest mass killing in Canadian history, withdrew the money from a Brink’s depot in Dartmouth, N.S., on March 30, stashing a carryall filled with hundred-dollar bills in the trunk of his car.
According to a source close to the police investigation the money came from CIBC Intria, a subsidiary of the chartered bank that handles currency transactions.
Sources in both banking and the RCMP say the transaction is consistent with how the RCMP funnels money to its confidential informants and agents, and is not an option available to private banking customers.
The RCMP has repeatedly said that it had no “special relationship” with Wortman. RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell reiterated that statement during an interview with the Toronto Star published online, and in its print newspaper on Sunday, saying: “The gunman had no special relationship with the RCMP whatsoever.” Campbell told the Star: “The investigation has not uncovered any relationship between the gunman and the RCMP outside of an estranged familial relationship and two retired RCMP members.”
According to the Star story: “Campbell said the reason for Wortman’s large cash withdrawal, which he confirmed was hundreds of thousands of dollars, was not fully known, ‘however, there are indications that near the time of the withdrawal the gunman believed that due to the worldwide pandemic, that his financial assets were safer under his control.'”
Campbell declined to be interviewed by Maclean’s on Friday, prior to this story’s publication online, and again on Tuesday.
Court documents show Wortman owned a New Brunswick-registered company called Berkshire-Broman, the legal owner of two of his vehicles (including one of his police replica cars). Whatever the purpose of that company, there is no public evidence that it would have been able to move large quantities of cash. Wortman also ran his own denturist business and there is no reason to believe it also would require him to handle large amounts of cash.
If Wortman was an RCMP informant or agent, it could explain why the force appeared not to take action on complaints about his illegal guns and his assault on his common-law wife.
READ MORE: The Nova Scotia killer had ties to criminals and withdrew a huge sum of cash before the shooting
A Mountie familiar with the techniques used by the force in undercover operations, but not with the details of the investigation into the shooting, says Wortman could not have collected his own money from Brink’s as a private citizen.
“There’s no way a civilian can just make an arrangement like that,” he said in an interview.
He added that Wortman’s transaction is consistent with the Mountie’s experience in how the RCMP pays its assets. “I’ve worked a number of CI cases over the years and that’s how things go. All the payments are made in cash. To me that transaction alone proves he has a secret relationship with the force.”
A second Mountie, who does not know the first one but who has also been involved in CI operations, also believes that Wortman’s ability to withdraw a large sum of money from Brink’s is an indication that Wortman had a link with the police. “That’s tradecraft,” the Mountie said, explaining that by going through CIBC Intria, the RCMP could avoid typical banking scrutiny, as there are no holds placed on the money.
“That’s what we do when we need flash money for a buy. We don’t keep stashes of money around the office. When we suddenly need a large sum of money to make a buy or something, that’s the route we take. I think [with the Brink’s transaction] you’ve proved with that single fact that he had a relationship with the police. He was either a CI or an agent.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIMW1wH_3Rw&ab_channel=Maclean%27s
Wortman arrives at Brinks yard on March 30, 2020
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Wortman inside the Brinks yard on March 30, 2020
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A Canadian retail banking expert speaking on condition that they not be identified says it is unlikely that Wortman was cashing out his own savings when he collected the money from Brinks after the money was transferred from CIBC Intria.
“When you come into my branch and you want a ton of cash, then I say, you gotta give us a couple of days. We put in our Brink’s order, I order the money through Brink’s, then when the money arrives, you come back into the branch, I bring you into a back room and I count the money out for you,” the banking expert said. “Sending someone to Brink’s to get the money? I’ve never heard of that before. The reason is, if I’m the banker, and you’ve deposited your savings in my bank branch, I’m responsible for making sure the money goes to the right person. If you want this money, I’m going to verify your identity and document that. I can’t do that if I’m transferring the money to Brink’s.”
In response to detailed questions from Maclean’s about the transaction, a CIBC spokesperson replied via email: “Our hearts and thoughts are with the families and the entire community as they deal with this senseless tragedy and loss. Unfortunately we are not able to comment on specific client matters.” Brinks did not reply to questions about the transaction.
The banking expert speculates that the RCMP could keep transactions relatively quiet by going through Brink’s instead of a bank to transfer money to a confidential informant or an agent.
“You can imagine that if someone comes in with large sums of cash, that stuff is not kept quiet. You don’t want that. Maybe what the RCMP was doing is they thought they could keep things quieter simply by transferring funds via Brink’s.”
At a press briefing on June 4, the RCMP’s Campbell seemed to rule out the possibility that Wortman was a confidential informant for the force. “The gunman was never associated to the RCMP as a volunteer or auxiliary police officer, nor did the RCMP ever have any special relationship with the gunman of any kind.”
The RCMP Operations Manual, a copy of which was obtained by Maclean’s, authorizes the force to mislead all but the courts in order to conceal the identity of confidential informants and agent sources.
“The identity of a source must be protected at all times except when the administration of justice requires otherwise, i.e. a member cannot mislead a court in any proceeding in order to protect a source.”
A spokeswoman for the Nova Scotia RCMP declined further comment after Maclean’s reported on the financial transaction.
“This is still an active, ongoing investigation,” said Cpl. Jennifer Clarke in an email on Friday. “All investigative avenues and possibilities continue to be explored, analyzed, and processed with due diligence. This is to ensure that the integrity of the investigation is not compromised. We cannot release anything more related to your questions.”
Maclean’s reported earlier this week that sources say Wortman had social relationships with Hells Angels, and with a neighbour, Peter Alan Griffon, who recently finished serving part of a seven-year sentence for drug and firearm offences linked to La Familia, a Mexican cartel. Sources say Griffon printed the decals that Wortman used on the replica RCMP cruiser he used in his rampage.
Sources say that RCMP in New Brunswick, not Nova Scotia, recently took over operational control of investigations into outlaw bikers in the Maritimes, which means that Nova Scotia Mounties may not have been aware of any connection to Wortman.
The RCMP Operations Manual identifies two types of sources: informant sources and agent sources. A law enforcement source said the force uses Brink’s to make large payments to agent sources, not informant sources.
“Informants are never paid more than a couple hundred at a time,” said a person briefed on RCMP operations. “Anything over $10,000 is agent money.”
Agents typically have greater responsibilities than informants. Only officers who have received specialized training are allowed to handle agents.
“An agent source is a person tasked by investigators to assist in the development of target operations,” says the manual. “Direct involvement and association with a target may result in his/her becoming a material and compellable witness, ie. a source used to introduce undercover operations, act as a courier for controlled delivers or act in place of an RCMP undercover operator by obtaining evidence.”
If the money was a transfer from the RCMP to an agent, there would be a paper trail through FINTRAC, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, which tracks large cash transactions and suspicious transactions.
“Brink’s does the FINTRAC paperwork saying it’s coming from us, it’s from a chartered bank, and the RCMP liaison at FINTRAC signs off, handles the paperwork,” said a source briefed on the system. “The RCMP guys clear it or they refer it for further investigation. They manually clear those FINTRAC reports coming from Brink’s related to paid agents.”
The RCMP Operations Manual requires officers handling confidential informants and agents to send reports to the director of the Covert Operations Branch at National Headquarters.
Headquarters’ media relations office said in an email Friday that Campbell’s statement that the force never had a “special relationship” with Wortman “still stands.”
The attorney general of Nova Scotia, former RCMP staff sergeant Mark Furey, has said the province is in talks with Ottawa about a joint federal-provincial inquiry or review of Wortman’s murderous rampage.
Furey’s office did not reply before deadline to a question about whether the terms of the inquiry would allow inquiry counsel to pierce the powerful legal privilege that attaches to confidential informants.
Family members of the victims have complained that the process is dragging out. As calls for an inquiry mount, so does speculation about what happened, among both the general public and the RCMP.
One former Mountie says he doesn’t understand why Wortman would turn against the Mounties if they were paying him. “What seems inconsistent to me is why are you going to bite the hand that feeds you? If he’s getting money, and that’s a lot of money for an agent, or a CI, that part doesn’t make sense to me.”
The former investigator pointed out that if Wortman was acting for the RCMP, and receiving that amount of money, he would eventually be expected to testify.
“If he was an agent, he should show up on a witness docket.”
But another Mountie says, “This guy always wanted to be a Mountie. He was acting like a Mountie. He was doing Mountie things. It’s clear to me that something went wrong.”
Contact our reporters:
Stephen Maher: stephenjamesmaher@gmail.com
Shannon Gormley: shannon.n.gormley@gmail.com
Paul Palango: paulpalango@eastlink.ca
Time for real answers on the Nova Scotia mass murder
Paul Wells: A full judicial inquiry into the April shooting is now essential. It must be robust, with real power to get to the truth.
A still from a video showing Gabriel Wortman in the Brink's yard on March 30, 2020.
We are faced, perhaps only temporarily, with a familiar Canadian paradox: everyone says they want something to happen, but it isn’t happening.
The “something” is a rigorous public inquiry into a horrible shooting spree that spanned two days and killed 22 people in Nova Scotia in mid-April. It was the worst mass murder in Canadian history. It was lurid in its weirdness. The gunman, Gabriel Wortman, spent two days driving around in a convincing replica RCMP vehicle, shooting at whim, while the force he was imitating and dodging failed to send out a more comprehensive emergency alert than their Twitter warnings, one that might have saved more lives. In the midst of the carnage, two actual RCMP officers apparently fired their weapons into the walls of a firehall in Onslow for reasons that remain unknown.
New reporting for Maclean’s by Shannon Gormley, Stephen Maher and Paul Palango raises troubling new questions about Wortman’s possible ties to organized crime and, especially, to the RCMP itself. This reporting is attracting a lot of attention and, here and there, vigorous online debate. This Twitter thread, for instance, asks hard questions about our latest story.
The questions raised by our investigative team including Paul Palango, author of three best-selling books (here, here and here) about the troubling history of the RCMP, are backed by a solid and growing network of well-informed sources. But past a certain point, even superb reporting can’t provide authoritative answers. That work is properly left to duly mandated public authorities, usually wearing judges’ robes. Some people, reading the most recent Maclean’s reporting, have said the RCMP has a lot of questions to answer. Unfortunately there is no reason to take any answer from the RCMP on faith. It’s time for a full judicial inquiry.
READ MORE: The Nova Scotia killer had ties to criminals and withdrew a huge sum of cash before the shooting
Everyone agrees! From Nova Scotia premier Stephen McNeil to the latest embattled RCMP commissioner to three Trudeau-appointed Nova Scotia senators to anguished families of the murdered to, I mean sort of, the Prime Minister. But so far there is no inquiry.
As is reliably always the case with this Instagram-obsessed and reflexively stonewalling regime, the best information about what the Trudeau government is up to is coming from somebody else, in this case the Nova Scotia government. An inquiry’s coming soon, Nova Scotia attorney general Mark Furey said two weeks ago. Really soon, he said on Thursday. (It’s unclear why Furey hasn’t been working with his direct counterpart, the attorney general of Canada, who is reputed to be David Lametti, although on most days it’s hard to be sure. On the bright side, I can report that Lametti has been kayaking.)
Unfortunately even the noises emanating from the McNeil government, the second-last Liberal provincial government in the country, are unnerving. There is much talk about a “restorative” approach that would investigate broad societal issues. But in many cases the families of the murdered aren’t crying out for a healing circle. They are demanding answers on the facts. “The amount of information being kept from us is deplorable,” Darcy Dobson, whose mother Gabriel Wortman shot dead, told the CBC.
So with all due respect for the complexity of setting up any inquiry, it is time for Justin Trudeau to make Mark Furey’s repeated predictions of a joint federal-provincial inquiry come true. The inquiry must be robust, with real power to get to the truth, and no stonewalling. Which means it will need to constitute a surprising and wholly uncharacteristic act of transparency from this Prime Minister.
What we are used to seeing from this Prime Minister is Liberal MPs on the Justice committee enforcing a coverup in the SNC-Lavalin affair. We are used to the ethics commissioner reporting that nine witnesses with material information were forbidden from testifying by the Privy Council Office. We are used to this Prime Minister responding to the Nova Scotia killings by trying to tell reporters what they could and couldn’t report. We are used to a Prime Minister who has replaced Question Period in the House of Commons with daily briefings to reporters whose tone is deferential, who are limited to a single follow-up per question, and who don’t get to speak until Trudeau has announced the latest injection of dozens of millions of dollars into the national mood. Canadians see this Prime Minister, and they are used to watching him be the only person in a crowd who thinks he is answering a question.
That’s not good enough now. It’s time for a real inquiry with real powers to provide real answers to a slaughter whose central figure’s ties to the federal police force that took two days to stop him are in question. Now, please.
Cracks are forming in the RCMP cone of silence
Photo: Joan Baxter
It has been about five weeks since the Nova Scotia massacre, five long weeks during which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have cowered inside a cone of silence.
Compare its approach to how police forces around the world have typically handled similar events. From Paris to Toronto to just about Anywhere USA, the police are quick to inform the public about what has transpired and about key information about the perpetrator or perpetrators. Little, if anything, is hidden.
So what’s the problem here?
From the outset the RCMP right up to Commissioner Brenda Lucki seems determined to stall for time and control the narrative of this story. They have forced the media to go to court to find out what was in the applications for search warrants executed after the shootings. The law states that such information should be readily available to the public.
The Mounties have also taken refuge behind its claim that it has commissioned a psychological profile of the gunman and can’t say anything at this time. It kind of sounds like then candidate Donald Trump’s claim in 2016 that he couldn‘t reveal his tax filings because they were under audit.
In my long experience of writing about the RCMP, now into its fourth decade, I’ve become accustomed to the typical response I receive after something is published. Some are praiseworthy, many are castigating, including current and former members of the RCMP.
What I’ve learned and described is that RCMP culture is cult-like. There is an almost mindless commitment to the force. “There is no such thing as an ex-Mountie,” I once wrote, because even retired Mounties seem compelled to protect the image of the force.
Since publishing an opinion piece last week on Macleans.ca, I’ve witnessed the typical gamut of comment. Among them, Philip Black wrote:
The RCMP are not perfect, but does that justify the rampant jumping to conclusions and the widespread RCMP bashing.
And Brenda Carr, a 911 dispatcher had this to say:
… people who do not work in this profession can only surmise what it is like and what it takes to do this job. And no one is looking for praise. And on the same note, no one is looking for criticism. They did their best. And you do not know nor will you ever know what these men and women did to stop this monster. This is a time for healing. This article is not helping, it is only hurting.
But to my surprise, many others have contacted me who don’t fit the normal profile in that a number of them were current or retired RCMP and other law enforcement officials.
“I’ve read everything you’ve written over the years and while I agreed with some of it, a lot of it just made me mad,” said one former high-ranking RCMP executive. “But now, I have to admit that I agree with you. The RCMP is broken. It’s not ready. It’s a danger to the public and its own members.”
That Mounties sentiments were echoed by another former Mountie, Calvin Lawrence, who first served in the Halifax police department before joining the RCMP, where he had a long career. He is the author of a book, Black Cop. He amplified the comment about readiness.
After the murder of three Mounties in Moncton in 2014, the RCMP changed its policies and all police officers were given long guns.
Lawrence says that while the Mounties carry the guns, they don’t likely know how to use them in a desperate situation. He says that while the RCMP talks a good game about its training, in reality a lot is left to be desired.
I suggested to him that the first Mounties to respond to the scene, particularly the supervisor, a corporal, may have been frozen in place, not knowing what action to take.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” Lawrence said. “You would think they had something in place to respond to crazies,” Lawrence said. “They probably put something in writing but didn’t practice it…. Tactical training costs money. The officers had the guns but didn’t know how to use them.”
But the most interesting call of all arrived with a cryptic description on the cell phone call display that I had never seen before.
The caller, who could best be described as a Deep Throat whistleblower, was obviously nervous. I will call him “he” from now on because there are more hes than shes in the law enforcement world.
“This is the first time I’ve ever done something like this,” he said. “But I felt I have to do something.”
He said he was calling me to encourage the media to keep asking questions: “Don’t give up.”
When I told him that I and others who are pursuing the story have a thousand questions about what went wrong, from the indecision at Portapique Beach Road, the apparent communications debacle where not only the RCMP brass was not alerted to the seriousness of the situation but also the public.
I asked him why the premier of Nova Scotia and the province’s Attorney General were reluctant to call a public inquiry.
“Is it because Premier McNeil has relatives in policing, that the Attorney General is an ex-RCMP and that there are ex-RCMP in the police services branch?”
“That’s not it,” he said. “It’s about the money.”
So I switched to events.
“Why was Heidi Stevenson alone in her car?”
“I know what happened to Heidi,” he said. “It was just bad luck. But, you’re right, she shouldn’t have been there.”
But that wasn’t why he called.
“All that stuff will eventually come out,” he said.
The real issue, he said, was what the police are hiding about their previous knowledge about the gunman.
“Make requests about Wortman and what the police knew about him.”
“RCMP or Halifax?”
“Just keep asking questions and filing access requests.”
I tried to push him. I pointed out that while the COVID-19 epidemic has hampered the news gathering abilities of the major media, there was a lot of good work being done by an array of organizations from the on-line Halifax Examiner to Canadian Press and even the notorious Frank Magazine. To date the various entities have reported on everything from the gunman’s quirks, threats to others, illegal guns, replica Mountie cars, possible cigarette smuggling and even the murder of someone in the United States, among other things. The man killed 22 people, including a police officer in cold blood, so he doesn’t have a reputation to besmirch. In the absence of the RCMP’s official story about him, speculation becomes rampant.
“It seemed to me from the outset that he may have killed other people in the past,” I said.
The whistleblower just hmmmed.
“There’s something they are hiding that will blow the lid right off this thing,” the whistleblower reiterated. “I can’t tell you what it is. I shouldn’t even be telling you this. Just keep pushing.”
When I ran all this by Maclean’s writer Stephen Maher, he immediately added another possibility. “Maybe he was a CI.”
A confidential informant? With a licence to kill?
It’s a crazy idea but in the absence of facts from the RCMP people will talk.
That’s the situation we are in.
This week the RCMP and its government lawyers have continued to obstruct the information process, insisting upon redacting information contained in the applications for its search warrants.
And then there is the psychological assessment or “autopsy” of the gunman. Well here’s my independent analysis.
He likely wet the bed when he was young. He had a fascination with fire. He tortured little animals. He likely had an accident and sustained a seemingly minor head injury in his youth. He suffered from undetected frontal lobe brain damage. He had low self-esteem but masked that with a superficial outward face. He grew into a malignant narcissist. Like many serial killers and mass murderers, he had a fascination with policing but becoming a security guard was beneath his station. He was a misogynist, largely because he had sexual orientation issues. He had no empathy for anyone and was controlling. I could go on, but….
That’s it. Send the cheque to a charity of your choice.
That being done, Commissioner Lucki, what’s the BIG SECRET?
Paul Palango is a former senior editor at the Globe and Mail and author of three books on the RCMP. He lives in Chester Basin.
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Mark Furey and the RCMP’s secret army of Smurfs
Justice Minister Mark Furey. Photo: Jennifer Henderson
It has been six weeks since the Nova Scotia massacre and as the RCMP dribbles out the official facts of the investigation, many have wondered why the Nova Scotia government has been reluctant to call for a public inquiry.
Premier Stephen McNeil has tried to fob it all off on Ottawa, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week seemed reluctant to catch the steaming hot potato.
And then there are questions about Justice Minister Mark Furey. He was a Mountie for 36 years before he became a politician. And now he’s in charge of all matters of legal and policing issues from soup to nuts.
From what I know of him in passing, Furey is an outwardly nice guy, a sort of Boy Scout on steroids. But as my late Sicilian mother, Lea, used to say: “Who is he when he’s at home?”
Who knows?
Furey collects a healthy pension from his Mountie days and is revered in Mountie circles as one who made a life for himself in the outside world. He says he does not have a conflict. But does he? He says he can deal dispassionately with the enormous task before him. But can he?
The powerful, mind-controlling threads of Mountie DNA are instilled in every recruit who passes through Depot, the RCMP training facility at Regina. Among the first things a young Mountie is taught in his or her indoctrination is that the RCMP is “The Silent Force.” It does not answer or explain itself but lets the public speak for the organization.
That sounds high-minded and confident. It might appear to the casual observer that all kinds of Canadians leap to defend the RCMP in the time of crisis, but dig deeper and you begin to understand that the seemingly spontaneous defence of the force and its actions is anything but. The force is being a little too disingenuous.
In my 2008 book I devoted a chapter to the Secret Armies of the RCMP. It told how the force directs dialogue and policy from behind the scenes, mostly covertly, sometimes overtly. This so-called army consists of current and retired Mounties, their families, friends, and a general coterie of typical right-wing zealots. In the United States, there is a two-word phrase to describe these sorts: Trump supporters. In Canada, they advocate against change, reform or investigation of the RCMP.
It’s as if they sit around the Lodge sipping tea and cordials and then charge out on their high horses in a cult-like mission to lobby and silence critics and other perceived threats to the force, particularly political ones.
For a current example of this, consider Alistair Macintyre. He is the retired assistant commissioner, once the Number Two commander in British Columbia. Last month he played the Smurf and wrote an open letter to hint at salacious behaviour by the mayor of Surrey. The real issue is that the Surrey city council has voted to replace the Mounties with a city force next year, which is huge blow to the Mounties. Surrey employs more Mounties than all of Nova Scotia.
Over the past couple of decades, many in the RCMP, municipal and provincial police forces, have told me about how they’ve been bullied and intimidated or afraid of the force. Most are so fearful that they refuse to go on the record about it.
“The Mounties play dirty,” Edgar McLeod told me for Dispersing the Fog. He is the founding police chief of the Cape Breton Regional Police department and the head of the Atlantic Police Academy at Holland College in Prince Edward Island. Friday, in an interview from his Summerside, PEI home, he elaborated: “Governments at both the federal and provincial level have failed in their duty to hold them accountable.”
Another person extremely familiar with RCMP thinking said this: “The biggest fear the RCMP has is to be held accountable. It believes that no one can tell the force what to do.” This source is close to the inner circle in Ottawa and I’ve chosen not to name him/her, but we will call the source Dudley, from now on. Dudley is more valuable to the readers keeping his ear to the ground.
“At this point,” Dudley says, “there is only two ways to go: save the RCMP or shoot it.”
The stakes are high and the Smurfs are coming out of the woodwork trying to affect, narrow, and even shut down public discourse. One tactic they have is to conflate any criticism of the force and the system in which it operates, which is my focus, down to an attack on officers on the street, which is not.
After I did a radio interview in Halifax, the Smurfs started calling in, suggesting that because I wasn’t physically at Portapique Road, I had no right to be commenting on what happened.
That evening, just after midnight, a person identifying himself as a retired Mountie named Staff-Sgt. Eric Howard contacted me. In a shirty rant, Howard demanded that I provide a resume showing my expertise before I be allowed to comment on matters regarding Mountie tactics, operations, and human resources. “Should you continue to make statements without the expertise to back it up, you are just prostituting yourself for money or attention,” Howard wrote. “Think about this before commenting on any situation. I await your reply and resume.”
He’s still waiting.
Later that day I had a pre interview with another radio show host. I could smell the Smurf on him. We booked a time for the next day.
That night, just after midnight again, I got another missile fired at me from R. G. Bryce, who claimed to be a long time and current member of the RCMP.
Calvin Lawrence
In the officious sounding comment Bryce challenged former Halifax and RCMP officer Calvin Lawrence for what he had to say about the readiness of the Mounties in dealing with such a horrific situation that began on Portapique Beach Road. On Facebook, Lawrence continues to be pummelled by the Smurfs for speaking out.
Bryce wrote: “As a former member, you should be supportive to your fellow members ….so to make myself clear, shut your mouth, because you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
He gave a perfect demonstration of how the Smurfs talk when they want to control the narrative.
When I appeared on the radio the next day, I was prepared for the expected attack. The first question could have come right out of Staff-Sgt. Eric Howard’s mouth. I batted down by reading the exact response I had sent to Howard, which began: “Sir: Many of your retired superiors say I’m 100 per cent right…. The deep seated problems afflicting the RCMP are obvious and a matter of public interest.”
Over the decades I have experienced these attacks in both an overt and covert way. Some of it was reported in 2008 in the Georgia Strait newspaper in Vancouver, among other places.
What’s different this time, is a sense of desperation by the RCMP. As I popped my head up in this story, I got a notice from Linked In that a number of top Mounties in Ottawa were interested in me, including Ted Broadhurst, an Ottawa-based cyber special projects officer in federal policing criminal investigations. What? Was he looking to hire me or work for me? Not likely.
Paranoid? No, the curious thing was that Broadhurst is an expert on doing sneaky things. His public resume shows he was in the special services covert operations branch, tactical internet open source and other creepy things. He’s a guy who should know how to cover his tracks, but he didn’t. Why? Maybe he was trying to spook me. That’s what the Mounties tend to do.
To understand how the Mounties have worked behind the scenes in Nova Scotia, we need to go back to the years prior to the 2012 signing of the latest 20-year contract with the RCMP in Nova Scotia. At that time then Halifax police chief Frank Beazley noticed severe discrepancies on the rosters of the RCMP detachments who had the contract to police Halifax County outside the city. Although taxpayers were footing the bill for a certain number of officers, there were consistently fewer working. Beazley told me: “We began to look at RCMP staffing in the area and what individual officers were doing. Beside some officer’s names we’d find a zero for time, zero files, zero investigations, even though they were listed as being on the roster. We asked the Mounties what was going on and they wouldn’t tell us. We sent 1,500 emails to the RCMP about this, but never got one reply. Eventually we learned that one of the officers who was on our roster was also on the roster of a force in B.C. Another was on a federal police roster, and so on.”
You would think that such shenanigans would generate considerable interest in the provincial government. The Mountie shell game was essentially a fraud and still is, as was pointed out in an excellent CTV story on Sunday. But the New Democratic Party Justice Minister at the time was Ross Landry, an ex-Mountie. He pretended to hear the arguments about why the RCMP should be replaced at least in Halifax, but then pushed through a new contract which pretty well gave the RCMP everything it wanted and needed. If the Mounties had lost the Halifax County contract, they were effectively finished in the province.
Now Mark Furey is the minister of all things touching on the law in Nova Scotia. He is the point man when it comes to holding the RCMP accountable. It’s obvious that there are a thousand horrible questions for which we need answers. At the same time, the Mounties and their fervent Trump-like supporters are literally saying: “Move along. Nothing to see here.”
But there is plenty to see and to suggest otherwise is pure negligence. If anyone who is a threat to the Mounties and doesn’t say the right thing is attacked, how is Furey resisting this? Does he have some sort of immunity from overt and covert RCMP pressure?
We need to know what exactly the Mounties did and didn’t do over those two days.
How many Mounties were supposed to be on the roster of the various detachments and communications centres and how many of them were actually there that weekend?
Who was in charge at every moment?
Why did the RCMP not call in the local forces in Truro, Amherst, Halifax, and New Glasgow and environs?
Conversely, why have the chiefs of those same local forces been closed lipped about what happened? Is it the thin blue line in action? Or is there something going on between those forces and the Mounties that the public doesn’t know about? Did that something affect the decision-making process that night.?
A big question: Why did the Halifax Police Chief refuse to call in his emergency response team? Why did he tell them not to shoot the gunman?
How and why was Heidi Stevenson at the traffic circle in Shubenacadie at the time she was murdered?
What was the seemingly hidden relationship between the gunman and the police?
There are more questions, many more, and I suspect they will lead down a dark hole for the Mounties.
At this particularly delicate time in its history, when its very structure across the country is at stake, the RCMP will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.
That means it will resist a public inquiry. Even its house union has taken that position, which should tell you something.
Can Mark Furey rise above all this, be the bigger man and be totally objective?
Or is he just another dyed-in-the-wool Mountie Smurf who, given the choice between defending the public interest or those of the Mounties, slyly tilts to the side of the red coats.
Furey says he doesn’t have a conflict, but the smart thing would be for him to recuse himself and let Caesar’s wife, someone above suspicion, take over the file.
Paul Palango is a former senior editor at the Globe and Mail and author of three books on the RCMP. He lives in Chester Basin.
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Comments
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Why “smurf”? I couldn’t find an explanation of this nickname in the article.
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In the world of money-laundering, Smurfs are seemingly ordinary people who do the bidding of their masters and make deposits here and there to clean the dirty money.
Yeah, I probably should have elaborated. You’re right.
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I haven’t read the RCMP report on the shooting, but I find it unbelievable that officers responding to an emergency had to stop to gas up. It was of course fortunate, in this case that the RCMP and GW ran into each other at the gas station but it is ridiculous that our “first responders” don’t keep enough fuel in their tanks to respond to an emergency without stopping for gas. I’ve never heard of an ambulance or fire truck having to gas up on the way to an emergency.
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Not only that, the fact that the police were still in Halifax County more than 13 hours after it all began and at least 30 minutes after two police officers had been shot about 24 kilometres away, speaks volumes about the RCMP response. What were they doing? The RCMP and its hordes of supporters will say that in any difficult situation mistakes will be made and that we shouldn’t dwell on these. What happened goes beyond mistakes and into the realm of gross negligence.
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In HRM there are/were 1 RCMP officer per 965 citizens and HRP has 1 officer per 441 citizens. HRP covers Dartmouth,Halifax and Bedford.
Minutes here, read pages 3-5 https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default/files/documents/city-hall/boards-committees-commissions/180115bopcMins.pdf
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As the CTV report yesterday indicates, the real problem is that even if the RCMP is allowed to hire more members, where are they going to come from? They are short in huge numbers right across the country and can’t possibly train enough new Mounties to fill the positions. The proportions in Halifax are normal. When you spread the police too thin, bad things happen, as we’ve seen.
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Paul, thanks for this piece and all your other reporting on the RCMP. Here in Sackville, N.B. where I’ve been covering town council for the past four years, the Mounties were finally pried out from their closed-door, town briefings which had been going on for years. Now, they’re trying to get most of their briefings held in camera again and some town councillors are sympathetic. As I pointed out in February, policing services is the single largest item in the town’s budget and there needs to be more public oversight, but the Mounties are resisting it. Under Sackville’s rules, anything heard in camera, can’t be divulged to public or media. One councillor had been complaining to the RCMP repeatedly in closed-door meetings about their lack of action to protect the town’s water supply from illegally parked oil tanker trucks — but the issue became public only because the police briefings were finally out from behind closed doors. Now, I fear, the Mounties will succeed in getting most of them closed again https://warktimes.com/2020/02/04/sackville-town-councillors-respond-to-rcmp-complaint-about-public-police-briefings/
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Bruce: The Mounties always want to work behind the curtain. As Dudley says today, the RCMP’s greatest fear is accountability. The structure of contract policing all but guarantees they have free reign: it’s a federal police force operating under provincial laws. You’d think that would mean there would be all kinds of meaningful oversight, but the opposite is usually true. Each side defers to the other until nothing of substance gets done. It’s a hybrid system fraught with a bevy of fundamental conflicting problems. The only resolution is for Nova Scotia to form its own regional/provincial forces and take full control of its own destiny. Yes, it will cost a little at first, but at least it would put an end to all the shenanigans. In any event, the RCMP as we know it is dwindling on the vine of its own volition and maybe your local councillors should wake up and come to the realization that there is a different world ahead for which they need to be prepared.
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Saint John is the only New Brunswick municipality with a police board. Councillors hate having an arms length police board and councillors love having ‘in camera’ meetings. The RCMP may like private meetings but you will find councillors love them more.
This : ” The Police Act also makes provisions for regional policing authorities to be established
for a region policed by a regional RCMP force. The only regional policing authority in
existence at this point is the Codiac Regional Policing Authority serving the
municipalities of Dieppe, Moncton, and Riverview. ”
More details here :
https://voixfemmesnb-voiceswomennb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/ps-sp/pdf/Safety_Protection/police/PoliceGovernanceAndOversight-PolicyGuidelines-April2011.pdf-
Local politicians are a big problem. They get all star struck dealing with cops. It’s like when I covered major league baseball as a journalist.
Some reporters were jock-sniffers, and a few were not. Guess which group I fell into?
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“Twice as Far” by Thomas Juby also details corruption by RCMP brass in the Swissair investigation.
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David: I am well aware and up to speed on Juby’s work. I was the first person to really look at it. I tried to do a book, but was rejected. I met with the Halifax Chronicle Herald publisher and suggested a series of stories outlining what Juby’s investigation suggests. Nobody would touch it. She basically wrote me off as being a conspiracy theorist, even though there were more than 10,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. She didn’t want to see them. She said the paper was too small to take on such a big project. Now, look where it is, smaller and it reads like its written by civil engineers and edited by accountants. The only memorable writing in it is the obituaries, a collection of the most colourful would make a wonderful book. They are the best I’ve ever seen. When I ran out of options, Tom Juby did it himself. I believe his story.
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No coincidence that our Premier who has family in law enforcement and runs his government with the same cult like grip on secrecy and access to information.
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The public, journalists and the opposition should be banging down the walls … but, sadly, far too many don’t have the energy to do it.
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The RCMP maintain they had no idea what kind of villain they were dealing with. They’d never encountered anything like this. The miscreant drive more than 140 km, and posed as a policeman, in a marked police car. Then he set fires, murdered 22 people, kidnapped his own girlfriend — all of it over the top. Isn’t that what the RCMP is trained for – dealing with “over the top” situations?
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Politicians across the country have allowed the RCMP to basically dictate what it will or will not do. Yes, they should be prepared for something like this. The Smurfs in their closed chat rooms have attacked those who said they weren’t prepared. They say there is training in active shooter situations. But as a number of members pointed out, the training was for a shooting in a building, not outdoors over a wide area and at night to boot. I’ve argued for years that the RCMP was a danger to its own members and citizens. Incompetent negligent leadership led to the deaths of many people, not the least being Heidi Stevenson. She should never have been there alone.
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With Steve & Mark in the back pocket, thank God almighty that on the RCMP /public inquiry file our three opposition leaders are so “silently effective”.
Or was that “effectively silent”, can’t remember which….
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As my piece points out, the noisy, nasty chatter from the RCMP Smurfs scares politicians. They fail to appreciate that this single-minded constituency is not representative of the entire province. The cowardly approach is typical. Real leaders take charge and aren’t afraid of the tin gods. Over the years we’ve talked endlessly about making the police accountable, but when a time like this comes, politicians duck for cover. Too bad. It really is time for an adult conversation filled with facts, not just cheap emotion and blind faith in a dysfunctional organization.
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Paul I was not convinced at first that retired rcmp smurfs know the term but I can assure you that on the Facebook forums discussing the GW case, they sure do !
(Hint : they ain’t fans..) -
I already got the memo. However, Mike, people have told me there has actually been some rational discussion within the forums of late; not a lot, but something other than Trudeau is a Nazi and I’m a stupid, wimpy loser. Keep an eye on them, please
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/calvin-lawrence-black-panther-partys-unlikely-cub/
https://stephenkimber.com/calvin-lawrence-black-panther-partys-unlikely-cub/
Calvin Lawrence: Black Panther Party’s ‘unlikely cub’
His hiring as a Halifax police officer in 1969 happened only because the city feared what might happen if it didn’t at least pay lip service to inclusion. But over the course of his 36-year policing career, Calvin Lawrence proved a more than worthy fighter against racism.
The 1969 Halifax Police graduating class. Calvin Lawrence is in the second row, third from the left. Calvin Lawrence remembers the life-altering moment well. It was an early summer day in 1968 and Calvin, then 19 and still a student, was hanging out at Creighton and Gerrish Streets, “one of my favourite corners,” with his good friend Ricky Smith. A big Lincoln car filled with three senior members of the black community, including ex-boxer and community leader Buddy Daye, pulled up beside them.
“C’mon, get in boys,” one of the men said. “We’re going somewhere.”
Somewhere turned out to be the old Halifax police station on Brunswick Street. As Lawrence recounts the story in Black Cop (James Lorimer & Company Ltd.) — his excellent and well-worth-the-read account of his 36-year career as a police officer with both the Halifax force and the RCMP — “we were led down a squeaky clean hallway into what seemed like a prearranged meeting” with the city’s then-chief of police, Verdon Mitchell.
For a while, the two young men were just puzzled observers to a 90-minute conversation with the chief about policing in Halifax. “Finally,” Lawrence writes, “Buddy looked hard at Ricky and me. Without taking his eyes off of us, Buddy said to Chief Mitchell, ‘Perhaps you can give these two young men summer jobs.’”
For a young black man at the time, it was — or should have been — a golden opportunity.
But in 1968, Halifax had become a seething cauldron of racial tensions. The city’s destruction of Africville had been “disgusting,” Lawrence recalls. “It was shameful.”
The local black community, which had historically accepted racist behaviour as an “immovable object,” finally rebeled. “The anger of the community spilled out of the confines of the church and out of the established avenues of accepted activism.” There were riots — minor compared to what was happening in other cities in North America, but still cataclysmic for Halifax. The Black Panthers came to town, and brought with them the real possibility of organized, black-led violence. “Their tactics went beyond marching, singing, praying and demonstrating for change.”
All of that, of course, “scared the hell out of the city of Halifax and the Halifax police department.” And, in its way, it had led to that meeting in the chief’s office and to the offer of a summer job with the Halifax police department for Calvin Lawrence. “We were the unlikely cubs of the Black Panther Party’s time in Nova Scotia.”
“I was to be thrust into the eye of the storm that was pitting the city police against the black community,” he writes in the book. “What I didn’t know then — but what I do know now — was that I was a bargaining chip.” On the one hand, he and his friend were being offered up to the chief as potential young black police officers, a way out of the turmoil. “On the other side was the fear of the dark — the unknown of the Black Panther Party. We were just two little pieces of a puzzle, but the message to the white power structure was clear — put these boys in uniform, or the alternative might be more than you can handle.”
And that was the beginning of Calvin Lawrence’s career, first as a Halifax police officer (1969-1978) and, later, as a member of the RCMP.
Although he would remember moments of deep satisfaction — including a stint with the Prime Minister’s Protective Detail where his expertise in security made him the go-to consultant for police forces across the country, and beyond, who were looking for help with VIP security — racism was never far from his lived everyday experience.
There was that day inside the Halifax police station’s writing room where mug shots of those with outstanding warrants were posted when Lawrence found that someone had written on the black mugshots: “Nigger,” Coon” and “Calvin Lawrence.” He remembers white officers did nothing about it until he’d complained. Later, he would remember the RCMP’s Toronto drug section as “akin to working at a Ku Klux Klan affiliate. Some members in my section threw the word ‘nigger’ around like it was wedding confetti. A number of RCMP members in the section were either passively or actively racist; it seemed to be part of the culture. Not one person stood up against it, and I suffered because of it.”
Perhaps even worse were the seemingly reason-free-but-racist-upon-closer-examination denials of promotion, or permissions to take courses, refusals of requests for transfer and so on.
Like the very good young boxer he had once been, Calvin Lawrence confronted all of this directly — he filed freedom of information requests to document what had been done to him, complained to the human rights commission — until it all became overwhelming.
He was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. “My mental state,” he notes, “was not the result of my experiences as a police officer. It was due to an internal, co-ordinated attack on me by vindictive members, promoted and endorsed by the RCMP’s dysfunctional culture.”
In the end, beaten down but still proud, he accepted the inevitable and retired. “I retired with an immaculate record with two police agencies, and with a twenty-five-year and a twenty-year good conduct medal from the RCMP,” he writes proudly. “There are some who ask why I ever became a police officer,” he adds. “I answer, because I had a right to. I believed — and I still do — that my community was better served by me in a uniform than by a racist white cop. I had an opportunity thrown in my lap, and I ran with it and made the best of it that I could.”
I write all of this to make two points.
The first is that Black Cop (written with journalist and activist Miles Howe) is a book well worth the buying and the reading — not just for those interested in the big-picture issues of racism in policing in Canada but also for Nova Scotians who want to know how we got to where we are.
The second point is that — given Calvin Lawrence’s own inside-the-squad-room history and experiences — we need to listen when he cautions us about last month’s formal apology by new Halifax Police Chief Daniel Kinsella for the Halifax force’s racist practice of street-checking.
“On behalf of the Halifax Regional Police,” Kinsella told an audience of several hundred who’d gathered at the Halifax library, “I am sorry. I am sorry for our actions that caused you pain.” The chief promised the apology was only the first step in a process of healing wounds that date back to long before Calvin Lawrence joined the police force.
Lawrence calls the apology a “good start.”
“But an apology without change is just manipulation. He can apologize, but that does not transfer automatically to the rank and file police officer on the street. That’s where the proof of any change is going to come — that individual interaction by the police officer with somebody of the community, then you’re going to see if there’s going to be change.”
Members of the city’s black community will be watching. So should the rest of us.
This column first appeared in the Halifax Examiner December 9, 2019.
Premier McNeil: A message from my grandmother about the RCMP
That horrible weekend last month, all Canadians witnessed what was likely the most catastrophic collapse of policing in Canadian history. Little, if anything, went right.
Twenty-two people were murdered. The gunman marauded around the province of Nova Scotia with seeming impunity, only being killed and captured because the last person he murdered had left her gas tank empty.
We all know that we can’t let that happen again. Yet, in Nova Scotia, the premier and his ex-Mountie Justice minister have been virtually silent, caught up in the COVID-19 disaster.
The Halifax Examiner obtained a highly redacted version of a search warrant application made by the RCMP.
People, even many Mountie supporters, want a public inquiry to hopefully clear the air, but the Crown and the RCMP seem tone deaf. Even if they are not in cover-up mode, it smells like that. They seem bent upon using up the provincial supply of permanent ink, blacking out large chunks of the various informations to obtain a search warrant.
Little seems to make sense about it.
The position taken by the censors is that the blocked information is key to an ongoing criminal investigation. Their focus is on the shooter. Just as much, if not more attention, must be paid to the Mounties.
What investigation arising out of the circumstances is going to change the fact that the RCMP embarrassed itself with its performance that weekend? There are supposedly more than 900 Mounties in Nova Scotia in contract and federal policing? Where were they all?
Logic dictates that since the shooter, who the Examiner is calling GW, was absolutely linked to the shootings and fires, any new criminal investigation should have little, if anything, to do with him. RCMP Chief Supt. Chris Leather said as much at a press conference three days after the rampage: that GW “acted alone.”
Has the RCMP has stumbled onto some new, sensitive, and dramatic case or are they and the government just slowing everything down to a crawl, to control the narrative and buy some time?
My gut tells me the latter. Prove me wrong.
That there is a well-known public market in RCMP uniforms, badges, and patches and nothing has ever been done about it, it suggests there is not much room for a criminal investigation there. That is, unless Mounties were actually hawking their stuff to make a buck, and even then that’s only a tiny sliver of the larger story.
Donald Walker told the Toronto Star, a week after the shootings, that GW “didn’t hide this vehicle. This car was not like in a garage where he was secretly making it…. He was very proud of that vehicle. He told me he wanted to go to car shows, take it there, show off.”
The Mounties apparently knew this, too, and it was widely reported that GW was told he could take the decked out fake police car to shows, but not drive it on the road.
Nothing there.
To date, various media entities have reported on everything from the gunman’s quirks, threats to others, illegal guns, replica Mountie cars, possible cigarette smuggling, and even the murder of someone in the United States, among other things.
Even if any of those allegations are worth pursuing, as I said, the perpetrator is dead. There does not appear to be reasons enough to run through Sharpies by the caseload.
The public has a right to know what was in those documents and disclosure should not be unreasonable withheld.
Last week, I reported that a Deep Throat Whistleblower told me that the media must continue to push for information on the relationship between GW and the police, either the Mounties or Halifax.
There was a Big Secret there, the source said, big enough to blow the entire story into another dimension.
Which brings me, briefly, to my qualifications to write about these matters.
I am a citizen.
Reporters across the country tell me that the mention of my name draws immediate ire from the Mounties. “He hates the RCMP,” more than one has been told.
For the record, here’s what I think, based upon my considerable research over the years. The RCMP is a secretive, stubborn, archaic, and dysfunctional organization that is foremost a danger to its own hardworking and mostly loyal employees. All too often, young Mounties become quickly disillusioned when they begin to realize that they are mere faceless pawns in the force’s over-arching ambition to protect its multitude of franchises. Because that’s what they are: business-like franchises. Profit centres.
The issue of my competence and insights is politically heated among RCMP and other police supporters on talk shows and in internet forums.
So here we go, wading into the past.
As a journalist since 1974, I’ve covered policing from a variety of perspectives.
In 1976, fellow reporter Steve Jarrett and I responded to a gun call one Saturday night where the then Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police were using their SWAT team for the first time. As we approached the scene, one of the SWAT members was heard to say that they had hoped “Palango would show up.” He jokingly implied he was going to take me out. I got so close to the scene that I had to push down the barrel of a tear gas gun a sweaty officer was about to fire into a room filled with his fellow officers. It was a pretty funny story. The police hated it.
Over the years, I Iearned a lot being close up and had not a few harrowing moments here and there facing down an enormous range of physical and legal threats.
Left to right: Former Governor General Roland Michener, Her Excellency Jeanne Sauvé, Governor General of Canada; reporter Paul Palango, representing The Globe and Mail, winner of the 1988 Michener Award. Photo: Sgt Raynold Kolly, courtesy of the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General
In my thirties, as the City and later National Editor at the Globe and Mail, I was in charge of investigative reporting. As I look over at the wall in my office, there is a photo of me accepting the Michener Award from then Governor General Jean Sauve, the highest award for journalism in the country, on behalf of the Globe and Mail. It is for disinterested public service journalism. Disinterested? It means we didn’t have a dog in the race. Why me? I was directly involved in the conception, reporting and editing of three different series of stories and had imput on a fourth, all of which were co-winners of the award. One of the stories, the so-called Patti Starr Affair, resulted in nine Ontario Cabinet Ministers losing their jobs in one day.
After I left the Globe, I wrote three increasingly more critical books about the RCMP and its operations, as well as newspaper and magazine articles. I met hundreds of Mounties and policing experts. I rode around in police cars around the country and saw what the Mounties go through firsthand. I fielded hundreds of calls over the years from distressed Mounties. They all told the same stories about how the force has and continued to let them down. “I would go to a city police force in a moment,” one Mountie told me when we met over an incident. “But I can’t transfer my pension.”
In fact, as I look around my office, I can also see another way the world has changed.
I’m looking at a large framed print of the Musical Ride charge by Bill McMillan from 1997. It was given to me as a gift by a detachment in British Columbia who invited me to speak at and attend their annual ball. Why me? The Mounties there believed back then that I was speaking for the rank and file, the ordinary members, trying to protect them from the scourge created by the incompetence of their masters. Not much has changed. In fact, almost all tell me, things have deteriorated even more.
But what has changed is the echo chamber mentality created in the closed, invitation only chat rooms on the Internet. I have had a peek into some of them recently and it’s what you’d expect. It’s like the Taliban in there. Anything perceived to be liberal or Liberal is the subject of scorn. Anyone who speaks out of turn is either castigated or threatened with banishment. People like me are accused of being libs, gay (not that there is anything wrong with that), stupid, greedy, or corrupt. In those rooms, as Donald Trump might put it, a Mountie could mow down everyone on 5th Avenue, and no one would hold it against him.
The final taunt, and you hear this one on the radio talk shows all the time. Neither I, nor anyone, like me can talk about policing unless you are a police officer.
No, I’m not one and never have been. I couldn’t be. I’m partially colour blind, which in the context of what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years or so, glass art, should give anyone pause.
But when I argue that Constable Heidi Stevenson should not have been where she was, I say that because I understand the deep flaws in the system and I care about what happened to her.
Why do I care? Because it’s the right thing to do. It’s in the public interest. Caring about how she died might prevent it happening to some other police officer. And, secondly, contrary to what the mad-dog police defenders seem to assume, I am not some wimpy, money-grubbing theorist with no clue about policing and law enforcement.
Paul Palango
I have a long family history of peace officers, people who have been on the line and are still on the line.
My father was military police watching over Nazi prisoners at Camp Barriefield, just outside Kingston, Ontario.
My brother, Dave, was a corrections officer in one of the most difficult jails in the country, until he retired.
Six weeks after she became a peace officer, my daughter had to use a weapon to protect a fellow officer during a near riot situation. When another one happened, subsequently, it was on her day off. She told me that when she asked prisoner the next day about what had happened, the prisoner told her: “We did it when you were off, ma’am, because we know you shoot.” She is now a crisis negotiator.
Her husband is also a corrections officer in a federal institution and an avid hunter, which brings me to my final qualification, which I self-admittedly dismally fail.
My son-in-law along with his buddies took their children on a weekend hunting trip to a camp. When they got back, I asked my grandson what he thought. He said: “it was boring.”
When he gets older, I’ll tell him what I really think: “Hunting isn’t much of a sport, since the animals don’t know the rules. It would be a real sport if the deer could put out donuts and jerky, perch in trees with long guns and shoot at the hunters. That would be a sport worth watching.”
The long and short of it is that I am confident that I know what I am talking about.
The 30 law professors at Dalhousie who have been joined by others like former coroner, Dr. John Butt, are right in calling for a public inquiry. The sooner, the better.
And then there is that final thing, my last name. Palango.
Although I’ve lived here 20 years, I’m still considered to be a CFA, a come from away.
Well, these days, you never know who you’re dealing with. My father was conceived in Nova Scotia and was born in Ontario, four months after the family arrived there. Here are my other Nova Scotia credentials. My great grandfather was Big Allan MacLellan from the Inverness area on Cape Breton. My great-grandmother was Mary Kennedy from nearby Broad Cove. She was born on Campbellton Road. So was her daughter, my beloved grandmother, Mary Sarah MacLellan.
And, right now I am calling on her to send a message to Premier McNeil. As she would have put it: “Jeezus snow-shovellin’ Christ, Stephen, get the blazes off your arse and call an inquiry.”
The Halifax Examiner is an advertising-free, subscriber-supported news site. Your subscription makes this work possible; please subscribe.
Some people have asked that we additionally allow for one-time donations from readers, so we’ve created that opportunity, via the PayPal button below. We also accept e-transfers, cheques, and donations with your credit card; please contact iris “at” halifaxexaminer “dot” ca for details.
Thank you!
Comments
Thanks Paul. Keep speaking up for justice and the poor souls in the RCMP who are suffering under the cone of silence mentality. I believe it will only take one ‘hero’ to speak up and it will start an avalanche of truth by Mounties across the country.
Thank you. I always wanted to make my grandmother a hero. She died far too young. Stay tuned.
Also, the Radio talk show hosts you make reference too.
Would that be News 95.7? I find them to be fair and balanced.
Mike: Yep. Now they’ll just be fairer and more balanced, I hope. But don’t be blinded by the insistence on balance. The late great Bob Simon of 60 Minutes fame put it well when he said, and I paraphrase: So called balance sometimes actually gives the bad guys in a story too much say and confuses the issue. Sometimes all a reporter has to do is point.
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I have contacted my MLA Bill Horne twice in the last few days regarding an open inquiry into the ‘Portapique Massacre.’ Advising him to strongly suggest to his boss that nothing short of an open and diligent investigation will do. No reply from Mr. Horne as of yet. The first time I have ever contacted my MLA. I have Covid-19 time on my hands. Like so many others. I hope other people are using this time to make demands of their elected officials.
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I think we have to also start asking where the Oppo leaders and spokespeople are on this, as well as the chronicle Herald which seems to be caught in the headlights. It sees itself as being the engine of the news cycle in the Maritimes, but on this story it couldn’t push a lawn mower. Wake up and get into the game, Ms Dennis
RCMP’s rural policing is an ongoing disaster, say Colchester County councillors
The killer’s replica police car. Photo: RCMP
The RCMP’s rural policing strategy has been for many years an ongoing disaster and a danger to the public in Colchester County, say two municipal councillors with law enforcement backgrounds.
Most of the victims killed in the Nova Scotia massacre of April 18-19 lived in Colchester County, the majority of them at Portapique at the south end of the roughly 3,800 square kilometre county. Others were killed near Wentworth, just over the western edge of the county in Cumberland County.* The final three killings, including RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, took place in Shubenacadie, just south of the county.
“I know for a fact that we are not getting the proper policing that we’re paying for and this in turn has left the community very vulnerable,” said Wade Parker in an interview with the Halifax Examiner. Parker, a former corrections supervisor, is a councillor for the Municipality of the District of Colchester and chairman of the police advisory board.
His comments were supported by Michael Gregory, who spent 25 ½ years in the RCMP, where he worked in various capacities from highway patrol, the force’s drug section, and criminal investigations. Gregory’s final assignment before retirement was as Corporal* Commander of the Tatamagouche, NS detachment. As an elected representative, Gregory is also a member of the police advisory board and a separate entity overseeing the RCMP contract with the municipality.
“Over the past several years, the RCMP policing has gone completely downhill,” said Gregory in an interview. “It’s pretty sad.”
One of the major problems both men see is the force’s practice of providing services during a defined window. In Colchester that means there are no scheduled RCMP services between 2am and 6am. Officers are on call.
“To me we need 24 hour policing,” Gregory said. “The world is changing all the time. In today’s society most things don’t happen between the hours of 9 to 5. There is a four-hour time frame when there are no police. That’s when things are happening. It’s wild out there.”
Another expert who has problems with the RCMP approach is former Cape Breton Police Chief Edgar MacLeod.
“At 4am in the morning in many of these rural communities policed by the RCMP it’s like the wild, wild west, out there,” MacLeod “There has to be a police presence. It’s that simple.”
Both Gregory and Parker outlined a litany of problems with the force’s policing methods, including not only poor response times, but often no response, at all, to calls from the public.
“I live behind the NSLC (government liquor store) in Tatamagouche,” Gregory said. “I heard on the grapevine that the liquor store had been broken into three weeks earlier. I hadn’t even heard about it. So I called the RCMP in Bible Hill (the local detachment just outside Truro) and asked what the Mounties had done. I said: ‘Nobody knocked on my door. People around me heard nothing about it.’ The Mountie told me that the force doesn’t make neighbourhood inquiries anymore. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
In their assessment of the decline of the RCMP, each man separately painted a picture of a secretive, unaccountable organization that seems to have lost touch with the basic requirements of its mandate — to protect the public interest and enforce laws.
“The thing the RCMP used to emphasize was its commitment to Community policing,” Gregory says. “When I was the commander in Tatamagouche, I lived in the community. I knew everyone and everyone knew me.”
Nowadays, in many rural communities near major cities, the RCMP has switched to what can best be described as commuter policing. Instead of the traditional notion of workers travelling to their jobs in the city, many Mounties do the reverse — they live in or near the cities and commute to their jobs in the country.
“The police are the public and the public are the police,” said Gregory, quoting Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing. “When I lived in the community, I prided myself that I knew everyone in the community. It paid off for me. Now, that’s all gone.”
Councillor Parker added: “The RCMP got away from community policing and instead of having officers rooted in the community, they are everywhere. I don’t know where the police live or where they have to come from to get here. And when they do get here to do their job, they don’t know the people in the area, very well. The people don’t know them. They don’t who’s a criminal and who isn’t.”
That Mounties are commuting to their posts in rural areas like Colchester only compounds the problem.
“So they are on call. In the middle of the night, a call comes in to the Mountie at home?”
“How long is it going to take them to respond when they don’t live in the communities they are policing?” Parker asked, adding: “I have nothing against the people doing their jobs. They lay their lives on the line. It’s not their fault. The problem is higher up than the people working in the detachment. I don’t like the RCMP model of policing.”
But perhaps the two most important issues facing Colchester, and for that matter many communities with RCMP contracts across the country, is understaffing and accountability.
That the RCMP is understaffed across the country is no secret. It is an issue in Surrey, B.C., much of the rest of that province, Red Deer, Alberta, Moncton, NB, and Colchester.
Colchester County is paying for 28 Mounties, but the local council has no way to hold the RCMP accountable for those numbers.
At one point, Parker said, he learned that the detachment was short about 5 or 6 members, about 25 per cent.
“We couldn’t get the real numbers,” he said. “We tried our best, but the RCMP won’t answer to anything.”
Lately, he said, the numbers may have gone back to normal. “But I can’ be sure of that either. We don’t know. And no one in the ministry (of Justice) will tell us.” Then, he added: “I heard that before the shootings they might have gone down again, but who knows.”
These concerns and questions are not new.
Three years ago, Gregory and Parker raised the issue with their fellow councillors. They knew that the current contract worth almost $6 million per year with the RCMP would be expiring within a year and they were looking for alternatives.
In January, the nearby Truro municipal force was asked to put in a proposal to police the entire county. Within a month of being asked, the Truro police made a proposal which included 24-hour policing, staffed sub-detachments, and more police on the ground — for less money.
The RCMP was asked to make a similar proposal, but hasn’t yet. A potentially complication is that the new RCMP union will come into being in the near future.
“When the time comes, I just want to be able to compare apples to apples,” Parker said.
“But the Department of Justice was supposed to come back to us with their model in March or April. Now they are telling us its going to be another 20 weeks. We need to know as soon as possible. The RCMP right now is 90th on pay scales in Canada for police. With the union, we can expect they are going to want a raise and we can’t afford $7 million or $8 million dollars.”
The eagerness of the Truro force to take over the RCMP’s role in Colchester County also raises another serious question.
It has been widely reported that the RCMP did not contact the nearby Truro police on the weekend of April 18-19 and ask for assistance. In fact, the shooter drove his fake RCMP car down the main street of Truro in mid-morning.
Did the RCMP not contact Truro because of corporate hurt feelings over a perceived intrusion into their business?
“I sure hope that isn’t the case,” Parker said. “Only a public inquiry will bring that out.”
(Interviewed by Examiner contributor Joan Baxter, Gregory said he did not support an inquiry into the massacre.)
But both the federal and provincial governments have balked at calling an inquiry, arguing that there is no money left for such an exercise after the impact of the COVID-19 shutdown on finances.
Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister Mark Furey has all but stayed out of the discussion. Premier Stephen McNeil has indicated that he sees no problem with Furey handling the RCMP file. However, there might be a clue to how Furey thinks from a 2017 news story published by Global News https://globalnews.ca/news/3762836/tatamagouche-n-s-councillor-former-rcmp-officer-concerned-over-police-response/
about Councillor Gregory’s nascent attempt at overturning the current RCMP contract with Colchester County.
Reporter Natasha Pace interviewed Furey who said: “We’re certainly familiar with the police service delivery model in rural Nova Scotia. It’s a model that is applied right across Canada outside of our urban centre and it’s certainly a challenge to have police presences 24/7.”
Has Furey changed his mind about whether the RCMP model can be applied unilaterally across rural Canada in every country?
Wade Parker doesn’t seem to think so.
“Our constituents deserve to know whether we have proper policing in place for our municipality. We need to know whether we should stick with the RCMP or if there is a better model. If there is, so be it.” he said. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done on council, the most frustrating three years of my life. It’s so hard to get information. This process needs to be resolved once and for all. Right now, I don’t feel we have the safest policing because of that.”
* As originally published, this article misidentified Gregory’s rank, as well as the location of Wentworth.
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Comments
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When it comes to policing the provincial Department of Justice is a joke – they leave municipalities alone to do their own thing – regulations are not enforced and key sections of the Police Act are not enforced. The attitude seems to be that anything a municipality wants to do is OK by the Minister and his department.
A provincial appointee to a Board of Police Commissioners fails to attend 40% of meetings – not my problem said Furey, write to the Chair. In Annapolis Royal 2 board members met in a pub owned by one of them and prepared a budget for the 1.5 person police department. I could go on and provide more example but it won’t make any difference. It was just as bad under Tory and NDP governments.-
Provide more examples, please, we are all ears. The RCMP has controlled the ball for decades, particularly through the ministry and the appointment of ex Mounties to head municipal forces, as was the case in Halifax until recently. Mark Furey says he can be objective, but the old saying still seems to go for him: there’s no such thing as an ex-Mountie. Fortunately, as seen recently in the Examiner, more former Mounties are coming up for air, which is a very good thing for the public interest.
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HRM has had only one chief from the RCMP and he was picked by then CAO Richard Butts who knew Chief Blais would follow instructions. HRP had a long history of appointing a Chief who had risen through the ranks of the detectives. Kinsella is only the second chief to have been appointed from outside the ranks of HRP. I am quite sure the next Chief will be an internal promotion; just look at the ranks below Chief Kinsella and you will see at least two candidates.
If you want more info scroll through my comments regarding policing of HRM in previous articles re HRM budgets and policing. Or email Tim and ask him for my email.
CBRM promoted internally, never had an outsider as Chief.
Ask other people about the attempt to disband HRP and hand over policing to the RCMP; not a great secret because it was not too long ago. The council was kept in the dark until late in the exercise and that was the end of that idea.
The staff in Policing Services at Justice are predominantly HRP on secondment or post retirement.-
Thank you, Colin. I was well aware of the attempt to have the RCMP take over Halifax. That would have been as disastrous as what has unfolded in Moncton or Surrey, B.C. The RCMP are the dicks from the sticks. A rural force. The RCMP works the backrooms and promises the moon to get all kinds of contracts, but then plays its games once it gets them. They do not want accountability, just the illusion of accountability. Once you let the RCMP in, governments at every level have no control over their police force. Yet, citizens continue to blindly support the force: “We love our Mounties.” What is there to love?
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CBRM has a large police force which was melded from all of the town and county forces when they amalgamated in 1995. There was a fight to keep the Mounties, but the New Waterford contingent worked the issue well and ended up with most of the bureaucracy and many of the policing jobs. But I digress.
CBR police are using criminals as informants. This is not free; in exchange they get reduced time, or no time. The crown is very well aware of the practice and plays along, after all, it’s also less work for them. Some of these offenders are dangerous and are back on the streets with what they feel is immunity. It’s not safe for citizens and it has become a ‘policing model.’ Why don’t we tax payers simply hand over our substantial policing dollars directly to the criminals?
Policing is the second biggest budget item here, after public works. Most of it goes to salaries. They also have all the toys a police force could want…and crime is down.
I don’t think it’s just the Mounties who are doing less, in term of actual police work and I believe the lack of transparency is also across all police forces. The hands off approach by government is also across all levels of government, in my opinion. The police write their own rules and the toothless police commissions rubber stamp them. There seems to be no effort at oversight. Politicians at all levels don’t seem to have the knowledge or the will to manage any part of the bureaucracy.-
I couldn’t have said it better, Joan. Politicians and too many in the public allow themselves to be awed by the police presence and become instantly deferential toward them. They allow themselves to be bullied by them and don’t hold them accountable.
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Nova Scotia massacre: Did the RCMP “risk it out” one time too many?
Catharine Mansley.
Catharine Mansley was a Mountie for 24 years. In time her mind began to go from all the stress of being a RCMP patrol officer in Halifax County. She began drinking. When she complained about her problem to her supervisors, that just added to them. She was caught driving drunk twice. Convicted once, she went off on stress leave for 11 years because of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Mansley sued the RCMP as part of a class-action claiming that the Mounties failed to provide a work environment that was free from gender-based discrimination, bullying, and harassment. She got an undisclosed chunk of money in the court-ordered payout by the force to the hundreds of claimants who received their share of at least $200 million.
Since officially resigning in April, you’d think that Mansley would have moved on by now, but the RCMP is still stuck in her craw.
“I signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of the settlement,” Mansley said.
“I don’t mind talking about the things I used as examples in my claim. I am not going to keep my mouth shut. If they want to sue me let them go ahead. It’s worth getting the word out. I would love for them to sue me”
Cst. Heidi Stevenson
She knew Constable Heidi Stevenson, who was murdered by the gunman near the end of the Nova Scotia massacre. They met at Depot, the RCMP training academy in Regina.
“Heidi was my pit partner. She was in the bed next to me in the dorm, seven months of living six feet away from her. Because we both worked in the Halifax area at the end, I used to cross paths with her here and there. She was a really nice girl.”
When Mansley was in the Tantallon detachment, west of Halifax, at Exit 5 on Highway 103, one of her supervisors for two years there was a Staff-Sgt. named Mark Furey.
Mansley is the kind of person whose credibility can be affected by their past situation. That she is angry about what happened to her in the RCMP is palpable. She believes she lost her career. That she doesn’t like Mark Furey for a variety of reasons she says she experienced on the job is neither here nor there, for the moment.
Furey, now the Attorney General and Minister of Justice of Nova Scotia, has become the shrinking-violet, silent type. He hasn’t made a substantive comment about the Nova Scotia massacre in more than six weeks, so why would anyone think he’d defend himself against accusations from a distressed, former Mountie? All things being equal we won’t get into that hornet’s nest.
But there is one thing in Mansley’s story that caught my ear in the context of recent developments. A few days ago, I reported in an Examiner story about how two current members of Colchester council, both senior former law enforcement officers, slammed the RCMP rural policing strategy. Among other things, they talked about staff shortages, lax response, and virtually no accountability in place at any level of government.
Similar themes were addressed nationally earlier in a story by Canadian Press reporter Jim Bronskill, who described how the federal government continues to pour millions — $508 million, this time — into a broken RCMP system.
When Mansley talked about the roots of her stress, there were the usual suspects, harassment, bullying, and all the death that police officers and other first responders regularly face. But there was this other important thing.
“The RCMP is always trying to do the most with the least amount of staff. That’s their model,” Mansley says. “The supervisors get bonuses for coming in under budget. So, when you show up for a shift and there are not enough bodies to cover the shift, the supervisors used to say: “We are not calling anyone in on overtime, we are just going to risk it out.”
Mansley said the stress of working alone without proper backup was mentally and physically draining. She said Furey as her commander often used to say it. “All the supervisors said it.
“They say: ‘risk it out’, but they weren’t risking their lives, Mansley said. “What they do is risk us out. We are the ones out there in dangerous situations. They are risking each Mountie’s life, and I can’t believe they get bonuses when they do.”
While some other Mounties say they have heard the term used, a few others, mostly those who have not served in contract policing, had not. Nevertheless, the “risk it out” approach to policing is quite evident.
Edgar MacLeod, the former Cape Breton Police Chief, said in a recent interview that the Mountie system of single person patrols is both dangerous for the police and the public and particularly destructive to the mental well-being of many individuals.
“The Mounties send their members out into these rural areas where they are all alone in the middle of nowhere. They like to say there is backup, but in reality there is no backup,” MacLeod says. “That’s dangerous. And the constant stress on the individuals is damaging.”
Michael Gregory is a former Mountie corporal who spent 25 ½ years in the force, and who is now a councillor in the District of the Municipality of Colchester, where Portapique Beach Road is located. He used to command the former RCMP detachment in Tatamagouche.
“When I was on the force, we would never operate a shift without a full complement,” Gregory said in an interview. “We would even call in auxiliary police, if need be. But the force got rid of auxiliaries a couple of years ago.”
One has to wonder, therefore, about the situation with staffing on the weekend of the Nova Scotia massacre.
In the previous story on the Bible Hill detachment, which covers Colchester, we know from Gregory and fellow councillor Wade Parker, the chairman of the police advisory board, that the RCMP was notoriously short of staff on occasion there. They have no idea how many were working that night.
What we can piece together is that there were very few. It all began on a Saturday night during a province-wide lockdown. People were supposedly confined to their homes. One can presume that the RCMP went with a minimal staff that night: they risked it out.
When things got hot, they called in for help. There are supposedly 28 members on the roster in Bible Hill. Were they called in? Or would that blow the budget? Would that affect a supervisor’s bonus? Did they risk it out?
Did they only call for help from those who were on duty, not only in Nova Scotia but also in New Brunswick, as far away as Fredericton?
Did the RCMP fail to escalate the alarm through the force because someone decided to risk it out?
Since Colchester County only had paid policing until 2am and it didn’t start up again until 6am, did the RCMP hold back resources until its members could come in at a regular time?
Did the RCMP engage in magical thinking, hoping the shooter was dead when, in fact, in the overnight hours it was later determined that he spent the night behind a building in Debert? Was the RCMP search for him affected because of this risking it out?
So many questions and so few answers.
Over the decades, in spite of obvious structural and cultural issues, the RCMP has cleverly managed to survive by avoiding accountability. It is a wily servant of two masters, the federal and provincial governments, and it deftly surfs along the boundaries between them to avoid being called to task in any meaningful way.
Now here we are left in a situation that is right out of a Monty Python skit. Even though the RCMP clearly abrogated its responsibilities and duties that weekend, the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia are reluctant to call for a public inquiry because they say there is no money.
Justice Minister Mark Furey. Photo: Jennifer Henderson
No money? Didn’t the federal government just give $508-million to the desperate Mounties to fix a system that clearly cannot be sustained?
Instead, the premier of Nova Scotia, Stephen McNeil, leaves it up to his legal handyman, Mark Furey (you may remember him from a few paragraphs north of here) to sort things out.
Their intention it seems is to have the RCMP investigate the RCMP for the failings of the RCMP and report back to Furey, the ex-Mountie who, nonetheless, proclaims he can be objective.
Why not call in an objective, competent outside police force such as the Ontario Provincial Police or the Surete du Quebec, whose operations are not dissimilar to those of the RCMP?
Why not set up a public inquiry, which seems to make even more sense every day?
If nothing is done, there is likely another huge dollar problem on the horizon. Now that it’s widely reported that the RCMP has been likely negligent in its operations and that there are severe flaws in the organization, what would happen, god forbid, if something else horrible takes place? There seems to be a ton of potential legal liability for governments and the police unless something is addressed quickly.
Or, Mr. Prime Minister and Mr. Premier, do you just want to risk it out?
Paul Palango is a former senior editor at the Globe and Mail and author of three books on the RCMP. He lives in Chester Basin.
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Comments
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Ross Landry,Minister of Justice in the Dexter NDP government and a RCMP officer for 34 years He was Minister of Justice for over 4 years and had no interest in how policing was governed in Halifax. Fury is keeping the tradition alive.
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Unfortunately, Nova Scotians and their representatives at all levels of government have let them get away with it.
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It only takes ONE mountie to tell the truth. If, at 1030 pm that Saturday night, the mountie on the scene had simply said, “I am in Portapique at a major major murder scene – the biggest in NS since I dont know when (when:1751) and killer is still on the loose” : the media and family calling family would have become a de facto Province Wide Alert. That’s what the less trained Hfx and Dartmouth police did with their man-hunts for ‘the boy on the bike’ and the ‘Christmas Eve killer’. Telling the truth worked, as I well remember : we all stayed safe inside till the killers were caught. But it is the mounties’ overweening pride at always being in control, of never needing help, that led to the decision to underplay a mass murder as just another “firearms incident”. And eight more needless deaths.
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While I agree with some of what you have said, I take issue with the municipal police being “less trained”. While the Mounties proclaim that they are superior, a lot of what they say is marketing, I believe that based upon the available evidence, municipal police forces across the country have a higher quality of cadets and more, better and consistent training than Mounties. The RCMP likes to assume it is superior and that’s how it markets it’s services, but any objective analysis would show the opposite to be true. RCMP members on the street, by and large, are good people working in an impossible system. I feel sorry for them.
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The purpose of law enforcement, like public health care and labour regulations, is public safety. When Westray occurred killing 26 Nova Scotians ,a public inquiry was called to sort through the tangled mess that caused so much grief. It was in everyone’s interest to make sure something so tragic never happened again. That inquiry changed the liability of Canadian companies, making employers criminally liable for workers’ deaths. In Portapique we lost 22 Nova Scotians, the result of an abusive, armed sociopath who was allowed to threaten community members for years without consequence. He was actually assisted in his murderous rampage through the procurement of police / police-like equipment used cleverly to lure some of his victims. There is a long ugly list of issues here that need to be examined and rectified for all Canadians through an immediate public inquiry. This tragedy is a Westray. Trying to bury it under the cover of a convenient pandemic or manufactured confusion over federal versus provincial jurisdiction is not acceptable.
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You are right. Virtually the entire journalistic community is chasing the short-term tragic story of the murders and its perpetrator. The really important story is the epic collapse of policing, which allowed much of it to happen. The collective media and much of its audience, with a few notable exceptions, are more interested in the emotions generated by the first part and not the critical public policy issues that have been raised by the second. It’s all too boring for them.
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Stephen Maher
Contributing Editor, Maclean’s Magazine
Bachelor of Arts, International Development Studies, 1988
I think that King’s, because it’s so small, helped me find how I fit into the world.
Throughout his 30-year journalism career, Stephen Maher has relocated several times and worked as a general reporter, restaurant critic, political reporter and magazine correspondant. While his career has continually evolved, one thing that’s held constant is its underpinning at King’s.
“I have continued to draw on the Foundation Year Program. It gives you a foundation—as advertised. It gives you the tutorial approach. It helps you develop a habit around critical thinking and textual analysis. I think it’s strong in that,” Stephen says.
After FYP, Stephen chose to major in international development, which he says broadened his perspective on the world, and his place within it.
“I was a bit of an odd duck,” says Stephen, of arriving at King’s as a 17-year-old “misfit” from Truro, N.S. “I think that King’s, because it’s so small, helped me find how I fit into the world.” Stephen says King’s is also the place where he found community: “My best friends in the world are friends from those days.”
He began his career in 1989 as a reporter for the Grand Falls Advertiser, in central Newfoundland. Stephen next worked as an editor and restaurant critic for Halifax’s Chronicle Herald newspaper, then moved to Ottawa with the Herald in 2004 to cover federal politics.
“I came to Ottawa when Paul Martin still had a majority. I covered that whole period. I covered Harper, managing to hang on,” Stephen says, referencing media downsizing over the past decade. “It’s not always been easy… It’s a buyer’s market for journalism.”
He has nonetheless persevered, and branched out into novel writing as well. His books include Salvage, Deadline and Social Misconduct, all of which are classified as thrillers.
In 2011 he moved to Postmedia News, where he began working as an investigative journalist and columnist. In 2012, he began investigating rumours that a political party had used robocalls—phone call that use a computerized autodialer to deliver a pre-recorded message, as if from a robot—through which fraudulent telephone messages sent voters to the wrong polling stations in the 2011 federal election. The resulting stories Stephen wrote earned him a National Newspaper Award, a Canadian Association of Journalists Award and the prestigious Michener Award for outstanding public service journalism. In his acceptance speech when receiving the Michener Award, he said of the robocall affair, “It has been a fascinating detective story, with burner phones, surveillance videos, digital call records, contradictory witnesses, red herrings and non-denial denials, but we still don’t know who done it.”
In 2016, Stephen attended Harvard University as a Nieman fellow. According to Harvard’s website, Nieman is a fellowship for select journalists who are invited to spend an academic year at Harvard in pursuit of individual study plans to strengthen their knowledge and leadership skills. It offers fellows the rare gift of time to think, learn, plan and create in a rigorous academic environment.
Today, Stephen is a contributing editor at Maclean’s Magazine, Canada’s national news magazine. He’s lately been writing about Coronavirus, including one personal story detailing his own experiences in and fleeing from Florida during the pandemic’s outbreak called Escape from Florida: My 2,400-km drive back to the sanity of Canada. It has garnered a lot of attention and feedback on both sides of the border.
“Overwhelming,” is how Maher describes reaction to the article. “[I got] A great number of messages from people saying ‘that’s like our experience’ … [and] people also responding to the ideas of social solidarity and social trust. I think that’s good. I’m also getting a steady number of messages from people in Florida. People are unhappy with me. They don’t like it. They say, ‘Don’t come back here. You’re an idiot.’ That kind of thing.”
Stephen says he doesn’t need for everyone to like his work, but he admits that it does create some strain to be reporting on the front lines of a pandemic. He forges on because he believes journalism is an essential service.
“I do believe the media play a vital role in times like this in helping people get information. That’s what we [journalists] spend our careers doing—trying to engage people and tell stories to them,” he says. Stephen cites the interplay between public health officials, government and the media, and how journalists challenge public institutions and hold them to account. “Nothing could be clearer than [that] this is an important function.”
April 2020
RCMP considered charging Justin Trudeau over Aga Khan visit
Politics Insider for April 26: Trudeau calls for an inquiry; Ottawa braces for another convoy; panel warns about Neo-Nazism
Trudeau arrives on Parliament Hill, April 25, 2022 in Ottawa. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
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Charge dodged: The RCMP considered charging Justin Trudeau with fraud after his trip to the Aga Khan’s Bahamas island, but decided against because it seems Trudeau had the authority to approve the trip himself, the Globe reports.
RCMP documents from 2019 reveal the Mounties looked at whether they could charge Trudeau based on the findings in a report from the federal ethics commissioner, which concluded that Mr. Trudeau had violated four sections of the Conflict of Interest Act. Investigators believed there were “reasonable grounds” to think fraud may have been committed, but a lack of clarity in federal rules that apply to accepting gifts stood in the way.
The relevant section of the Criminal Code has a provision which allows officials to accept benefits if they have written consent from the head of their branch of government. RCMP Corporal Michael Kiperchuk said in a briefing note to his superiors that “an investigation and prosecution under this section may not be in the public interest if it cannot be definitely determined whether or not Mr. Trudeau can simply provide consent to himself.”
Convoy inquiry: Trudeau called Monday for the establishment of an inquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act, CBC reports.
“This includes the evolution of the convoy, the impact of funding and disinformation, the economic impact, and efforts of police and other responders prior to and after the declaration,” the release said. Paul Rouleau has been named as the commissioner heading the inquiry. He was first appointed as an Ontario Superior Court justice in 2002 and then joined the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2005.
Critics say the inquiry should be more focused on holding the government to account.
“The Liberal government is doing everything in their power to ensure this inquiry is unsubstantial and fails to hold them accountable,” said a joint statement from Conservative MPs Raquel Dancho, Dane Lloyd and Gérard Deltell. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association — which is suing the federal government over its decision to invoke the act — said the inquiry does not appear to be focused on government accountability.
Accountability? In the Toronto Sun, Anthony Furey argues that the inquiry as conceived is a recipe for a cover-up.
There’s also no acknowledgement on their part that the inquiry should consider the question of whether Trudeau was even right to take this unprecedented step. The Liberals would clearly prefer this to be a trial of others — of the convoy participants and of the Conservative opposition, especially Pierre Poilievre, who is now gaining popularity by the day as he tours the nation for his Conservative leadership campaign.
Tried together: Furey points out that an inquiry doesn’t need to consider the guilt of convoy participants, because criminal trials will assess that. We learned a little about one such trial Monday, when prosecutors said that four men accused of conspiring to murder RCMP officers at the Coutts border protests will be tried together, CBC reports.
Chris Lysak, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick and Jerry Morin each face charges of conspiracy to murder, possession of a weapon and mischief. On Monday, the four, as well as 10 others facing less serious charges, made brief appearances in Lethbridge court as defence lawyers and prosecutors move the cases forward.
Two of the men have ties to Diagolon, a white supremacist group.
National security: In the Star, Susan Delacourt focuses on the national security questions to be raised, and the difficulty of considering them and sharing conclusions given that Rouleau has been instructed to “take all steps necessary to prevent any disclosure of information to persons or bodies other than the Government of Canada that would be injurious to international relations, national defence or national security.”
A reckoning for the convoy protest — and the government’s response to it — is crucial. If it is true that Canada’s national security was truly at risk, as the U.S. ambassador and prime minister’s security adviser have more than hinted, there are bigger questions to confront than simply whether the emergency legislation was justified. One big, looming question: how to make sure Canada’s democracy isn’t tested that way again.
Get ready, Ottawa: While Canadian institutions wrestle with fallout from the convoy, Ottawa is bracing for a motorcycle convoy on Friday, the Post reports. Organizer Neil Sheard says in a YouTube video that there will be a “free-for-all” Friday if Ottawa police don’t allow hundreds of protesters to bring their bikes onto the streets around Parliament Hill.
DND trouble: An advisory panel on systemic racism and discrimination within the Canadian military warned Monday that the threat from neo-Nazism, white supremacy and right-wing extremism is getting worse, APTN reports.
“In addition to sexual misconduct and domestic violence, hate crimes, extremist behaviours and affiliations to white supremacy groups are growing at an alarming rate in both Canada and its Defence Team,” the report says. “It is becoming increasingly covert, and technological advances such as Darknet and encryption methods pose significant challenges in detecting these members.”
Calls in UN: AFN National Chief RoseAnne Archibald asked the UN on Monday to launch an investigation into Canada’s possible role in violations of human rights associated with residential schools, CBC reports. Archibald wants the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples to probe Canada’s role in the residential school system: “I don’t call them schools anymore because no school I ever attended had children buried in unmarked graves. Canada and the other UN member states must not look away.”
Crypto cold water: Cryptocurrencies are not a way to “opt out” of inflation and they will in no way replace the Canadian dollar, two Bank of Canada officials — Tiff Macklem and Carolyn Rogers — said in an apparent rebuke to Pierre Poilievre at Finance Committee on Monday, the Post reports.
Snake oil: Speaking of Poilievre’s attacks on the Bank of Canada, Tom Brodbek, in the Winnipeg Free Press, pours scorn on him as a snake-oil salesman making Trump-style attacks on the central bank.
This is Donald Trump-style politics. The former U.S. president made a political career out of lying to Americans and attacking the integrity of public institutions, such as the courts, intelligence agencies and the U.S. Federal Reserve. Poilievre’s tactics are very similar.
Sloan bags Stone: Veteran dirty trickster Roger Stone will act as a strategic adviser to Derek Sloan’s Ontario Party, the Post reports.
Fuddle duddle: John Horgan swore in BC QP, Global reports.
Outsider: Vicky Mochama has an interesting profile of Michelle Rempel Garner in Chatelaine.
Speculation: In the Calgary Herald, Don Braid wonders if Jason Kenney, who faces a challenging leadership vote May 18, might call a snap election if the number he gets is above 50 per cent, but not high enough to silence dissenters.
Numbers: In his last story for CP, Jordan Press has an interesting item on what the census will tell us tomorrow about how Canada is aging.
— Stephen Maher
The Nova Scotia shooting and the mistakes the RCMP may have made
New details about the Nova Scotia shooting are raising several troubling questions about the actions and response of the RCMP
RCMP officers stopped the killer at a gas station in Enfield, N.S. on April 19, 2020 (Tim Krochak/CP)
This story was updated on May 14, 2020, to include a new comment from the RCMP
Previously unreported details about the Nova Scotia mass shooting last month are raising serious questions about the way the RCMP handled the nightmarish onslaught.
While Nova Scotians grieve their 22 dead, including an RCMP officer, they remain universally sympathetic to front-line officers still on the job. But law enforcement officers familiar with details that have not been made public are wondering aloud if at least some of the shooting deaths could have been prevented.
Here are six key questions:
1. Did the RCMP properly investigate reports that the killer assaulted his partner and had illegal guns?
The violence began when the killer, a 51-year-old denturist, went into a murderous rage after an argument with his common-law wife over a video call he made with a female friend, according to a police source briefed on the matter but not authorized to discuss it.
The killer—a heavy drinker with a history of violence and an obsession with the RCMP—was at a gathering with his partner at another home nearby in Portapique, a tiny seaside community 44 kilometres down the Bay of Fundy from the town of Truro in a sparsely populated coastal area of Nova Scotia.
They left after arguing about the call, but resolved the matter, at which point the killer’s common-law wife went to bed, the source briefed on the matter says.
He later woke her up, assaulted her, put one of her hands in cuffs, dragged her to a replica RCMP Ford Taurus, one of several replica police cars he kept. He shot at her twice to get her to move. He put her in the backseat of the vehicle, along with some containers of gasoline.
When he went back into the house, she slipped the cuff off her wrist and escaped from the car by sliding through the plexiglass divider between the front and back seats. She fled into the woods, where she hid until the morning.
Two sources briefed on the investigation believe that the killer may have been looking for her when he went to the home of Greg and Jamie Blair, who he murdered, apparently while their children, 10 and 12, were in the home.
Whether he had planned on the rampage or not, the killer appears to have prepared for one. He had replica RCMP vehicles and either an actual RCMP uniform or a convincing replica, which he wore as he went on his killing spree.
RCMP will eventually be asked to explain how the killer, who had a history of violence, managed to get hold of illegal guns, replica police cars and a uniform without raising red flags to the force, who had apparently been advised that he was a threat.
A former neighbour in Portapique told the RCMP that the killer, who she considered a “psychopath,” repeatedly assaulted his common-law-wife, who lived in fear of him. She told the RCMP that he had illegal guns, she told the Halifax Examiner and the Canadian Press.
The RCMP have said that the killer did not have a licence to own firearms, but used two semi-automatic handguns and two semi-automatic rifles in his murderous rampage.
Only one of the weapons was obtained in Canada, police say. They have not identified the weapons.
The neighbour, 62-year-old Canadian Forces veteran Brenda Forbes, has said that although three people witnessed one assault on his common-law wife, and she reported it to the RCMP, officers told her they could not act without the help of witnesses, who were unwilling to help.
Forbes believes the RCMP should have investigated the report of illegal guns.
“If you tell them that he may have illegal weapons, should you not go and check it out?” she said to the Canadian Press.
Forbes and her partner eventually left Portapique because of their fear of the killer.
The RCMP may already have had a file on the killer because of threats he made about 10 years ago, according to an interview his father did with Halifax’s Frank magazine. The killer’s father told Frank an officer went to Portapique to talk to him after he threatened to go to Moncton to kill his parents. His father also said his son beat him badly during a family trip to Cuba but they didn’t report it to authorities.
And in 2002, the killer pleaded guilty to a 2001 assault in Dartmouth. He received a sentence of nine months probation and a prohibition on owning firearms.
At a news conference on April 19, Chief Superintendent Chris Leather, the Criminal Operations Officer, appeared not to have been aware of the killer’s history of violence. Asked if the killer was known to police, Leather said “It’s early and I’m not aware of that.”
The RCMP said Thursday that they are not “looking into the gunman’s previous relationships and interactions,” but are not aware of the neighbour’s complaint: “As of right now, we have not found a record of this complaint being filed to the RCMP,” said Constable Hans Ouellette
2. Did the RCMP wait too long before entering the crime scene?
After the Blairs were murdered and the killer set their house on fire, their two children escaped to the home of neighbour Lisa McCully, a 49-year-old teacher of a combined Grade 3 and 4 class at Debert Elementary School.
McCully, a trilingual, fun-loving musician and loving mother, was murdered outside when she went to investigate, sources say.
The children are believed to have sheltered together in McCully’s basement and called 911, where they were connected with a civilian dispatcher at the RCMP’s Operational Communications Centre in Truro.
In all, the killer took 13 lives in Portapique, and set five buildings and several vehicles on fire.
In McCully’s obituary, her family thanks the RCMP and “the anonymous 911 person who stayed on the phone with [her children] for two hours.”
If that is accurate, police did not get to the children until an hour after the first officers arrived in Portapique. A source with knowledge of the events says the children stayed on the phone with the dispatcher during the 40-kilometre ambulance ride to the Colchester East Hants Health Centre, the regional hospital in Truro, which would have taken at least 30 minutes.
READ MORE: In memory of Emily Tuck, the young fiddler from Portapique
The timeline the RCMP released says that the force received a call at 10:01 p.m. and the first officer arrived in the community at 10:26. Spokespeople for the force in Halifax did not respond to repeated questions about how long it took before officers moved from the end of Portapique Beach Road to the burning houses.
It is not clear whether the killer continued murdering his neighbours while police were waiting at the end of the road, but some officers who were present have told others they waited too long.
“They were all set up on the end of the road and you could still hear gunshots and explosions in there,” said a source briefed on the matter. The source says some members eventually went up the road looking for the killer under their own initiative.
A 11:08 pm audio recording from an emergency medical personnel who was on the scene said “there’s a person down there with a gun. They’re still looking for him …. Police are stationed at the end of the road there on [Highway 2], not letting anybody down any further.”
Other sources briefed on events say they had not heard of a delay before officers went down the road and cautioned against concluding that police were wrong to hold back at the end of the road.
“Any time you have a shooter, and members who are willing to help, two minutes seems like forever. It’s OK to go in but it’s not OK to go in blind.”
The first car to arrive, likely a patrol car from the Bible Hill detachment, was coming to check out a shots-fired call, not an unusual call for RCMP officers in rural detachments. They did not know that they were about to enter a nightmare.
“The very first responding unit went in and it was a fucking disaster and they advised subsequent responding units,” said another source briefed on the events. “The very first car went in and there were multiple bodies. They pulled back. They had no fucking idea who or what or how many shooters. And they advised the responding units of the bodies, and that they were multiple, and that’s why they were collecting in force to do a containment and a proper approach.”
Police had to hold back emergency medical personnel and volunteer firefighters from nearby communities.
Meanwhile, four children were hiding in McCully’s home, talking to the dispatcher in Truro.
“There was communication between the members on scene, the telecommunications operator and the kids for them to stay fast, stay hidden, stay on the phone and that the police would come to them, and that they would be rescued, because that was the only living people that the police had any contact with at that point.”
When police eventually moved in, they did so cautiously, with their flashlights off so that they wouldn’t present easy targets to the killer. “It would almost be described as a war zone,” said a law enforcement source. “Fires. Gunshots everywhere. Miniature explosions, propane tanks in garages and in houses. It’s dark. The only light you’re going to get is whatever’s from the police cars and whatever’s from the burning houses.”
One source says officers believed they caught glimpses of the killer moving between houses as they proceeded.
“You’re alone. You’ve got bodies. You’ve got houses on fire. And you don’t know how many shooters there are.”
At 10:35 pm, the RCMP has said, the killer escaped the police perimetre by driving through a field, past the officers, in what would have appeared to be one of many RCMP Ford Tauruses on the scene.
“I’ve been in policing for almost 30 years now,” Superintendent Darren Campbell said later in a news conference. “And I can’t imagine a more horrific set of circumstances than searching for someone that looks like you.”
3. Why didn’t the RCMP issue an alert to warn the public?
After evading police, the killer drove north on unpaved back roads 30 kilometres to Debert, a farming community of 1,400, where he parked behind a welding shop for the night, while police set about the grim task of sorting through the carnage he had left behind in Portapique.
Police sources say that while the killer was resting in his replica vehicle, RCMP officers on the scene believed he was likely dead in one of the burning buildings.
The Canadian Press reported that a surviving gunshot victim told police that night that he was shot by someone in an RCMP vehicle, but there were three similar vehicles burning at the scene, so police wouldn’t have had reason to believe that the killer was still at large. They only learned that he was travelling around in a replica car when his common-law wife emerged from the woods the next morning around 6 a.m.
The woman, who was distraught after the assault and spending the night in the woods, told police about his weapons and the missing vehicle and gave them photos of the killer and his vehicle, which police distributed through Twitter, which is not the best way to reach rural Nova Scotians. The force sent several Tweets that morning, warning people to stay inside, but did not issue an emergency alert to cell phones, although the province’s Emergency Measures Organization asked them to do so.
The RCMP sent out a tweet about the killer and his vehicle at 10:17 local time, displayed above as 9:17 EDT (@RCMPNS/Twitter)
While his common law wife was briefing the police, the killer was making his way to the residence of Alanna Jenkins, 37, and Sean McLeod, 44, corrections officers who lived in Wentworth, a small community home to a ski hill. He killed them and burnt their home. He also killed Tom Bagley, a volunteer firefighter, who came to investigate the fire.
It has been reported that police received a 911 call by 8 a.m that morning, which might have made them aware that the killer was continuing his murderous rampage. But they did not use the alert system to warn people to stay in their homes.
The system had never been used for an active-shooter warning, although it had been used in Nova Scotia days earlier for a COVID health warning.
At 9:35, the police received news that he had killed again, this time Lillian Hyslop, who was murdered as she walked beside the road in Wentworth, an apparently random attack.
Friends and neighbours believe an alert might have saved her life.
At 9:48 am, the killer visited the nearby home of a couple known to him, apparently planning to murder them, but they hid from him until he left.
At 10:08 am, police received a 911 call about the murders of Heather O’Brien, 55, mother of six, and Kristen Beaton, mother of a three-year-old son, who was pregnant with another child. Both were nurses with the Victorian Order of Nurses. The killer shot them in their cars in apparently random murders.
Nick Beaton, widower of Kristen, is still waiting for police to return her wedding rings and cell phone.
He is careful to say he doesn’t blame the “foot soldiers on the ground,” but believes the force’s failure to send an alert led to his wife’s death.
“The RCMP are as responsible for my wife and unborn baby’s death as much as that lowlife,” he said. “I can 100% guarantee with a warning my wife would be alive today. I can promise you that with every existence of my soul. She would not have went out the door.”
Police sources say the RCMP may have been afraid of sending an alert, in part because it could have put officers in jeopardy with armed members of the public looking to protect themselves, and also because their communications might have been paralyzed.
“We were chasing a guy in a police car and a uniform,” says a person familiar with the operation. “The number one thing I would be afraid of in putting out an alert is that we would be chasing our own shadows and depleting our own resources and eroding our containment because everyone would be calling in every police car they saw. That would be a tactical consideration.”
The officers running the operation were under terrible stress.
“People think these things are real time, like a CSI episode,” said the person briefed on events. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s a fucking shit show. We didn’t know where he was. We had no visual on him. We didn’t know where he was going to go.”
Other police sources think the RCMP made the wrong call.
“You say there’s an active shooter,” said a law-enforcement source who was not authorized to discuss the case. “If you’re home, stay home and lock your doors. You don’t have to say he was dressed as a Mountie or anything. People went about their lives and if one had been sent out, very likely they wouldn’t have done what they did.”
The RCMP has said they were preparing an alert when the killer was stopped. There had been speculation previously that they were waiting for approval from Ottawa, but knowledgeable sources say that is not the case, and operational decisions were all made in Nova Scotia.
At a news conference later, Chief Superintendent Leather said the force was “very satisfied” with its messaging through Twitter.
He said that police were preparing an alert when the killer was gunned down.
“So a lot of the delay was based on communications between the [provincial Emergency Measures Organization] and the various officers, and then a discussion about what the message, how it would be constructed and what it would say. And in that hour and a bit of consultation … is when the suspect was killed.”
In an interview with CBC Radio’s As It Happens, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki acknowledged that it is possible that an alert would have saved lives.
“What I would say is that they did alert through Twitter, and going back to what I said earlier, you know, the more ways we can alert, the better.”
The force is now drafting a new policy on the use of alerts in active-shooter situations.
4. What happened at the Onslow Belmont Fire Hall?
At about 10:30 a.m, the chief and deputy chief of the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade were in the fire hall, near Truro, setting up a muster point for evacuees from Portapique along with an official from Colchester County’s Emergency Management Organization.
While the men got the hall ready, an RCMP officer from Pictou County was outside, standing next to his cruiser, providing security.
Two other officers drove up and, believing the Pictou County officer was the suspect, opened fire on him.
“There was a horrible confusion for a nanosecond at the scene and the two officers who had stepped out at the car pointing firearms at this officer, discharged several rounds,” said someone briefed on the shooting. “They missed killing him.”
They apparently did not warn the Pictou County officer, as they would have been trained to do, and put dozens of bullets into the building.
“Didn’t challenge,” said another police source familiar with the details. “Didn’t speak. Just started opening fire. And [the officer] dove between the vehicles and started screaming on the radio to stop and they took off.”
A vertical pattern of bullet holes and possible shrapnel can be seen on one wall of the Onslow Belmont firehall (Harry Sullivan/Truro Daily)
The officers who opened fire did not speak to the volunteer firefighters before leaving.
Joy McCabe, who lives across the road, saw the beginning of the fire fight.
“And while I’m looking, that car pulled up right there in the middle of the road, opened both doors and started shooting,” she told the Truro Daily News.
Clair Peers, public relations officer for the fire brigade, says the firefighters inside hit the floor.
“They were immediately on the floor with the tables upturned and over, so they were shielded. They knew there was an officer out front to provide the protection they needed. But when somebody is shooting outside you don’t know what’s going on. So, they didn’t see anything that happened out there.”
The firefighters and the officer who came under fire are said to have been badly rattled by the experience, which is being investigated by Nova Scotia’s Serious Incident Response Team.
Peers said the RCMP officers involved can count on the continuing support of members of the fire brigade.
“We have every respect for what they do,” he said. “We meet them at accident scenes and all sorts of situations. So we just expect the best thing that can be done will be done. We want to give them every assurance that they have our confidence and we respect what they’re doing.”
5. Why didn’t the RCMP use other police forces to keep the killer from travelling?
While RCMP officers were shooting up the fire hall, unbeknownst to police, the killer was driving around in his replica cruiser through the downtown business district of Truro.
Police have not said why he went there. There is no indication he attempted to gain entry to the hospital where his common-law wife and other shooting victims were being treated.
Truro Police were notified of the shooting when they were asked to assist with a lockdown at the hospital at midnight on April 18. They put extra officers on the next morning and contacted the RCMP to offer assistance but “the RCMP thanked us for our offer but did not ask for assistance,” said spokeswoman Josee Gallant.
It is not clear why the RCMP didn’t ask the Truro and Amherst police to set up roadblocks to prevent the killer from leaving the area. Roadblocks at the entrances to Highway 102, which leads to the killer’s Dartmouth home, could easily have been blocked by Truro police, closing a natural chokepoint where the Bay of Fundy divides the province.
“The Truro Police cannot comment on what the RCMP did or did not do,” said Gallant. “The Truro police was not asked to set up roadblocks or a perimetre for containment.”
The Truro Police only became aware that the killer had driven through Truro “when the RCMP released the video showing the vehicle driving through town [approximately a week later].”
The Amherst Police Department stepped up to backfill for a nearby RCMP detachment, but otherwise received detailed information only through back channels with local Mounties who have a good working relationship with Amherst police officers.
“I see no indication that they engaged Truro police or Amherst police, who are on either side of that, who have 60 sworn officers between them,” says Paul Palango, a retired journalist who wrote three highly regarded books on the RCMP and now lives in Nova Scotia. “But they did call in RCMP resources from New Brunswick, which is an hour and half away, and God knows when they got there.”
Surveillance video shows the killer stopped to remove his jacket and put on a yellow traffic vest at Millbrook First Nation, outside Truro, before heading toward Dartmouth.
Twelve hours after he began his rampage, he was still at large, having eluded his pursuers. Nineteen people were dead. Three more were to die.
“Why weren’t roads flooded by police?” says Palango. “Why weren’t they stopping everyone? Why wasn’t the province shut down? There’s not that many roads.”
6. Why wasn’t Heidi Stevenson’s cruiser equipped with a push bar?
After the killer left Millbrook, his next victim was Constable Chad Morrison, who was waiting for Constable Heidi Stevenson, a mother of two and 23-year veteran officer, at a highway junction in Shubenacadie at 10:45 am when the killer drove up next to him and shot him.
“Const. Morrison thought that the vehicle was Constable Stevenson. The approaching police vehicle was actually driven by the gunman,” Superintendent Darren Campbell said at a news conference.
Morrison managed to drive away and radio for help. Stevenson, who was nearby, tried to stop the killer. They collided head on. The killer shot and killed Stevenson and took her sidearm.
The vehicle that Stevenson was driving was not equipped with a push bar on its front bumper, unlike the replica vehicle that the killer was driving, which may have given him an advantage in the collision, according to some experts.
Palango points out something similar happened in 2006 in Spritwood, Sask., when RCMP constables Robin Cameron and Marc Bourdages rammed a vehicle being driven by a man wanted for domestic assault. Their airbags deployed and while the officers were trapped, the suspect managed to kill them both.
Some, but not all, police forces use push bars. Palango thinks that may have been one factor that led to the tragic death of Stevenson.
“RCMP would not address this issue,” says Palango. “So they still have no push bars on their cars in Nova Scotia.”
One police source says Stevenson’s airbag did not deploy, so the replica vehicle’s light, aluminum push bar does not appear to have been decisive. But if her vehicle had been equipped with a heavy steel bar, the exchange could have ended differently.
After shooting Stevenson, the killer set the vehicles ablaze and killed Joey Webber, a 36-year-old father of two who stopped to help. The killer stole Webber’s car and drove it to the nearby home of Gina Goulet, who he knew, murdered her, changed into civilian clothes and stole her car, which was low on gas.
At the Irving Big Stop in nearby Enfield, two RCMP officers — one from a Emergency Response Team and a canine officer — recognized the killer from the photo they had seen on their phones while he was filling his stolen car. They warned him and, when he failed to comply with their warnings, repeatedly shot him. He died after they put the cuffs on him, a source says.
The RCMP in Nova Scotia is reeling from the incident. Members who know and loved Stevenson are turning up to work every day, holding their emotions in check so they can keep doing their jobs. A number of members of the force have been unable to return to work and many more are likely to have long-term challenges dealing with the trauma of the crime scenes.
Some of the Mounties who pursued the Portapique killer are still dealing with trauma from the 2014 Moncton shooting, which took the lives of three Mounties.
After that tragedy, the force was found guilty of labour code violations and fined $550,000 for failing to provide its officers with adequate training and equipment, in particular, high-powered rifles.
The force had failed to properly equip its officers in spite of the recommendation of an inquiry into the 2005 shooting death of four outgunned RCMP officers in Mayerthorpe, Alta.
The RCMP is continuing its investigation. It has conducted 500 interviews and searched 17 crime scenes. The Serious Incident Response Team is investigating both the fire hall shooting and the death of the killer. The Nova Scotia Medical Examiner is investigating the deaths.
Beaton, who has lost his wife and unborn child, has launched a class action lawsuit seeking a public inquiry into the murder rampage, the worst mass shooting in Canadian history.
Observers expect the province will eventually call a public inquiry into the affair under Nova Scotia’s Public Inquiries Act, although it is also possible that a joint federal-provincial inquiry will be held instead.
“It is premature to consider a public inquiry at this time,” said a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Justice Minister Mark Furey. Furey is a former member of the RCMP.
Stephen Maher can be reached at stephenjamesmaher@gmail.com
The falling tides in Portapique
Stephen Maher: Coming together in grief has been hard in the small Nova Scotia community. It's a place where fortunes have been falling for decades.
A couple pays their respects at a roadside memorial in Portapique, N.S., on April 22, 2020 (CP/Andrew Vaughan)
People used to dance late into the night on Portapique Beach Road, a stone’s throw from the houses where 13 people were murdered on the night of April 18.
Families drove in from far and wide to listen to a band fronted by fiddler Carl Elliott, a highly regarded player whose songs are still played wherever bluegrass pickers gather.
Elliott played his last gig in the Portapique Dance Hall in October 1975, because soon after the tide carried away the building. It was the second dance hall on the road, built while the first one was still standing, according to Dick Akerman, 85, who lived in nearby Great Village as a boy.
“When they knew the one on the extreme water side was going to go, they built a second one behind it.”
There was once a busy wharf in Portapique. Rum runners landed liquor there during Prohibition, and shad fishermen tied up their boats until that fishery died out.
There were wharves in Great Village, in Bass River, all along the shore, where locals once built tall ships that sailed the oceans of the world. “Tides eventually took all of those wharves out,” Akerman recalls.
The tides at the head of the Bay of Fundy are the highest in the world, with a daily vertical rise of 13 metres. Twice a day, the brown sea rushes in, so fast that you have to step lively at the water’s edge if you want to keep your feet dry. When the bay empties out, it leaves kilometres of mud flats bare at low tide, usually empty but for the odd clam digger.
READ MORE: In memory of Emily Tuck, the young fiddler from Portapique
The dynamic of Cobequid Bay is such that no wharf can stand for long, and nothing built near the water—like a dance hall, for instance—can be sure to last.
It feels like the tide has been falling along the shore for a long time.
Portapique, N.S., 1926 (Colchester Historical Museum and Archives/Virtual Museum of Canada)
There used to be dairy farms, lumber mills, a fishery, a shipbuilding industry, a chair factory in Bass River and a bustling port at Great Village, where life was timed to the rhythm of the tide. Since the Second World War, though, the area has been in steady decline.
“As a community, it’s not much of a community anymore,” says Joy Laking, a celebrated watercolour artist who has lived in Portapique since 1972. “As soon as you take away the school and the church and close the little store … Once those things are gone, there’s no real way for the community to come together.”
When Laking spoke, she still wasn’t sure of the fate of some friends, who were later declared dead. Like everyone, she was struggling to come to grips with the tragedy of the sudden violence in a place so peaceful that nobody locks their doors.
She is afraid that the name of her community will be synonymous with a crime. “We certainly don’t want to be known for a big murder when we have so much beauty and kindness.”
Media reports on the crime, which took 22 lives across Nova Scotia, often refer to the communities as tight-knit, but people who live there say that is not true, not anymore.
“It’s not a community,” said one longtime resident of Great Village, who didn’t want her name used. “It’s just a bunch of houses.”
As young people have left, in search of better economic opportunities in Truro, Halifax or points west, they have been replaced by summer residents, like the killer, attracted by the opportunity to own a seaside home for less than $200,000.
“It’s been a slow dwindling,” says Serena Lewis, a grief counsellor who lives in Great Village. Her father recalls when there were 11 gas stations on the road from Great Village to Parrsboro. Now there is just one. As the gas stations, churches and stores closed, people grew apart.
“There is not really a sense of community at all,” she says. “I’m struggling to stay living here just because it’s so isolated. There’s such a disconnect. Other parts of the province have thrived but we’ve never bounced back. That’s why I’m worried for this community.”
Lewis’s son is looking to buy or build a home in the area, but she is not sure he should.
“I said to him, ‘Honey, I love this place. This has been home to us for a long time. But you do know there’s going to be a heavy cloud for a long time. We’ve got a lot of healing to do.’”
Lewis, who is herself grieving friends lost in the crime, has been working flat out, trying to help the community recover from the terrible event, which has been difficult for caregivers because of public health restrictions.
“These people were robbed of a good death, and now they’ve also been robbed of us being able to grieve, to come together and celebrate who they were in our lives,” she says. “How do we really bring their legacy to life?”
READ MORE: When real life turns surreal
Pastor Steve Adams, of the Faith Baptist Church in Great Village, has been terribly frustrated to find himself struggling to comfort grieving parishioners without being able to see them, but has watched something positive happen online.
“If you go back to before the days of social media, communities were very involved,” he says. “If I went through a tragedy, there were people around me comforting me. Now, it’s the exact opposite. You could be in Ottawa and you could be providing just as much comfort as me living down the road. It’s kind of a weird thing, right? We’ve been talking for years about the global village and that’s a wonderful thing.”
Because of COVID-19 restrictions, people are stuck alone in their homes, suffering in isolation, but the online connection has helped, says Rena Kossatz, an actor who lives in Portapique.
“As isolated and alone as we are here at the edge of the woods, I am receiving messages of love and condolence from everywhere in the world, and their kindness and caring is helping to ease my sadness in the moments when we share thoughts and express feelings. I know it meets a need and fills a space for me.”
Tory Phinney, in Bass River, helped organize the online musical vigil that broke hearts across Canada when Natalie MacMaster played along with a recording of Emily Tuck, the 17-year-old Portapique girl who died with her parents.
Phinney says the expression of sympathy from far and wide has been deeply meaningful. “There’s people from everywhere saying, ‘We’re with you. We’re with you. Condolences.’
Locals were deeply moved by the online images that people spontaneously shared of lighted candles in their windows.
“That means a lot to someone who can’t be in that church or be in that community hall with their friends and family,” Phinney says. “I think that’s so vital for a tragedy of this magnitude”
Sue Mercer, a clinical social worker who works with the Mental Health Commission, says the expressions of condolences are also helpful for the people who make them, especially children.
“For the children out there that are impacted by that, you know, parents, if they can help the child write a note to that family, or do a card or make a video, something that makes it tangible, to acknowledge that this is a loss that they’re seeing, and help them move to the next step of saying goodbye.”
The community is just beginning to deal with the grief, a process that will take a long time. Funerals have been postponed, which means people risk getting stuck in their grieving process, facing the vastness of their loss alone. The people left to grieve and mourn will need mental-health support for many years.
“We also know the media’s going to go away,” says Lewis. “And I also know that this is not an affluent part of the province. And I know these people don’t have a lot of voice. And that’s where I’m very passionate that we have got to collaborate together for the long haul to help people come through this.”
Read more at: https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/the-halifax-paradox-of-nova-scotia-politics/Content?oid=27027817
https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/the-halifax-paradox-of-nova-scotia-politics/Content?oid=27027817
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/freeland-takes-aim-at-poilievre/
Read more at: https://www.thecoast.ca/author/stephen-maher
Stephen Kimber
MFA (Goucher)
An award-winning writer, editor, and broadcaster, Stephen is the author of 13 books, including two novels and 11 works of nonfiction.
His 2007 novel, Reparations (HarperCollins) — which bestselling Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill called “an entertaining, provocative legal thriller about power and race relations in Nova Scotia… bold, outrageous, and dangerous” — was a finalist for both the 2007 Crime Writers’ of Canada First Novel Award and the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
Reviewer Ian Colford called his 2020 novel, The Sweetness in the Lime, “a quietly powerful novel, poignant with the sorrow of great loss, uplifting with the joy of discovery.”
Stephen is currently working with Halifax-based Two East Productions to develop a new multimedia project, a TV series and a series of novels, about a fictional police detective that is set in Halifax during World War II.
His most recent nonfiction books include Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions, a memoir co-written with Jennifer Robertson and published by HarperCollins, and Alexa! Changing the Face of Canadian Politics, a biography of former Nova Scotia and Canadian New Democratic Party leader Alexa McDonough, by Goose Lane. Alexa! won the Evelyn Richardson Award for nonfiction.
His writing has appeared in almost all major Canadian magazines and newspapers. Between 1985 and 2002, he was a weekly political and general interest columnist for the Daily News in Halifax. As a broadcaster, he has been an Ottawa-based current affairs producer for the CTV Television Network and a producer, writer, story editor, and host for numerous CBC television and radio programs. Stephen currently writes a weekly column for the Halifax Examiner and is a contributing editor to Atlantic Business Magazine.
He is a member of the National Advisory Council of The Walrus and has served as the Atlantic Regional Representative on the National Council of The Writers Union of Canada, as president of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and as a national board member of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
Stephen taught in the School of Journalism, Writing & Publishing from 1983-2021 and was its director three times. He is the co-founder of King’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program and served as one of its cohort directors from its inception. In January 2023, he will become cohort director for the first class of the new Master of Fine Arts in Fiction program.
From: Timothy Bousquet <tim@halifaxexaminer.ca>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 19:27:40 -0300
Subject: Re: 3579
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Hello, I’m taking a much-needed vacation and will not be responding to
email until August 4. If this is urgent Halifax Examiner business,
please email zane@halifaxexaminer.ca.
Thanks,
Tim Bousquet
Editor
Halifax Examiner
On Jul 28, 2020, at 6:48 PM, David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
> BTW I inserted a lot more info in this blog
>
> https://davidraymondamos3.
>
Thursday, 23 July 2020
Independent panel 'a slap in the face,' says daughter of N.S. shooting victim
---------- Original message ----------
From: Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 21:48:08 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: RE The "Strike back: Demand an inquiry
Event." Methinks it interesting that Martha Paynter is supported by
the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation N'esy Pas?
To: david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Thank you very much for reaching out to the Office of the Hon. Bill
Blair, Member of Parliament for Scarborough Southwest.
Please be advised that as a health and safety precaution, our
constituency office will not be holding in-person meetings until
further notice. We will continue to provide service during our regular
office hours, both over the phone and via email.
Due to the high volume of emails and calls we are receiving, our
office prioritizes requests on the basis of urgency and in relation to
our role in serving the constituents of Scarborough Southwest. If you
are not a constituent of Scarborough Southwest, please reach out to
your local of Member of Parliament for assistance. To find your local
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Moreover, at this time, we ask that you please only call our office if
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Should you have any questions related to COVID-19, please see:
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Thank you again for your message, and we will get back to you as soon
as possible.
Best,
MP Staff to the Hon. Bill Blair
Parliament Hill: 613-995-0284
Constituency Office: 416-261-8613
bill.blair@parl.gc.cabill.blair@parl.gc.ca>
**
Merci beaucoup d'avoir pris contact avec le bureau de l'Honorable Bill
Blair, D?put? de Scarborough-Sud-Ouest.
Veuillez noter que par mesure de pr?caution en mati?re de sant? et de
s?curit?, notre bureau de circonscription ne tiendra pas de r?unions
en personne jusqu'? nouvel ordre. Nous continuerons ? fournir des
services pendant nos heures de bureau habituelles, tant par t?l?phone
que par courrier ?lectronique.
En raison du volume ?lev? de courriels que nous recevons, notre bureau
classe les demandes par ordre de priorit? en fonction de leur urgence
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veuillez contacter votre d?put? local pour obtenir de l'aide. Pour
trouver votre d?put? local, visitez le
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En outre, nous vous demandons de ne t?l?phoner ? notre bureau que si
votre cas est extr?mement urgent. Nous recevons un volume d'appels
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Si vous avez des questions concernant COVID-19, veuillez consulter le
site : http://www.canada.ca/le-
Merci encore pour votre message, et nous vous r?pondrons d?s que possible.
Cordialement,
Personnel du D?put? de l'Honorable Bill Blair
Colline du Parlement : 613-995-0284
Bureau de Circonscription : 416-261-8613
bill.blair@parl.gc.cabill.blair@parl.gc.ca>
< mailto:bill.blair@parl.gc.ca>
---------- Original message ----------
From: Finance Minister <FinanceMinister@novascotia.ca>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 21:48:16 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: RE The "Strike back: Demand an inquiry
Event." Methinks it interesting that Martha Paynter is supported by
the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation N'esy Pas?
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Your email has been received by the Office of the NS Minister of
Finance & Treasury Board.
Please be assured that your message will be reviewed and actioned accordingly.
If you are contacting the Honourable Karen Casey as your MLA, please
contact her constituency office at KarenCasey@eastlink.ca or by phone
(902) 641-2200.
Thank you for your patience.
Office of the Minister
NS Department of Finance & Treasury Board
---------- Original message ----------
From: "MinFinance / FinanceMin (FIN)" <fin.minfinance-financemin.
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 21:48:15 +0000
Subject: RE: RE The "Strike back: Demand an inquiry Event." Methinks
it interesting that Martha Paynter is supported by the Pierre Elliott
Trudeau Foundation N'esy Pas?
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
The Department of Finance acknowledges receipt of your electronic
correspondence. Please be assured that we appreciate receiving your
comments.
Due to the evolving COVID-19 situation, we apologize in advance for
any delay in responding to your enquiry. In the meantime, information
on Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan is available on the
Government of Canada website at
www.canada.ca/coronavirus<http
calling 1-800 O Canada (1-800-622-6232) or 1-833-784-4397.
Le ministère des Finances Canada accuse réception de votre courriel.
Nous vous assurons que vos commentaires sont les bienvenus.
En raison de la fluidité de la crise de la COVID-19, il est possible
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Entre-temps, les informations au sujet du Plan d'intervention
économique du Canada pour répondre à la COVID-19 sont disponibles dans
le site Web du gouvernement du Canada au
www.canada.ca/coronavirus<http
composant le
1-800 O Canada (1-800-622-6232) ou le 1-833-784-4397.
---------- Original message ----------
From: "kelly@kellyregan.ca" <kelly@kellyregan.ca>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 23:48:04 +0200
Subject: Auto Reply
To: david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
[This is an auto reply]
Thank you for contacting the constituency office of the Hon. Kelly
Regan, MLA for Bedford. This office is here to assist residents of
the Bedford community. If you are looking to reach the Department of
Community Services, please call 1-877-424-1177.
In order to ensure a proper and timely response to your matter, please
include all necessary contact information in your correspondence,
including your name, address, phone number/e-mail, and the nature of
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This constituency office is a respectful workplace. Please be advised
that we are unable to respond to communications involving profanity,
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discrimination.
Thank you and have a great day.
Traci Sullivan
Constituency Assistant
Office of the Honourable Kelly Regan | MLA, Bedford
902-407-3777 | 902-407-3779 | www.kellyregan.ca | 1550 Bedford
Highway | Suite 555 | Bedford, NS B4A 1E6
---------- Original message ----------
From: Premier <PREMIER@novascotia.ca>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 21:48:14 +0000
Subject: Automatic Reply
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Thank you for your email to Premier McNeil. This is an automatic
confirmation your message has been received.
We recognize that Nova Scotians have concerns about novel coronavirus
(COVID-19). If you are looking for up-to-date information, we
encourage you to visit:
novascotia.ca/coronavirus<http
canada.ca/coronavirus<https://
call the toll-free information line at 1-833-784-4397.
If you are experiencing symptoms, please use the COVID-19 online
self-assessment, which can be found here:
https://when-to-call-about-
On April 18th and 19th, our province experienced an unimaginable
tragedy, in already difficult times.
To share your condolences, please visit StrongerTogetherNS on
Facebook, or by sending them to
condolences@novascotia.cacondolences@novascotia.ca>.
To contribute to the Stronger Together Nova Scotia Fund, created in
partnership with the Canadian Red Cross, visit redcross.ca and search
for the Stronger Together Nova Scotia Fund, or call 1-800-418-1111.
Kind Regards,
Premier’s Correspondence Team
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 18:48:00 -0300
Subject: RE The "Strike back: Demand an inquiry Event." Methinks it
interesting that Martha Paynter is supported by the Pierre Elliott
Trudeau Foundation N'esy Pas?
To: Norman Traversy <traversy.n@gmail.com>, CabalCookies
<cabalcookies@protonmail.com>, El.Jones@msvu.ca,
tim@halifaxexaminer.ca, "steve.murphy" <steve.murphy@ctv.ca>,
kevin.leahy@pps-spp.gc.ca, Charles.Murray@gnb.ca, JUSTWEB
<JUSTWEB@novascotia.ca>, AgentMargaritaville@
"Bill.Blair" <Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca>, "kevin.leahy"
<kevin.leahy@pps-spp.parl.gc.
mlaritcey@bellaliant.com, mla@esmithmccrossinmla.com,
toryrushtonmla@bellaliant.com, kelly@kellyregan.ca,
mla_assistant@alanapaon.com, stephenmcneil@ns.aliantzinc.ca, PREMIER
<PREMIER@gov.ns.ca>, info@hughmackay.ca, pictoueastamanda@gmail.com,
markfurey.mla@eastlink.ca, claudiachendermla@gmail.com,
FinanceMinister@novascotia.ca, "Bill.Morneau" <Bill.Morneau@canada.ca>
Cc: motomaniac333 <motomaniac333@gmail.com>,
kevin.leahy@rcmp-grc.gc.ca, pm <pm@pm.gc.ca>, istayhealthy8@gmail.com,
prmi@eastlink.ca, "PETER.MACKAY" <PETER.MACKAY@bakermckenzie.
"Katie.Telford" <Katie.Telford@pmo-cpm.gc.ca>
BTW I inserted a lot more info in this blog
https://davidraymondamos3.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.
Protesters decry ‘shocking and paternalistic’ decision to hold review,
not inquiry into Nova Scotia mass shooting
July 27, 2020 By Yvette d'Entremont
Gathered at Victoria Park in Halifax at noon Monday for a general
strike intended to draw attention to demands for a public inquiry into
the Nova Scotia mass killing.
The event was slated to run from noon to 12:22, a 22-minute strike to
pay homage to the 22 people whose lives were taken during the weekend
of April 18-19.
“This is something that all sectors of society have asked for,” Martha
Paynter, founder and coordinator of Women’s Wellness Within, told
reporters before the event started.
Her organization works for reproductive justice, prison abolition and
health equity. It was one of several feminist community activist and
advocacy groups behind Monday’s ‘Strike back: Demand an inquiry’
event."
https://marthapaynter.ca/
‘Strike back: Demand an inquiry’ event." is a registered nurse
providing abortion and postpartum care. She is a Doctoral Candidate in
Nursing at Dalhousie University. She is the founder and coordinator of
Women’s Wellness Within, a non-profit organization supporting
criminalized women and transgender/nonbinary individuals in the
perinatal period in carceral institutions and the community. She works
to advance reproductive justice through advocacy, collaboration and
nursing scholarship.
For her nursing advocacy and research, Martha has received numerous
awards including the 2018 Rising Star Award from the Canadian
Association of Perinatal and Women’s Health Nurses, the 2018 Health
Advocacy Award from the Council of the College of Registered Nurses of
Nova Scotia, the 2018 3M National Student Fellowship, and in 2017, the
Senate of Canada Sesquicentennial Medal for volunteer service to the
country.
Martha’s doctoral research is supported by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Foundation, CIHR Banting-Best Canadian Doctoral Scholarship, the
Killam Predoctoral Scholarship, the Canadian Nurses Foundation,
Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre"
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2019 11:29:02 -0400
Subject: Attn El Jones I just called and left a message saying Iiked your style
To: El.Jones@msvu.ca, tim@halifaxexaminer.ca, "steve.murphy"
<steve.murphy@ctv.ca>
Cc: "David.Raymond.Amos" <David.Raymond.Amos@gmail.com>
https://www.halifaxexaminer.
Prisons, Refugees, Cats
August 5, 2018 By El Jones
Martha Paynter was driving through New Brunswick this weekend and
texted me that she saw a billboard for the Airbnb in the old
Dorchester Jail.
Among the attractions listed on the website are that it was the site
of the last double hanging in New Brunswick (more on that in a
moment), with a highlight being that guests can stay in the former
cells.
tim@halifaxexaminer.ca
El Jones - Judges
4 Comments
Canada is So Polite - El Jones
33 Comments
https://www.msvu.ca/en/home/
El Jones appointed Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at the Mount
El’s office is located in the McCain Centre (room 208B). She can be
reached at El.Jones@msvu.ca or 902-457-6257.
Here’s all the Halifax Examiner’s reporting on the mass murders of April 18/19, 2020
April 2020 was a difficult time in Nova Scotia. A strange new virus was loose in the world, and no one knew what would happen. Nova Scotia was under lockdown — restaurants and bars were closed, schools were online, health orders prohibited people from gathering socially, and the disease had entered the Northwood retirement home. People were frightened, uncertain.
And then hell descended on the province.
On Saturday night, April 18, a man went on a rampage in Portapique, a small, idyllic community on the shores of the Minas Basin. He murdered 13 people, injured two more, and burned several homes, including his own.
But the public didn’t learn the extent of the murders until the next day, when the horrific killing spree continued in an unfathomable fashion. The murderer emerged from an overnight hiding spot and — driving a replica RCMP cruiser — created a 100-kilometre trail of death and terror across the province, leaving nine more victims: a couple and their neighbour on Hunter Road, a woman out for her morning walk in Wentworth, two women driving in their cars on Plains Road in Debert, a cop and helpful passerby at the the Shubenacadie cloverleaf, a woman in her house on Highway 224. Finally, the killer himself was killed by police at the Enfield Big Stop.
There were immediately questions: Why wasn’t the public alerted about the danger? How was it possible for the killer to have an exact replica of a police car? Why did two police officers shoot up a volunteer fire hall? Were there warning signs that were ignored? How did the police response go so wrong? And more.
The Halifax Examiner was on the story immediately. Our entire team told the stories of the victims, the background events, the mishaps and mistakes. We’ve been on the story ever since. The Examiner has spent tens of thousands of dollars as part of a coalition of media outlets that has gone to court to get sealed search warrant documents related to the murders released. And we’re now reporting on the public inquiry into the murders and the trove of new documents that are being released.
As an easy reference, all of our reporting is collected below, and will be added to as new articles are published. Below that are Tim Bousquet’s Twitter threads following the proceedings of each day of the Mass Casualty Commission.
We hope you find this reporting valuable — so valuable that you will support it with your subscription to the Examiner. It’s subscribers who make this work possible.
Articles and commentary
166. Will the mass casualty commission report even matter? (July 25, 2022, by Stephen Kimber)
165. What’s the point of the Mass Casualty Commission? (July 21, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
164. The mass murderer was a thief, a drug runner, and a corrupt tax cheat (July 19, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
163. The witchification of Lisa Banfield (July 17, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
162. Lisa Banfield and the search for ‘truth’ (July 17, 2022, by Stephen Kimber)
161. An RCMP officer’s evolving recollection of Brenda Forbes’ complaint about the mass murderer (July 14, 2022, by Joan Baxter)
160. ‘Just complementary and just sweet’: Lisa Banfield’s 19 years of abuse (July 13, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
159. She had a bad date with the future mass murderer, went back to his apartment, and an RCMP officer walked in (July 12, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
158. A month before the mass murders, the perpetrator went to Pictou to kill someone else (July 12, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
157. Brenda Forbes tried to warn neighbours and the RCMP about the “psychopath” in Portapique years before he went on his murderous rampage. No one listened. (July 12, 2022, by Joan Baxter)
156. ‘A greedy, overbearing, little bastard’: the life of a terrible man, from university ‘asshole’ to mass murderer (July 12, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
155. Making a murderer: the multi-generational violence of the mass murderer’s family (July 11, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
154. Are ‘psychological autopsies’ junk science? (Morning File, July 8, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
153. Lisa Banfield is the target of innuendo, misinformation, and lies, much of it couched in misogyny (Morning File, July 4, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
152. Purported letter to RCMP Commissioner Lucki rebuked her for trying to influence messaging after mass murders (June 28, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
151. What the Mounties don’t want you to know? Everything (June 26, 2021, by Stephen Kimber)
150. RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki tried to ‘jeopardize’ mass murder investigation to advance Trudeau’s gun control efforts (June 21, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
149. Masculinity, as defined by a friend of a mass murderer: “Men want art work that’s a picture of a gun enlarged seven feet high” , and The killer’s past as an embalmer (Morning File, June 17, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
148. Two years after Portapique, call-takers and dispatchers are still struggling (June 14, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
147. ‘We really don’t need any more police officers; we really don’t need any more money’ (Morning File, June 10, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
146. 27 minutes: the RCMP’s communications division hesitated when the public most needed to be warned about the mass murderer (June 9, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
145. Missed communications among Communications personnel led to failure to alert public to the killer’s fake police car (June 7, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
144. How the mass murderer leisurely drove through the main streets of Truro without being stopped by police (June 6, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
143. Mass Casualty Commissioners considering request to allow direct cross-examination by victims’ lawyers (June 4, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
142. The parallels between the Norwegian and Nova Scotian mass murders: how commanders responded to unfolding events (June 2, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
141. Cpl. Rodney Peterson is “not tactically sound” and “puts us at risk” says fellow cop Nick Dorrington (Morning File, May 30, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
140. The Mass Casualty Commission and the Catch-22 of witness ‘accommodation’ (May 29, 2022, by Stephen Kimber)
139. Bodies of five murder victims weren’t discovered by the RCMP for more than 18 hours after they were killed (May 29, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
138. How RCMP commanders’ bumbling response to Portapique allowed the killer to continue his murder spree (May 27, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
137. “I have to live with that, and I’ve lived with that for two-plus years”: emotional testimony about RCMP mistakes during the mass murders (May 26, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
136. Victims’ families: ‘trauma informed’ inquiry has ‘further traumatized’ us (May 25, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
135. The clock is ticking down on the mass casualty commission (May 22, 2022, by Stephen Kimber)
134. RCMP Chief Supt. Chris Leather is being investigated concerning decision to not alert the public about the mass murderer’s fake police car (May 17, 2022,by Jennifer Henderson
133. There’s no meaning in mass murder (Morning File, May 16, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
132. Tech issues bedevilled the RCMP response to the mass murders of 2020 (May 16, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
131. After the mass murders of April 2020, Truro police chief Dave MacNeil stood up to RCMP “fixers” (Morning File, May 13, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
130. RCMP officers privately warned their loved ones that a killer was on the loose, but didn’t warn the broader public (May 12, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
129. Years before the mass murders of April 2020, police were offered access to the province’s emergency alert system but turned it down (May 10, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
128. ‘Frantic panic’: it was the RCMP, and not the public, who panicked during the mass murders (Morning File, May 9, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
127. Two cops who attended to the shooting of Heather O’Brien contradict each other (Morning File, May 6, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
126. Yesterday, the Mass Casualty Commission made public two statements James Banfield gave to police (News items #2 and 3, Morning File, April 29, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
125. The RCMP didn’t tell the public about the mass murderer’s fake police car because they didn’t want to create a ‘frantic panic’ (April 27, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
124. Lisa McCully was ‘creeped out’ by a neighbour in Portapique; then he killed her (April 27, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
123. “I didn’t know he was the devil”: women recall their experiences with the mass murderer (April 25, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
122. It’s been 2 years since the mass murders, and we still haven’t collectively mourned (Morning File, April 19, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
121. As and after Gina Goulet was murdered, RCMP made repeated mistakes pursuing the killer (April 13, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson and Tim Bousquet)
120. Cst. Heidi Stevenson wanted the public to be warned about the killer driving a fake police car; RCMP higher-ups said no (April 11, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
119. Dave Westlake doesn’t have malice towards the two RCMP cops who shot at him, but he wonders how they missed (April 11, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
118. Relying on junk science, the RCMP made a terrible decision during the mass murders (Morning File, April 8, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
117. Here’s how Cst. Craig Hubley killed the mass murderer (April 5, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
116. Nick Beaton has every right to be angry, but… (April 4, 2022, by Stephen Kimber)
115. A Tragedy of Errors: how RCMP mistakes, missteps, and miscommunications failed to contain a mass murderer (April 3, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
114. “I’m going to blow his fucking head off”: A Glenholme couple’s close call with a mass murderer (March 31, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
A memorial for Alanna Jenkins, Sean McLeod, and Tom Bagley on Hunter Road. Photo: Joan Baxter.
113. The RCMP didn’t warn the public a mass murderer was on the loose, but people on Hunter Road figured it out themselves (March 30, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
112. First 3 cops at Portapique testify at public inquiry (March 28, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
111. Cheating and beating: the tragic lead-up to the Portapique massacre (March 22, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
110. “If he had come to my house that night in a police car, I would have opened my door and welcomed him in, and I would probably have been dead” (March 14, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
109. “I wasn’t surprised,” said Chris Wortman after his nephew killed 22 people (March 11, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
108. Lisa Banfield and cops who responded to Portapique will testify under oath at the mass murder inquiry (March 10, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
107. Two kids were hanging out, listening to music, when they saw the man who had just killed 13 people in Portapique (March 9, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
106. ‘A couple of glasses of wine,’ poor communications, and indecision about alerting the public were factors in RCMP command decisions after Portapique shootings (March 8, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
105. Inquiry documents detail shoot-up of Onslow Fire Hall (March 4, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
104. The mass murder inquiry has a crisis of legitimacy (Morning File, March 4, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
The Elks Lodge in Houlton, Maine. Photo: Tim Bousquet
103. The Maine connection: the Houlton Elks Lodge, the call that precipitated the murder spree, and how the killer obtained his guns (March 4, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
102. Mass murder inquiry: here’s what the victims’ families want to question cops about (March 3, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
101. “I don’t know who has command”: RCMP confusion on the ground in Portapique (March 1, 2022, by Jennifer Henderson)
100. Night of Hell: here’s what happened in Portapique on April 18, 2020 (February 28, 2022, by Tim Bousquet and Jennifer Henderson)
99. The first day of the mass murder inquiry was dominated by a condescending and offensive panel on mental health (February 23, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
98. The inquiry into the Nova Scotia mass murders begins today; here are some of the questions we have (February 22, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
97. Families’ statement (February 16, 2022, by Tim Bousquet)
96. Mass Casualty Commission’s public hearings are moved back four months (October 14, 2021, by Jennifer Henderson)
95. Mass Casualty Commission’s recommendations will not be binding on government (October 4, 2021, by Jennifer Henderson)
94. Lisa Banfield wants part of mass murderer’s estate (September 28, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
93. “An apology would be nice and I would like to know what happened”: people suffering from the Nova Scotia mass murders speak to commission (September 27, 2021, by Jennifer Henderson)
92. Mass Casualty Commission schedules Open Houses for public input (September 10, 2021, by Jennifer Henderson)
91. Mass murderer intended to kill five more people, says RCMP (June 17, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
90. Lawsuit alleges police failures during Nova Scotia’s mass murder (June 17, 2021, by Jennifer Henderson)
89. “People grieve differently:” How Nova Scotians remember (Morning File, April 19, 2021, by Suzanne Rent)
88. A “Conversation About Femicide” connects domestic violence to mass murders (April 16, 2021, by Yvette d’Entremont)
87. Killer’s spouse says she hid in a tree cavity the night of the mass murder (March 9, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
86. SIRT says ballistics report confirmed officers fired just five shots outside Onslow Fire Hall (March 3, 2021, by Jennifer Henderson)
85. The cops who shot up the Onslow Fire Hall committed no crime, rules SIRT (March 3, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
84. New details emerge on what happened just prior to the mass murderer’s rampage (Morning File, February 12, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
The Portapique sign on Highway 2 was adorned with a NS tartan sash following the mass shooting that began there on April 18, 2020. Photo: Joan Baxter
83. Lisa Banfield seeks to keep court records sealed (Morning File, February 9, 2021, item by Tim Bousquet)
82. It sure feels like a whole lot of nothing is happening with the mass murder inquiry and investigation (Morning File, January 25, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
81. Three times in the last year, violent men have been driving look-alike police cars (Morning File, January 22, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
80. After the Nova Scotia mass murderer bought property on Portland Street, the houses next door burned down (December 28, 2020, by Zane Woodford)
79. Police found $705,000 in cash at killer’s property in Portapique (December 16, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
78. Mark Furey isn’t in a conflict, Donald Trump won by a landslide, and other tales from the alternate universe (December 13, 2020, by Stephen Kimber)
77. The RCMP repeatedly shows a reckless disregard for public safety (Morning File, December 11, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
76. New information is revealed about the weapons used by the mass murderer, and it appears he was heading to the city to kill someone else (December 9, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
75. Commonlaw spouse of killer, and two others, charged with supplying ammo used in mass murders (December 4, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
74. 3 big stories the Examiner is covering extensively: the pandemic, the mass murders, and the lobster fishery (Morning File, November 24, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
Portapique Church Hall. Photo: Joan Baxter
73. In the hours after the mass murders, someone gave “erroneous” information to police (November 16, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
72. Reports from inquiry into Nova Scotia mass shooting due in 2022, third commissioner announced (October 22, 2020, by Zane Woodford)
71. We “drove the back roads”: On Saturday, April 18, the mass murderer and his common-law spouse travelled around the province, looking at various locations. Just hours later, those sites were associated with the murderer’s rampage.” (September 23, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
70. Financial expert: newly released documents show mass murderer was not an RCMP informant (September 21, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
69. Tim Houston says Mark Furey has a conflict of interest in the mass murder inquiry (September 10, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
68. What does it mean to be “Nova Scotia Strong”? (September 9, 2020, by Philip Moscovitch)
67. The mass murderer’s connection to a drug dealer (August 21, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
66. The RCMP kept secret information any TV watcher could’ve predicted (August 13, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
65. February 12 was a strange day for the man who two months later would murder 22 people (August 10, 2020, by Paul Palango)
64. Michael Bryant has deleted his dickish tweet about Atlantic Canada and replaced it with a dickish apology (Morning File, August 6, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
63. The RCMP’s statement about the mass murder investigation is an exercise in obfuscation (August 4, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
62. Nova Scotia RCMP release long statement denying mass shooting details unsealed this week (July 30, 2020, by Zane Woodford)
61. Celebrating the inquiry: ‘This was because of the families, our determination, our drive, and the Nova Scotians, the Bluenosers’ (July 29, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
60. Federal and provincial governments to hold public inquiry into Nova Scotia mass shootings (July 28, 2020, by Zane Woodford and Yvette d’Entremont)
59. Witness told police that mass murderer “builds fires and burns bodies, is a sexual predator, and supplies drugs in Portapique and Economy” (July 27, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
58. Protesters decry ‘shocking and paternalistic’ decision to hold review, not inquiry into Nova Scotia mass shooting (July 27, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
57. Portapique: how to (maybe) turn a rickety review into a transparent public inquiry (July 26, 2020, by Stephen Kimber)
56. Public anger mounts at decision not to hold a full public inquiry into the April mass murders (July 24, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
55. Not having a public inquiry into the mass murders is a disservice to victims’ families, the public, and common sense (Morning File, July 24, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
54. “No public inquiry into mass murders: ‘They keep saying they don’t want to dig stuff up and hurt the families more than they have already been hurt. But a public inquiry is the one and only thing we are asking for and I think we deserve that.’” (July 23, 2020, by Tim Bousquet, Yvette d’Entremont, and Jennifer Henderson)
Family and friends of the 22 victims killed during April’s mass shooting held a peaceful march in Bible Hill on Wednesday morning to draw attention to their demands for a public inquiry. Photo: Yvette d’Entremont
53. 300 family members and friends of mass murder victims march and demand public inquiry (July 22, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
52. “An epic failure”: The first duty of police is to preserve life; through the Nova Scotia massacre, the RCMP saved no one (July 18, 2020, by Paul Palango)
51. Shelter workers also call for public inquiry into mass murder (July 16, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
50. Son of mass murder victim calls for public inquiry (July 16, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
49. Petition calls for mass murder inquiry with “feminist lens” (July 14, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
48. Why we need a full public inquiry into the Nova Scotia massacre (July 13, 2020, by Paul Palango)
47. Bill Casey: the RCMP is “more interested in real estate than public safety” (July 7, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
46. From cop to survivor: Cary Ryan is a survivor of domestic abuse. She’s also a former cop who says she was harassed in the workplace because of her mental illness. Now, she studies how cops respond to domestic violence. (July 7, 2020, by Suzanne Rent)
45. Cabinet roundup: Northwood review, mass shooting inquiry, schools, Liscombe Lodge, and Northern Pulp (July 3, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
44. “Body parts still in the automobile” of mass murder victim when RCMP released the car to the victim’s family, claims lawsuit (June 17, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
43. “A political act of opportunism”: Conservatives go hard right on gun laws (June 17, 2020, by Joan Baxter)
A poster at the roadside memorial in Portapique commemorates the 22 people killed in the mass shooting that began there on April 18, 2020. Photo: Joan Baxter
42. Nova Scotians to determine questions and guide research into mass shooting: New program aims to ‘find answers and healing’ in the aftermath of tragedy by seeking community input” (June 16, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
41. Mass murderer left a will directing that his remains be placed in the Portapique Cemetery (June 12, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
40. Portapique Cemetery: we won’t accept the body of the mass murderer (June 12, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
39. Bill Casey: the shooting of the Onslow fire hall reflects a broader RCMP communications failure (June 9, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
38. Gunning for change: doctors in the gun control debate in Canada (June 8, 2020, by Joan Baxter)
37. Colchester councillor: change in RCMP policing model left information gap on shooter (June 5, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson and Joan Baxter)
36. RCMP Rural Policing: Strangers in a Hurry, Policing Strangers (June 5, 2020, by Chris Murphy)
35. Inquiry into mass shooting will be announced soon (June 5, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
34. Mass shooting lawsuit amended; victims’ families call for public inquiry (June 2, 2020, by Jennifer Henderson)
33. Nova Scotia massacre: Did the RCMP “risk it out” one time too many? (May 30, 2020, by Paul Palango)
32. RCMP’s rural policing is an ongoing disaster, say Colchester County councillors (May 28, 2020 by Paul Palango)
31. Opposition critics on the Advisory Council on the Status of Women call for an inquiry into mass murder, but McNeil government demurs (May 27, 2020, by Joan Baxter and Jennifer Henderson)
30. Premier McNeil: A message from my grandmother about the RCMP (May 27, 2020, by Paul Palango)
29. Here’s what the RCMP doesn’t want you to know about the mass murder investigation (May 25, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
28. Mark Furey and the RCMP’s secret army of Smurfs (May 25, 2020, by Paul Palango)
27. Dear Mr. Premier: I know you’re busy but… (May 24, 2020, by Stephen Kimber)
26. Cracks are forming in the RCMP cone of silence (May 21, 2020, by Paul Palango)
25. This is why the Halifax Examiner keeps going to court (May 20, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
The fake police car. Photo: Mass Casualty Commission
24. Court document provides new info on mass murder (May 19, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
23. Lots of people knew about the mass murderer’s destructive behaviour, and did nothing (May 19, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
22. “Canada is an ‘after-the-fact country’: Could a red flag law have helped prevent the mass shootings in Nova Scotia or help reduce gun violence in Canada? Or do such laws give cover to the failure of policing agencies to act under the authority they already have?” (May 18, 2020, by Joan Baxter)
21. “He was a psychopath”: A former resident of Portapique says she called the RCMP to tell them the future gunman assaulted his domestic partner and that he had illegal weapons. The police took no action.” (May 12, 2020, by Joan Baxter)
20. Trigger Warning: The ban on assault-style weapons comes in the wake of the Nova Scotia shootings, but it is just one cautious step in a decades-long debate over gun control (May 8, 2020, by Joan Baxter)
19. Source: Halifax police held back response to mass murderer (May 4, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
18. The mass murder isn’t “senseless” in a culture that excuses the violence of white men (May 1, 2020, by El Jones)
17. There’s free psychological help for people in distress about the mass murders (April 28, 2020, by Yvette d’Entremont)
16. Murderer escaped Portapique within 10 minutes of police arriving (April 28, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
15. What to do if you think you’re being stopped by a fake cop (Morning File, April 27, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
Emily Tuck playing her fiddle for the Nova Scotia Kitchen Party for COVID-19. Screenshot from Facebook video.
14. “There’s some fiddle for ya”: A Portapique love story (April 26, 2020 by Tim Bousquet)
13. Male violence: “A pandemic in its own right” (April 26, 2020, by Suzanne Rent)
12. Portapique tragedy: We need a full public inquiry (April 26, 2020, by Stephen Kimber)
11. A memorial trail of grief and love: Nova Scotians mourn the victims of last week’s tragedy (April 26, 2020, by Joan Baxter)
Photo: Joan Baxter.
10. The killer was on Hunter Road for nearly three hours (April 25, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
9. 13 hours of terror: tracking a mass murderer’s rampage through Nova Scotia (April 25, 2020, by Erica Butler, Tim Bousquet, Jennifer Henderson, Joan Baxter, and Yvette d’Entremont)
8. How to heal with furry companions: Like humans, pets can experience trauma and grief, but they and their owners can recover together. (April 23, 2020, by Suzanne Rent)
7. The anatomy of failure: How and why the emergency alert system was not activated when a mass murderer was roaming around Nova Scotia (April 22, 2020, by Tim Bousquet, Jennifer Henderson, Joan Baxter, and Yvette d’Entremont)
6. These are the 22 people murdered in Nova Scotia on April 18-19, 2020 (April 22, 2020 by Erica Butler, Joan Baxter, Jennifer Henderson, Tim Bousquet, Philip Moscovitch, Yvette d’Entremont, Linda Pannozzo, and El Jones)
5. “There’s a person down there with a gun”: first responder audio from the beginning of the murder spree (April 22, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
4. There are 22 victims in the weekend murder spree (April 21, 2021, by Tim Bousquet)
3. A time for grief (April 21, 2021, by Yvette d’Entremont)
2. RCMP investigator: There are “in excess of 19 victims” in Nova Scotia’s mass murder rampage (April 20, by Tim Bousquet)
1. Too much pain: Here are 15 victims in yesterday’s mass killing (Morning File, April 20, 2020, by Tim Bousquet)
Twitter threads
• June 7, 2022 — presentation of “RCMP Public Communications“; witnesses Cpl. Jennifer Clarke, Glenn Mason, Superintendent Dustine Rodier
• June 6, 2022 — presentation of “Truro Police Services – April 19, 2020“; witness Chief Dave MacNeil
• May 31, 2022 — witness Sergeant Andy O’Brien
• May 30, 2022 — witness Staff Sergeant Brian Rehill
About Tim Bousquet
Were Nova Scotia Mounties right to refuse to identify the mass killer’s weapons?
Did the RCMP commissioner attempt to unduly interfere in a police investigation? Or did local Mounties try to unduly control the narrative? Those are the questions at the heart of recent parliamentary hearings. They're also the subject of this week's column.
The Portapique sign on Highway 2 was adorned with a NS tartan sash following the mass shooting that began there on April 18, 2020. Photo: Joan Baxter
The gunman in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history bought two AR-style rifles legally just after his 18th birthday — days before his assault on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
—Texas Tribune
May 25, 2022
It is worth noting that this news report — which not only identified the weapons (two AR platform rifles) used in this spring’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, but also detailed where and when and how the gunman purchased them — was published less than 24 hours after the shooting.
We’ll come back to that.
Our question for today is about another mass shooting — the horrific murder of 22 people in Nova Scotia in April 2020 — and the ongoing controversy over whether publicly identifying the weapons the gunman used could have compromised police investigations.
You know the controversy I mean, the dispute over what was said — and what was meant — during an April 28 conference call among senior Mounties. The participants included national RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki, Nova Scotia chief superintendents Chris Leather and Darren Campbell, and then-director of H-Division’s strategic communications unit Lia Scanlan.
Although he wasn’t a participant on the call himself, then-federal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair was a significant focus of the others’ conversation.
One of the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission’s foundational documents details what transpired during the meeting and quotes from Campbell’s handwritten notes about his version of what went down.
Campbell claimed Lucki told the Nova Scotia Mounties she had “promised” Blair, the Minister of Public Safety, and the Prime Minister’s Office that the RCMP would release information about the weapons used in the shooting.
When Campbell argued that publicizing such information could jeopardize the still ongoing investigation by the RCMP and United States law enforcement, he says Lucki told him: “We [the Nova Scotia RCMP] didn’t understand that this was tied to pending gun control legislation that would make officers and public safer by or through this legislation.”
The fact that the justice department did not provide the Mass Casualty Commission with Campbell’s notes — which essentially accused the commissioner of pressuring her underlings to publicly disclose compromising information about the killer’s weapons — until two and a half months after other requested documents naturally raised legitimate alarms on the opposition benches in Ottawa. (Why that happened is another subject for another day.)
The House of Commons’ Public Safety Committee has been holding hearings this summer to try to determine if what Lucki said during the call constituted political interference in the police investigation.
Last week, the committee heard from some of the Nova Scotia-based participants in the meeting.
Let’s dig deeper.
The conference call happened 10 days after the shootings. The Mounties were already facing public scrutiny over their abysmal communications failures in the first days following the tragedy.
During the conference call, Lucki, the country’s top Mountie, “expressed disappointment in the press briefings carried out by the Nova Scotia RCMP.”
We know from the foundational documents and testimony at the Mass Casualty Commission some of what had been happening behind the scenes that provoked her “disappointment.”
Even though senior Mounties knew at the time of their first press conference the day after the shooting spree began that the gunman had killed at least 17 people, Leather and Scanlan deliberately decided to use the number 10 instead.
The following day, Leather — despite being aware one of the victims was a teenager — told reporters the victims were all adults.
While the local Mountie brass was doing its best to obfuscate and confuse, Commissioner Lucki granted interviews to media outlets, telling them the actual numbers she’d learned from the on-the-ground Mounties in Nova Scotia. (I don’t want to make it sound as if Lucki was the white hat here; there were enough black hats to go around, but at least, in this one instance, she opted for transparency.)
Scanlan was not amused. Soon after media outlets began reporting Lucki’s actual numbers, she fired off a frustrated email to members of the RCMP’s national communications team:
Can I make a request that we stop changing numbers on victims? Please allow us to lead the release of information. It looks fragmented and inconsistent. The release of 10 was decided upon for good reason… We knew at the time of the press event that it was more than 10 but that is what we came to ground on for the event.
To be clear, the “good reason” was for her team’s convenience. It had nothing to do with the facts or the public interest in them. “I’ve had to ask my entire team to turn their phones off,” she complained after reporters began pressing for the latest actual known death count.
Over the next week, local Mounties continued to do their best not to say anything about anything, including refusing to answer reporters’ questions about the weapons the killer used.
During a press briefing the same day as the conference call, Campbell repeatedly deflected questions concerning specifics about the weapons the killer had in his possession. That information, he told one reporter, is “part of the active and ongoing investigation and it’s a piece that right now, unfortunately, I can’t share with you.”
We’ll come back to that justification.
According to Campbell’s notes, Lucki believed the Nova Scotia RCMP had disobeyed her instructions to make public specific information on the firearms used by the killer — and made her anger plain to those on the call.
Lea Scanlan — she of the 10-is-as-good-as-17 school of public communications — not only backed up Campbell’s version before the parliamentary committee but she also wrote her own letter to the commissioner, calling Lucki’s behaviour during the meeting “appalling, inappropriate, unprofessional and extremely belittling.”
Although Lucki herself conceded to the committee her frustrations with the local Mounties, she insisted: “I did not interfere in the investigation around this tragedy, nor did I experience political interference. Specifically, I was not directed to publicly release information about weapons used by the perpetrator to help advance pending gun-control legislation.”
Blair, appearing before the committee, also denied he or Mr. Trudeau ever put any undue pressure on Commissioner Lucki.
Two sets of witnesses, two versions of reality…
“Somebody’s not telling the truth,” declared Conservative MP Stephen Ellis, who represents the riding where the mass shootings began. “And that is very, very disappointing to me and I think it’s very disappointing to Canadians.”
Let’s stop there.
Is it possible everyone is telling the truth as they understood it at the time?
The Liberal government was days away from introducing new gun control legislation intended to ban 1,500 models of assault-style firearms.
It would make sense for the government to ask the RCMP commissioner which weapons were used by the shooter in what was being described as the worst mass shooting in Canadian history (not correctly, as it ignores the large number of native people who have been shot dead through Canadian history).
If those weapons were among those being banned by the government, it bolstered the argument for the new legislation. Using facts to bolster a public policy argument, by the way, is hardly nefarious.
If the weapons were not among those banned, should they have been included? Was it too late to add them?
It would make sense for the government to ask Lucki about the weapons and for her to ask for that information from investigators.
Despite requests from on-the-ground Mounties that she not share information about the weapons with anyone, Commissioner Lucki did inform Blair’s office. He is, after all, her boss. But the information came with a stern caveat: “Please do not disseminate further. Do not share this information past the minister and the PM as it is directly related to this active investigation.”
The evidence is that — despite their eagerness to include details about the weapons as part of the announcement of the bans — neither Blair nor the prime minister made the information public. We didn’t learn what weapons were involved in the shooting, in fact, until seven months later when the National Post used access to information laws to obtain a copy of a briefing report prepared for Trudeau.
So, while the government may have — legitimately — wanted to use information about the weapons as part of the rollout of new legislation, it didn’t.
The Nova Scotia Mounties may indeed have felt pressure from the commissioner to publicly release information about the weapons. Despite that, they maintained their investigative independence and did not do as she’d asked. They also did not — so far as we know — suffer undue consequences for not following orders they believed compromised their investigation.
This brings us to that other, larger question.
Would disclosing information about the weapons the killer used really have jeopardized the ongoing investigation? Or was that — like so much of the Mounties’ behaviour in the aftermath of the shooting — merely part of a rote, routine effort to control the narrative?
“When the shooter is identified,” A.J. Somerset, the author of Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun, a 2015 book on the gun culture, told Canadian Press, “then anybody who had any information about how those guns were obtained would immediately want to avoid talking to police. I don’t see how the identification of the weapons actually leads to that person becoming aware of something they weren’t already aware of.” [my italics]
The name of the gunman had been broadcast nationally and internationally after the RCMP itself tweeted his identity well before the first press conference.
In the US, where mass shootings are common, identifying weapons used by shooters is usually one of the first pieces of information we learn.
But the fact is that Canadian police did not always jealously guard such information either. When a man murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique on December 6, 1989, for example, the public was quickly informed that the weapon he used was a Ruger Mini-14, which, it turned out, was also one of the weapons of choice for Nova Scotia’s mass killer.
Blake Brown, a Saint Mary’s University history professor and author of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada, told CP’s Michael MacDonald, “I don’t understand why that information can’t be released faster by police. One of the themes of the Mass Casualty Commission has been highlighting the tendency of the RCMP to hand out very little information and to treat the public like they don’t need to know much.”
Treat-the-public-like-they-don’t-need-to-know-much…
That is exactly the problem.
Will the mass casualty commission report even matter?
Last week, Examiner editor Tim Bousquet asked 'What's the point of the Mass Casualty Commission?' In his column today, Stephen Kimber offers a (slightly) more hopeful take. He says it's too soon to know.
The Mass Casualty Commission, with (left to right) commissioners Leanne Fitch, Michael MacDonald, and Kim Stanton, in February 2022. Pool photo by Andrew Vaughan/ Canadian Press
So… is it already too late for the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report to matter?
Was its credibility irreparably shredded even before it began, thanks to the circumstances of its unwanted-by-governments birth? By its ever-escalating costs? By the encyclopedic weight of its mandate? By its slowness in beginning its public hearings? By its overly trauma-informed interpretation of how it should go about its business? By its seemingly restrictive rules around questioning important witnesses? By endless, earnest research reports, expert opinions, round-table discussions and panels delving into broader social issues like domestic violence that few seemed to pay attention to and even fewer believed the commission’s consideration would improve? By the by-now inevitable cover-up conspiracy theories that have dogged its every decision? By an unrealistic, too tight deadline to complete its work.
My own answer to my first question is that we don’t simply know. Not yet.
Let’s circle back to those other issues.
The public inquiry into the horrific mass murders of April 2020 did not get off to an auspicious start. Neither Ottawa nor the provincial government wanted one. Instead, they announced a review they could limit and control.
The families of the victims rightly pushed back, the governments eventually backed down and created a public inquiry with a broad mandate and a restricted timeline.
The families’ success in forcing governments to change their minds gave some among them a sense of empowerment and entitlement. They felt they now had the right to direct the process.
But the inquiry’s broad mandate (“causes, context and circumstances”) meant that this was never just about them or the deaths of their individual loved ones. Intimate partner violence, family violence, gun regulations, police responses, public alert systems…
At the same time, the inquiry’s restricted timeline — its work is supposed to be done and dusted by November 1, less than two years after it began — created an impossible burden for the commission.
Oh, and then there was COVID. The mass shooting happened early in the pandemic and the inquiry’s work was inevitably slowed and hampered by its ongoing impact.
Oh, and then there was its trauma-informed mandate. That’s a reflection — for good and ill — of the times in which we live. But the commissioners’ understandable desire not to retraumatize families already traumatized by the events of April 2020 quickly smacked up against the reality that many of those same families felt they were being more re-traumatized by the commissioners’ attempts to protect them.
Instead, the main beneficiaries of the commission’s trauma-informed approach seem to be some RCMP officers whose union and lawyers asked for special treatment for them.
It’s worth noting that only six witnesses asked for accommodation to testify. One was denied outright, two were allowed to testify as a panel and three were granted various other levels of accommodation.
So far as we know, none of the Mounties’ most senior officers — the ultimate decision-makers — have been excused or will be accommodated. Darren Campbell and C/Supt. Chris Leather will testify for two days each this week. In late August, Lee Bergerman and Brenda Lucki are scheduled to appear
That said, the inquiry’s timeline means not every question will ultimately be resolved by testimony and/or cross-examination.
Let’s consider two examples.
Two on-the-ground RCMP officers provided investigators with different accounts of what they did in the first seven minutes after they arrived at the scene where Heather O’Brien had just been shot by the killer.
Their memories of which one did what when in those chaotic minutes differ. Each remembers being the one to open O’Brien’s car door, check her pulse and believe — briefly — that she might be alive.
What appeared to make that discrepancy significant was the fact that O’Brien’s family later said they had data indicating her FitBit continued to show a pulse hours later.
Did the police leave her to die?
The commission didn’t call either officer to provide public testimony. Why not?
Well, consider their full statements to investigators and then fast forward to how those first six minutes ended.
One officer, a trained medic, who initially said he’d thought he’d detected a pulse with his thumb had called for a LifeFlight air ambulance.
His partner, also a trained medic, wasn’t so sure. Given the gravity of her injuries, he wondered if what his partner had felt was the result of his own adrenaline, or perhaps the result of hopeful tunnel vision.
He suggested they perform “a systematic parallel check of the pulse at her carotid, brachial, and femoral arteries for 10 to 15 seconds each. They did not detect a pulse. Cpl. Ivany then conducted a pupil check with his flashlight and found them unresponsive. Due to these findings, and the severity of her injuries, he determined that Ms. O’Brien was deceased.”
The commission did call the chief medical examiner, who ultimately conducted the autopsy on O’Brien, as a witness. His expert testimony — based on 16 years’ experience — was that her death had been instantaneous or had occurred within minutes.
The unscientific FitBit data didn’t change his view.
He was, it should be noted, cross-examined.
The other example involves retired RCMP constable Troy Maxwell, who responded to a 2013 complaint from Brenda Forbes about GW, the man who would become the mass killer.
We have testimony from Forbes, that the complaint involved an alleged domestic assault by the killer on Lisa Banfield, his common-law spouse.
Maxwell denied that to investigators. He claimed the complaint had been about the killer driving dangerously on local roads in a replica Mountie car.
In her own testimony, Banfield not only confirmed the assault happened as Forbes had described but also testified that the killer didn’t own a replica RCMP car until six years later.
That’s a significantly different version of events. And it’s important because it raises questions about how seriously the Mounties took allegations of domestic abuss, including, in particular, by GW himself.
Maxwell was called to testify. He stuck to his original story, but during cross-examination by one of the lawyers for the families — yes, they were able to ask questions — he offered a telling explanation of why he hadn’t bothered to seek statements from those whose names he wrote down, including Banfield’s, before closing the file.
“We don’t have the ability to sit around and say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to spend an hour on this,’” he testified.
We don’t know what the commissioners will make of Maxwell’s testimony — or, really, anything else they’ve heard. Other than emphasizing that the inquiry is trauma-informed, they haven’t said much.
They will have plenty to consider. There are now more than 60 so-called foundational documents, supplementary reports and policy documents, deep dives into everything from minute-by-minute accounts of what happened when during the killer’s rampage, to his family and personal history of violence, to his financial misdealings. Those documents include cross-referenced investigator interviews, statements, audio recordings, photos, transcripts of police calls, etc.
And all are available to anyone with just a few mouse clicks. They’re worth a read.
Despite suggestions from some critics that the commission was created to exonerate the RCMP, those documents paint a damning picture of police incompetence and failure at every level.
The commissioners will have all of that to consider.
Plus, there are close to 20 more research and technical reports on everything from “Communications Interoperability and the Alert Ready System,” to “Crime Prevention and Community Safety in Rural Communities,” to “Police and First Responder Decision-making During Mass Casualty Events.”
Not to forget the transcripts of all the roundtables and panels that have occupied the commissioners’ attention during the public hearings.
Does any of that matter?
In Thursday’s Morning File, my colleague, a frustrated Tim Bousquet, who has probably spent more time and energy covering this story than almost any other journalist, asked “What’s the point?”
For sure, the inquiry has helped us understand what happened before and during the murders of April 18 and 19, 2020. There is a veritable treasure trove of documentation released, the likes of which I’ve never seen publicly available before.
And the inquiry is at least raising important questions about the “why?” of it all, questioning that looks at issues of policing, emergency responses, care for first responders, how next-of-kin notifications work, intimate partner violence, political and bureaucratic intervention in police operations, and more.
In November, the three commissioners will release their final report, including a long list of recommendations. I have no doubt the recommendations will be thoughtful, and also that they will mostly be ignored.
He may be right.
But he may not be.
Many people, including some critics of the current commission, consider the 1990 Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution to be the “gold standard” for such inquiries.
We tend to remember its key factual finding — that Marshall, who’d spent more than a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, was failed by the criminal justice system…
at virtually every turn, from his arrest and wrongful conviction for murder in 1971 up to, and even beyond, his acquittal by the Court of Appeal in 1983. The tragedy of the failure is compounded by evidence that this miscarriage of justice could — and should — have been prevented, or at least corrected quickly, if those involved in the system had carried out their duties in a professional and/or competent manner. That they did not is due, in part at least, to the fact that Donald Marshall, Jr. is a Native.
But, as the commission itself pointed out a few paragraphs later, its role was not…
just to determine whether one individual was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, or even to get to the bottom of how and why that miscarriage occurred. The Nova Scotia Government, which appointed this Royal Commission on October 28, 1986, also asked us to “make recommendations” to help prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.
The commission’s final report, which ran to seven volumes, included research studies that — like the various research reports and roundtables of the current mass casualty commission — were largely ignored by the media and the public as they unfolded. But they helped shape the most far-reaching of the report’s 82 recommendations.
These covered legal procedures for righting wrongful convictions, as well as new criminal justice system policies regarding visible minorities, and police. They recommended, for example, that the Crown make full and timely disclosure to the defence of all relevant information. The commission also recommended that public provincial prosecutors remain totally independent from any political interference. These prosecutors, argued the commission, should be answerable only to a province’s legislature, not the attorney general. In the case of federal prosecutors, they are answerable to Canada’s Parliament…
The Marshall Inquiry’s recommendations led to the creation of the first independent public prosecution service in Canada. As well, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society established its first race relations committee. The inquiry and its recommendations helped bring more inclusion and diversity to Nova Scotia’s and Canada’s law schools and public service.
No one will pretend the Marshall report ended racism in the criminal justice system in Nova Scotia, or that all its recommendations were implemented.
As Michelle Williams, the then-chair of the Dal Law School’s Indigenous Blacks a& Mi’kmaq program — itself a result of the report — told a 2018 panel on the report’s impact: “Many of the Marshall Commission’s recommendations have yet to be implemented… There are no specific restorative justice programs. Black and Indigenous peoples are still overrepresented in the criminal justice system.”
Still… I think it’s fair to say the Marshall commission not only led to some significant positive changes but also changed the conversation around race in Nova Scotia.
Can the Mass Casualty Commission do the same for issues around gun violence and gender-based violence?
I don’t know.
It will depend.
On the report that the commissioners write.
On the willingness of governments to address the recommendations.
And on our own individual and collective commitment as citizens to push for change.
I live in hope.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/lisa-banfield-and-the-search-for-truth/
Lisa Banfield and the search for ‘truth’
Cross-examination isn't the only valid — or always best — truth-seeking method for testing evidence. And, in light of last week's controversy over Lisa Banfield's appearance before the Mass Casualty Commission, it's worth asking whether truth was all that was being sought.
Well, yes but no.
The notion that cross-examination is the only valid — or always best — truth-seeking method of testing evidence may fly in a first-week, first-year law class, but anyone who has spent any time in a courtroom knows that truth is, at best, an occasional by-product of cross-examination.
In the real world, cross-examination is mostly about undermining the credibility of the other side’s witnesses, about establishing a narrative that supports the interests of the lawyer’s client.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it can be.
Consider just one high-profile Nova Scotia court case I covered and which the chief commissioner of this inquiry, Michael MacDonald, presided over.
Former Nova Scotia Premier Gerald Regan had been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than three dozen women. The most serious allegations became the subject of a 1998 trial. Regan was found not guilty of all charges.
Why? Because, thanks to rigorous cross-examination, we learned the truth?
No. Because Regan’s lawyer, Fast Eddie Greenspan used his cross-examinations to berate, hector, humiliate and undermine the complainants — not about what they said Regan had done to them, but about who they were. Greenspan spent days “proving” that one of the complainants had lied once when she was a teenager so she would be placed in a grade with children her own age. You lied about that, you’d lie about anything, became Greenspan’s mantra for days. He attacked another woman for not being able to locate the quarry where she said Regan had raped her 30 years before. There is no quarry, there was no rape. There was a quarry, but the damage was done.
So, if you think cross-examination is a pristine path to truth, I have a bridge or three I’d be happy to sell you.
Don’t get me wrong. I do wish the Mass Casualty Commission had not decided — unilaterally and in advance — to allow Lisa Banfield, the long-time common-law partner of the man who murdered 22 Nova Scotians, to answer questions last week only from commission counsel. At the very least, the commissioners should have worked with counsel for other participants to find a better way for Banfield to be questioned, if only to avoid the kind of wrong-headed attacks on the commission’s overall credibility by advocates like Scott, who has now publicly dismissed the commission as “a three-ring circus.”
That’s another question for another day.
Let’s explore the Banfield issue more closely.
What was it that lawyers for the families were so eager to ask Lisa Banfield that they didn’t already know?
Keep in mind that Lisa Banfield was not only interviewed four times by the RCMP but on five separate occasions by the commission’s investigators and lawyers. Before each of those commission interviews, lawyers for the families and other participants were invited to submit questions that the commission counsel would ask. In advance of Banfield’s testimony on July 15, they were invited again to submit questions. During breaks in her day-long testimony, they were invited to raise potential follow-up questions or raise other issues.
Many of the families chose to boycott instead. “We have communicated to the commission that we won’t be submitting questions unless our instructions change,” Scott said in advance of Banfield’s testimony. “The concern is No. 1, it serves no function. Simply writing our questions and giving them to commission counsel is not an effective way to get those questions answered. Secondly, we are resisting any sense of legitimizing the process as it has been proposed. As it stands now, what’s going to happen on Friday is not anywhere near what we would consider to be witness testimony.”
What was it they wanted to know so badly? And what was it that they couldn’t have asked — and had answered — through commission counsel?
Here’s what Michael Scott told the Globe and Mail:
Many of the questions his clients want answered are focused on the story Ms. Banfield told police after the mass shooting. In particular, they want to know how she freed herself from the handcuffs she said the gunman put her in and how she managed to survive a night hiding in the woods in sub-zero temperatures wearing nothing but a T-shirt and yoga pants, he said.
Those questions seem to suggest Scott doesn’t believe Banfield’s version of events or is at least skeptical. They fit, rather too nicely, with fact-free internet conspiracy theories that Banfield was part of some scheme with GW to perpetrate the mass murder.
One might suggest — with respect, as they say in the courts — that Scott re-read Banfield’s testimony or the 23-page section of the foundational document Perpetrator’s Violence Towards His Common-Law Spouse that focuses on “April 18, 2020: Immediately Preceding the Mass Casualty.”
That document is not only based on Banfield’s recollections during those five in-depth interviews with the commission, four with the Mounties and her video re-enactment of the events of the night of April 18, but also on evidence gathered at the scene by investigators.
For example, Banfield described the moments after GW set their Portapique cottage on fire as the rampage was beginning.
The perpetrator and Ms. Banfield began walking towards the path back to the warehouse. When they reached the middle of Portapique Beach Road, Ms. Banfield got on the ground and began screaming and trying to kick him away from her. She was unsuccessful: “He’s bigger than me and he got on me, and then he took my sneakers and threw them and I didn’t have socks on, cause I didn’t have time to put socks on.” …
Ms. Banfield described her sneakers as “black Nike” sneakers. During the RCMP’s search of the Portapique area following the mass casualty, a pair of sneakers were located and logged in the Exhibit Ledger as “Nike shoe” located on “200 Portapique Rd.” Photos of the shoes appear below…
During her RCMP interview on April 28, 2020, Ms. Banfield was asked if she lost any jewellery that night. Ms. Banfield responded that she might have been wearing a gold chain and pendant that “was round and had an angel on it” during this incident. During the RCMP tact troop search of Portapique, a pendant with a chain that matched the description given by Ms. Banfield were located in the woods and logged in the Exhibit Ledger as “pendant & chain,” located on “path 200 Portapique Rd.” Photos of the pendant and chain are below.
So, photos… And physical corroboration of the story she told.
Later, inside the warehouse at the back of the cottage…
The perpetrator demanded that Ms. Banfield get up. She stayed on the floor and continued pleading. When she refused to get up, the perpetrator fired his pistol into the ground on either side of her. Ms. Banfield told the Mass Casualty Commission that she does not know whether the perpetrator shot “down on the floor” or somewhere else, but after she heard the two shots on either side of her…
The RCMP Forensic Identification Services team conducted a search of the perpetrator’s burnt warehouse after the mass casualty. In his occurrence report of the scene, Cpl. Kevin Redden noted that “3 shell casings were located by [Cpl. Justin Anthony] in the area just east of the southwest corner. One casing was ruptured, one had the projectile still in place and the third was empty. In all three casings the primers were empty and were consistent with having been burnt out.”
More corroboration for her “story.”
What about Scott’s doubts about how Banfield “freed herself from the handcuffs she said the gunman put her in?”
They were inside [the warehouse] standing by the bar area when the perpetrator pulled out a pair of handcuffs and handcuffed her left hand. When the perpetrator demanded her other hand:
… I said [perpetrator] please just don’t do this, ‘cause I thought, I don’t want to be confined, ‘cause I’ll need my hands if I have, if I have any chance to get away…
Ms. Banfield refused to give the perpetrator her second hand so that he could finish applying the handcuffs…
Later, locked in GW’s fake police cruiser, Banfield says she…
… then managed to slide the handcuff from her left hand. In her interviews with the Commission, Ms. Banfield described sliding the handcuff off her wrist while in the back of the replica RCMP cruiser:
Lisa BANFIELD Oh, while I was in the back seat. That’s the thing. While I was in the back seat, the whole time I was ripping it off me ‘cause I thought, I don’t want to be confined. And I felt like I was confined. I mean, I still have the scar, but I just kept pulling and pulling and ripping it off me. And I didn’t care how much it hurt, I wasn’t even thinking that I just wanted it off me, because I felt confined.
One hand handcuffed… Still have the scar…
The next morning, Cst. Heidi Stevenson was killed at the Shubenacadie cloverleaf, and the fake police car was burned out, removed by police later that night. The next day, Eric Fisher, a neighbour to the cloverleaf went to the scene and found a pair of blackened and charred handcuffs; based on the position, Fisher figured the handcuffs had fallen out of the car when it was being towed away. Fisher took the handcuffs home and cleaned them with WD-40 and a wire brush, then called police to say he had found them.
Because the handcuffs had been “cleaned,” there was no blood evidence or DNA on them.
Investigators cannot determine if these were the handcuffs that Lisa Banfield had on that night although the circumstances suggest that they may be. [Emphasis added.]
How
about Banfield’s actual escape from the backseat of the fake police
car, which was separated from the front by a plexiglass barrier and the
rear doors of which could not be opened from the inside?
That must be suspicious.
Luckily, Banfield’s sister was able to provide previously taken photos of the inside of the cruiser with its plexiglass silent patrolman showing the slider opening, which was large enough for Banfield to crawl through and escape while GW was otherwise occupied.
To answer Scott’s skeptical question of how Banfield “managed to survive a night hiding in the woods in sub-zero temperatures wearing nothing but a T-shirt and yoga pants,” let’s return to the foundational document.
At 6:30 the next morning, soon after Banfield emerged from the woods where she’d been hiding overnight, police officers arrived on the scene. Cst. Ben MacLeod described her as being “in a state of terror and had a distraught dishevelled appearance… completely distraught, emotional, upset… extremely fearful… a quivering voice… The best way to describe it other than distraught, she was scared, fearful for her life, that he was coming to get her.” He told investigators later “he had only seen one other person in his career who was petrified to the same extent: a woman who had been kidnapped and held for three days.”
Another corporal, Duane Ivany, a trained medic and a coordinator of an RCMP Emergency Medical Response Team, conducted a preliminary medical assessment of Banfield. He said he was confident she was “hypothermic.”
She appeared very cool and clammy, her skin was very pale, she was shivering, you could see the bluish in her lips. And looking at her clothing, and when you feel, even through her shirt, where she said she had the pain, you could feel that her body was cold. So, the lack of her body to circulate heat indicated to me that she was outside for an extended period of time.
There is more of that sort of observation from other officers who dealt with her that morning, including Cst. Terry Brown, who told investigators he had “‘dealt with a lot of domestic violence type files’ in his work as a police officer, and that based on his interactions with her, Ms. Banfield’s actions were ‘consistent with somebody who had been the victim of domestic violence in the past.’”
Oh, and then there’s this — A Summary of Medical Records — that shows that, after her night in the woods, Lisa Banfield spent five nights in the Colchester Regional Hospital where she was treated for her injuries, which included….
“many superficial abrasions, basically on her hands, feet and legs.” Doctors also noted that Banfield had a contusion on her scapula and a fracture posterior to the medial right eleventh rib and fractures of the transverse processes of L1 to L4.
She was discharged on April 24, 2020. The discharge report noted the “Most Responsible Diagnosis” as: Assault with trauma and transverse process fractures of L1 to L4 and right rib fracture.”
She is, she told the commission Friday, is still on various medications she didn’t take before the shooting.
So, what was it that Scott really needed to find out in cross-examination? And why?
At the end of the day — unless there really is some factual basis to support the conspiracy theories, evidence of which has never been presented — how does rehashing an already detailed account of what happened to a victim of domestic violence in the woods on the night of April 18 have to do with advancing the commission’s mandate, which is to “inquire into what happened and make findings on…”
- The causes, context and circumstances giving rise to the April 2020 mass casualty;
- The responses of police, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), municipal police forces, the Canada Border Services Agency, the Criminal Intelligence Service Nova Scotia, the Canadian Firearms Program and the Alert Ready program;
- The steps taken to inform, support and engage those most affected.
How important is it to question the minute details of how Lisa Banfield survived her seven hours in the woods while Gabriel Wortman was holed up in a gravel parking lot in Debert preparing to strike again?
Which raises a question. Could there be another agenda at play here?
On February 5, 2021 — soon after Lisa Banfield and two of her relatives were charged with illegally supplying ammunition to the gunman — lawyers for the families filed amended court documents adding Banfield to its list of defendants in their already filed class action lawsuit over the killings.
The filing alleged that Banfield “was aware of and facilitated [the gunman’s] preparations, including but not limited to, his accumulation of firearms, ammunition, other weapons, gasoline, police paraphernalia and the outfitting of a replica Royal Canadian Mounted Police vehicle.”
The police — it’s important to note — never suggested that Banfield or her relatives had any idea of what the gunman was planning, and the charges themselves were later referred to a restorative justice process, which means that if she completes the process, she won’t have a criminal record.
But if you were the law firm seeking information to bolster a class action lawsuit in which you claim Banfield’s participation wasn’t “limited to” providing ammunition, you’d probably be keen to find ways to undermine her credibility about anything and everything.
It’s worth noting that the law firm behind that class action lawsuit is Patterson Law, the same firm for which Michael Scott also works.
I ask again — could there be more than one agenda at play here?
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/province-house/what-the-mounties-dont-want-you-to-know-everything/
What the Mounties don’t want you to know? Everything
The latest foundational document from the Mass Casualty Commission details everything the RCMP didn't say in the days after one of the worst mass killings in Canadian history. It's a long list.
Nova Scotia RCMP’s Chief Superintendent Chris Leather. Photo: Halifax Examiner.
[Canadian Press:] Canadians would very much like to know how many people have died?
[Chief Superintendent Supt. Chris Leather:] I can tell you that in excess of 10 people have been killed, but the investigation is still ongoing, and I expect to have more details in that regard in the coming days.
[Canadian Press:] Thank you very much, and can you please explain what you mean by “in excess of”?
[C/Supt. Leather:] I’m afraid at this time I can’t expand on that any further.
[Canadian Press:] You mean that you don’t know?
[C/Supt. Leather:] Correct. We don’t have a complete, uh… we’re not fully aware of what that total may be because, as we’re standing, here the investigation continues into areas that we’ve not yet explored across the province.
Press briefing
April 19, 2020
6:00 p.m.
That wasn’t completely true, of course.
Internal knowledge shared with C/Supt. Leather an hour before the 6:00 p.m. press briefing suggested the victim count was at least 17. Meeting minutes from a Criminal Operations (CrOps) meeting that C/Supt. Leather attended state that the victim count was “Likely 14+” at 3:55 p.m., and by 5:01 p.m., C/Supt. Leather was advised three more victims had been discovered (bringing the total to at least 17).
Mass Casualty Commission
Public Communications from the RCMP and Governments after the Mass Casualty
Foundational Document
June 13, 2022
So, by the time of that press briefing, the RCMP already knew that “at least” 17 people had been killed in a horrific mass shooting.
Mass Casualty Commissioner Investigator Krista SMITH: How did you decide on 10?
RCMP Director of H-Division Strategic Communications Unit Lia SCANLAN: Well, because at a certain point you have to call your information final … because we do have to [have] it translated, and we send it to translation. And we have to prepare [RCMP Superintendent] Darren [Campbell] for remarks. So, in those early days, the body count would change, and you just have to land on a number go to with for the press conference, knowing you’re going to be providing an update the next day. So that’s why 10 was decided upon. [My emphasis]
Interview with the Mass Casualty Commission
February 2022
“Seventeen” … “Dix-sept.”
It isn’t rocket science. A few keystrokes, a soupçon of Google Translate and you’ve got it. Seventeen in English becomes dix-sept in French, complete with handy dandy pronouncer.
Unfortunately, the RCMP’s congenital inability to be transparent about even how many people it already knew were dead that day was just one among its far too many sins of omission and commission in the aftermath of Canada’s worst mass shooting.
You may recall that that infamous press briefing began with a statement by Lee Bergerman, the RCMP’s commanding officer in Nova Scotia, that was beyond tone-deaf.
For two minutes and 40 seconds, she spoke only about the loss of Cst. Heidi Stevenson, “one of our own,” and the non-life-threatening injuries suffered by another of their own. Only then — with all of Canada watching and waiting — did she think to mention: “This tragic incident has also resulted in many victims outside of the RCMP.”
She was followed at the podium by Leather who began his own statement with another tribute to the fallen officer. It took a Canadian Press reporter to finally ask Leather the question the country was asking.
And to be consciously deceived by him.
Meanwhile, national RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, adopted a different tack. That evening, she granted interviews to various media outlets and told reporters what she knew at the moment — based on what she’d learned from the Mounties in Nova Scotia.
Within an hour of the end of the official briefing, for example, she had confirmed to CBC that at least 13 people had been killed, not including the perpetrator. Half an hour later, Lucki confirmed to Canadian Press that at least 17 people, including the killer, were dead.
Additional information continued to emerge:
At 11:00 p.m., the Nova Scotia RCMP’s investigative decision log stated: “Based on the information gathered from the scenes we believe that there are potentially 23 people deceased including the suspect and Cst. Stevenson. [But] the Nova Scotia RCMP did not share an updated victim number with the public until the next press briefing, at 2:00 p.m. on April 20, at which time they said there were “in excess of 19 victims.”
Rather than welcoming the commissioner’s ongoing updates, RCMP Nova Scotia communications staff seemed beside themselves with frustration that someone would betray their silence-is-golden strategy by releasing the facts as they were actually known.
At 9:27pm, Jolene Bradley, the director of strategic communications at RCMP national headquarters, sent an email to Scanlan commiserating about their boss’s unhelpful honesty. “Doesn’t help you the Commr keeps giving the number!!!!” she wrote. “Am really trying to get that back in the box for you.”
Scanlan replied with thanks. “I’ve had to ask my entire team to turn their phones off as a result.”
Turn their phones off?! Her communications team? In the immediate aftermath of a terrible mass shooting?
Less than an hour later, Scanlan wrote a frustrated email to other national communications staff:
Can I make a request that we stop changing numbers on victims? Please allow us to lead the release of information. It looks fragmented and inconsistent. The release of 10 was decided upon for good reason… We knew at the time of the press event that it was more than 10 but that is what we came to ground on for the event.
Don’t forget that that “good reason” seems to mostly have had to do with the need for translation.
And, of course, control.
In its 130-page June 13 “foundational document” on the RCMP’s public communications, the Mass Casualty Commission dissected and eviscerated many of the other “good reasons” Mounties offered up for their misstatements and unwillingness to make statements.
Just to give you a flavour of all that officials weren’t saying: By the second-day briefing, Leather already knew one of the victims, Emily Tuck, was a teenager and that available next of kin had been notified. Still, he told reporters that all the victims were “adults.” When another Mountie emailed to ask if Leather was aware of Tuck’s age, Sgt. Laura Seeley from the major crime unit emailed back:
C/Supt. Leather is aware of all the victims and ages. He released what he felt comfortable confirming at the time. Thanks for following up though.
Even before the Mass Casualty Commission released this most recent foundational document, it had acknowledged it was investigating another of Leather’s communications command decisions.
In a May 17 foundational document, reported on by my colleague, Jennifer Henderson, the commission said “investigation is ongoing into the role of Chief Supt. Chris Leather, as H-Division Criminal Operations officer, in relation to the release of information about the replica police cruiser.”
Interestingly, on June 2, just a few weeks after that news became public, the province’s Lieutenant Governor, Arthur LeBlanc, announced the names of the first 70 provincial recipients of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal “honouring significant contributions and achievements made by residents.”
Among the recipients: “Chief Supt. Chris Leather, Bedford.”
And so it goes.
***
What has been particularly intriguing to me about the media and political response to the commission’s latest foundational document is just how much attention was focused on one aspect of it: what the Mounties said — and didn’t say — about the killer’s weapons. And why.
During an April 28th press briefing, Supt. Darren Campbell repeatedly deflected questions concerning specifics about the weapons the killer had in his possession. That information, he told one reporter, is “part of the active and ongoing investigation and it’s a piece that right now, unfortunately, I can’t share with you.”
That same day, senior Halifax Mounties Campbell, Leather, Bergerman and Scanlan had a conference call with Commissioner Lucki and members of the national communications team.
At the meeting, Commr. Lucki expressed disappointment in the press briefings carried out by the Nova Scotia RCMP. In particular, Commr. Lucki felt that the Nova Scotia RCMP had disobeyed her instructions to include specific information on the firearms used by the perpetrator. In his notes, Supt. Campbell indicated that he had told the Nova Scotia RCMP Strategic Communications Unit not to release information about the perpetrator’s firearms out of concern that it would jeopardize the ongoing investigation into the perpetrator’s access to firearms, which was being carried out both by the RCMP and United States law enforcement.
According to Supt. Campbell’s notes, Commr. Lucki stated that “she had promised the Minister of Public Safety and the Prime Minister’s Office that the RCMP, (we) would release this information.” Supt. Campbell’s notes indicate that when he attempted to explain the reasoning for not releasing this information, Commr. Lucki stated that “we [the Nova Scotia RCMP] didn’t understand, that this was tied to pending gun control legislation that would make officers and public safer by or through this legislation.”
Was Lucki was responding to undue political pressure from Prime Minister Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair to provide them with confidential information about the killer’s weapons simply to support their proposed gun control legislation? That’s a legitimate question. It dominated Question Period in the House of Commons last week. And it deserves follow-up. As does the Mass Casualty Commission’s demand to know “to know why the federal government withheld information alleging that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki acted on political direction to interfere in the criminal investigation.”
But it’s just one of many questions and, in many ways, far from the most interesting. Especially given that boots-on-the-ground Mounties like Campbell continued to ignore her instructions and those of her political masters, if indeed they were instructions. (The details about the weapons didn’t finally surface until November 2020, seven months after the murders, when the National Post got a copy of a briefing report prepared for Trudeau that it had obtained through access for information.)
So, let’s ask some of those other questions not being asked in Ottawa:
- Are the kinds of weapons the killer used and how he got them relevant to public policy discussions about proposed gun control legislation?
- Would that kind of information — whatever it showed — have been a useful addition to the public discourse at the time?
- Given that the killer was already dead, and his name already known by every gun peddler with an Internet connection, what was the point in keeping this information secret? Beyond, of course, controlling every scrap of information?
As Michael MacDonald, one of the Canadian Press team covering the mass casualty inquiry, noted in an excellent follow-up report on June 23: “Lost in the partisan bickering was any discussion over the public’s right to know about the firearms in question.”
MacDonald interviewed A.J. Somerset, the author of a 2015 book on the gun culture:
When the shooter is identified, then anybody who had any information about how those guns were obtained would immediately want to avoid talking to police. I don’t see how the identification of the weapons actually leads to that person becoming aware of something they weren’t already aware of.
MacDonald also interviewed Blake Brown, a Saint Mary’s University history professor and author of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada, who made the point that Canadian police have actually stopped sharing information that previously was routinely made public. When a man murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique on December 6, 1989, for example, the public was quickly informed the weapon he used was a Ruger Mini-14 (which also happened to be one of the weapons of choice for Nova Scotia’s mass killer, and one of two weapons that the Nova Scotia killer used, which later became subject to the new gun control legislation). Noted Brown:
At some point, police stopped [sharing that information]. I don’t understand why that information can’t be released faster by police. One of the themes of the Mass Casualty Commission has been highlighting the tendency of the RCMP to hand out very little information and to treat the public like they don’t need to know much.
Treating the public like they don’t need to know much… Or anything at all.
Sounds like the RCMP’s communications strategy.
The Mass Casualty Commission and the Catch-22 of witness ‘accommodation’
Allowing two RCMP officers to testify in pre-recorded sessions without the direct involvement of lawyers for the families undermines the credibility of the commission. And that's unfortunate for all of us.
Retired RCMP Staff Sergeant Al Carroll.
I have not watched every minute of every witnesses’ testimony at the Mass Casualty Commission. As I have with the commission’s 18-and-counting foundational documents and 1,400 itemized source materials, I’ve sampled, closely watching the testimony of witnesses I expected to offer important information, dipping in and out of others as time allowed.
Among my many impressions, I have been particularly struck by the professionalism of the lawyers, both the various commission counsel and those representing the family members and other participants.
Everyone has recognized that this is not a criminal trial, so there is no need for histrionics, or witness badgering, or carefully plotted gotcha moments to win the favour of a jury.
The goal is to ask questions that matter, get answers that help, tease out context and reflection.
That’s, in part, because the commission’s mandate is not criminal. It is to understand what really happened and why on April 18 and 19, 2020, and then produce a final report that “sets out lessons learned as well as recommendations that could help prevent and respond to similar incidents in the future.”
But it’s also, in part, because commission staff and investigators have already done much of the heavy lifting, producing a multi-sourced, minute-by-minute timeline of what happened during the 13-hour shooting spree.
Everyone, including the lawyers and the RCMP witnesses, is working from the same set of facts, the same time-coded radio transmissions, 9-1-1 calls, phone logs, interview transcripts, email trails, and maps.
Perhaps partly as a result of that precise timeline reconstruction, few — no? — witnesses have so far attempted to deny the facts as laid out by the commission.
Instead, the RCMP witnesses have responded — mostly thoughtfully — to respectful questions from the lawyers. They’ve attempted to explain what they knew and didn’t know, the chaos that wasn’t captured in the timeline, what motivated this or that decision, their training and lack thereof.
Their responses have run the gamut from insistence they would do again exactly what they did that night, to bafflement at what they now know that they didn’t know then, to anger at their superiors for failures of leadership, to personal remorse for the deadly consequences of a detail missed in the moment.
Some of the Mounties and retired Mounties who testified even offered their own brutally honest assessments of their preparedness and recommendations for what needed to change to prevent such tragedies in the future.
I tell you all that because it makes the commission’s recent decision to allow some RCMP witnesses to testify via pre-recorded video, answering only questions put by the commission’s own counsel, so troubling. And potentially damaging for the credibility of a commission whose credibility has already been questioned by some of the victims’ family members.
From the outset, the Mass Casualty Commission has set out to be “trauma-informed.” Many family members — and others — believe it has been too trauma-informed, infantilizing those who lost loved ones in the tragedy and now want only answers to their many questions.
Worse, of course, for many family members, was that the National Police Federation and — worst — the Attorney General of Canada initially sought to use the commission’s trauma-informed mandate to prevent RCMP officers from having to testify at all, and then used the commission’s own Rule 43 —
If special arrangements are desired by a witness in order to facilitate their testimony, a request for accommodation shall be made to the Commission sufficiently in advance of the witness’ scheduled appearance to reasonably facilitate such requests. While the Commission will make reasonable efforts to accommodate such requests, the Commissioners retain the ultimate discretion as to whether, and to what extent, such requests will be accommodated.
— to seek special accommodations for six senior RCMP witnesses ranging “from provision of a sworn affidavit to appearing as part of a panel.”
One of those requests — one presumes the request to provide their own affidavit — was rejected. Two officers were permitted to speak as part of a panel. The participants’ lawyers offered “no objection” to any of those rulings.
In a decision released on May 24, the commission responded to requests from the three remaining officers. Based on “health information provided,” the commission agreed to allow the witnesses “to provide evidence in a way that reduces the stress and time pressure that arises from giving oral evidence.”
Staff Sergeant Al Carroll, who testified last week, was allowed to testify via Zoom, “with breaks as needed.”
That wasn’t a significant accommodation given that, since COVID, many trials have been conducted via Zoom.
As with most witnesses at this inquiry, lawyers for family members and other participants were still permitted to question Carroll directly.
As Adam Rogers, a lawyer who has been blogging about the hearings, also noted in a Tweet: “Noteworthy that, after asking for accommodations, including extra breaks, S/Sgt. Carroll has testified for 3.5 hours with just one (regularly scheduled) 15-minute mid-morning break, and has shown no obvious difficulties doing so. #MCC”
You can find Tim Bousquet’s full take on Staff Sergeant Carroll’s actual testimony here. His conclusion:
Overall, Carroll struck me as remarkably incurious. It’s been more than two years since the terrible events he was instrumental in, and yet he hadn’t read any of the MCC documents, nor had he read any of the radio transcripts from transmissions during the events, or any other of the underlying documents that he had access to and that have now become public.
That judgement may be harsh but it is based on watching Carroll testify and interact with various lawyers.
The accommodations for Sergeant Andy O’Brien and Staff Sergeant Brian Rehill — who are scheduled to “testify” on May 30 and 31 — seem to me to be significantly more significant and problematic. They were key players in the events of April 18 and 19:
Rehill was the risk manager working out of the RCMP’s Operational Communications Centre when the first 911 calls came in from Portapique, N.S. In addition to monitoring those calls and overseeing the dispatchers, he made the very first decisions on setting up containment and where the first responding officers should go.
O’Brien was the operation’s non-commissioned officer for Colchester County at the time, meaning he was in charge of the daily operations of the Bible Hill RCMP detachment. On April 18, he helped co-ordinate the early response from home and communicate with officers on the ground.
They will each be questioned in separate pre-recorded Zoom sessions, but only by commission counsel. The only other observers allowed for their testimony will be the commissioners themselves, media, accredited participants and their counsel “who wish to attend.” Except for the commissioners, however, they will all “be off-screen with microphones muted.”
Family lawyers will be allowed to suggest questions in advance and, after the initial round of questioning, “advise of any new questions that have arisen or additional questions that could not reasonably have been anticipated.” They won’t be allowed to ask questions themselves.
Said Joshua Bryson, who represents the families of two of the victims: “That’s not a suitable replacement for meaningful participation.” He won’t be participating. “We feel that if we’re going to be marginalized to this extent, there’s really not much point in us being here to participate.”
That’s understandable.
Most of the family members of the 22 victims of the mass shooting, in fact, have instructed their lawyers not to take part in this week’s hearings as a protest against the commission’s accommodation decision.
As Nick Beaton, who lost his pregnant wife in the shooting rampage, put it: “Silence sometimes is the loudest.”
That said, this is likely the only chance for family members — through their lawyers, through commission counsel — to have their questions asked to these senior officers and, as Sandra McCulloch of Patterson Law told the CBC, “find out what exactly Rehill and O’Brien did with the information they learned during the initial Portapique response, who they shared it with, and what decisions were made by anybody as a result.”
Unfortunately, the commissioners’ emphasis on being “trauma-informed” now seems to have hobbled their search for the truth, and further undermined the families’ faith in whatever their report concludes.
It’s complicated.
As a society, we now accept that trauma — and its impacts — are real.
We recognize the devastating impact trauma can have on victims and their family members, first responders, even witnesses long after the events have receded.
But the ripple effects don’t stop there.
Consider last week’s wrenching testimony from RCMP Staff Sergeant Bruce Briers, the risk manager operating out of the Operational Control Centre in Truro. During the chaotic night that followed the first murders in Portapique, Briers missed the fact that several other Mounties, including Pictou Cst. Ian Fahie, had looked at a photo of the killer’s fake police car and noted it had a black push bar — an unusual feature — on the front.
Because Briers missed that detail and no one told him directly about it, Briers didn’t notify all RCMP officers to be on the lookout for the push bar.
Just over two hours later, an RCMP corporal named Rodney Peterson passed the killer on Highway 4. It was only after Fahie radioed him directly to suggest he look for the push bar that Peterson realized who he’d seen and turned around to pursue him.
Too late. The killer went on to murder five more people.
“I have to live with that,” an emotional Briers told lawyer Josh Bryson, “and I’ve lived with that for two-plus years.”
So, yes, trauma can have an ongoing impact even on those not on the front line, decision-makers like Briers who missed a critical fact in the middle of a chaotic event and must now live with the consequences.
But Briers testified without accommodation. And we learned a lot as a result.
Which raises the Catch-22 question: How do we accommodate for trauma while getting to the truth?
When someone asks for accommodation, they often must disclose personal, private health information they don’t want shared. From the beginning, the commissioners acknowledged and accepted that.
Since witness accommodation requests involve sensitive personal health information, the Commission will not share any specific individual private information about these requests.
The problem is that the rest of us then have no way of evaluating whether the reasons were reasonable.
Instead, we are left with what else we know.
- We know that this commission has gone out of its way to make itself trauma-informed, for better and for worse.
- We know that Staff Sergeant Briers, who did not have any accommodation, testified about issues that were deeply, personally difficult.
- And we know that Staff Sergeant Carroll did not appear to need any of the accommodations he was granted.
We will not know until after the videos of O’Brien and Rehill are released whether — and how much — those accommodations may have hindered the commission’s larger search for the truth.
What we already know is that the decision to accommodate by excluding the families’ lawyers from direct witness testimony has only added to the questions about the inquiry.
And that’s unfortunate. For all of us.
The clock is ticking down on the Mass Casualty Commission
With less than six months to go before the inquiry is supposed to file its final report, it’s worth asking if it needs an extension to what was never a realistic timetable.
Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Inquiry commissioners (MCC)
(d) direct the Commissioners to submit, in both official languages, an interim report on their preliminary findings, lessons learned and recommendations no later than May 1, 2022, and a final report on their findings, lessons learned and recommendations no later than November 1, 2022…
The clock is ticking.
There are just 116 weekdays between now and the day that the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission is required — by the orders in council that created it — to report back to the rest of us on…
- the facts it has uncovered concerning G.W.’s murderous, 17-crime scene rampage across rural Nova Scotia on the night of April 18 and the morning of April 19, 2020, that “took the lives of 22 innocent victims and forever changed the lives of countless others;”
- the lessons the commissioners have learned from turning over and examining the many rocks beneath those bald facts; and
- the recommendations they’ve come up with as a result of all of that to “help prevent and respond to similar incidents in the future.”
It’s worth reminding ourselves just how extensive — and daunting — the tasks are that the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia set for this commission.
From the order in council again:
(a) direct the Commissioners to inquire into and make findings on matters related to the tragedy in Nova Scotia on April 18 and 19, 2020, including
- the causes, context and circumstances giving rise to the tragedy,
- the responses of police, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and municipal police forces, and
- the steps taken to inform, support and engage victims,
- police policies, procedures and training in respect of active shooter incidents,
- policies with respect to the disposal of police vehicles and any associated equipment, kit and clothing,
- policies with respect to police response to reports of the possession of prohibited firearms, including
- communications between law enforcement agencies, and
- information and support provided to the families of victims, affected citizens, police personnel and the community.
(b) direct the Commissioners to set out lessons learned as well as recommendations that could help prevent and respond to similar incidents in the future.
If you break down just the three items in just that first instruction — causes, context, and circumstances — there is already more than a public inquiry mandate’s worth of work to do.
But there are a few other caveats we should keep in mind as we consider that.
From the day of its appointment on October 21, 2020, this commission has been operating under COVID-19 lockdowns, restrictions, mandates and recommendations that have inevitably slowed down and complicated its work.
And then there is this, which should also never be forgotten — or forgiven.
Neither the federal nor provincial government wanted this public inquiry to happen at all. They did their best to avoid it. They preferred a quiet “review” that could be contained and controlled, filed and forgotten.
If not for the angry protests by the families of those who lost their loved ones, this inquiry wouldn’t be happening at all.
But…
Given all of that — and I realize I may be in a minority here — I think the commission has done a good job so far of constructing a compelling, deeper narrative of what happened and why, thanks to the presentations during its limited public sessions, its 18 (so far) foundational documents and its more than 1,400 supporting source materials.
So far…
With the cards it has been dealt.
My question is, do those cards need to be reshuffled?
I know the families — and their lawyers — have not always been happy with the pace of the inquiry, or the reliance on so-called “foundational documents” and roundtable discussions, or the lack of live testimony by witnesses and what some have claimed are the limitations on questions by the families’ lawyers.
Those are reasonable concerns that have smacked up against the commission’s artificial deadline.
On the other hand, I haven’t seen any evidence that the commission — as some critics have suggested — is attempting to cover up for the systemic failures of the RCMP or the actions of its officers.
On the contrary. It seems that every day’s proceedings bring damning new revelations and disclosures of Mountie failures and cockups in the years leading up to G.W.’s killing spree, in the 13 hours during which it unfolded and in the continuing attempts to cover up those failures ever since.
One of the concerns, for the families and their lawyers, has been that while commission staff and investigators have interviewed more than 200 witnesses, so far only 26 have testified in public.
More — including most importantly, senior RCMP officers responsible for decision-making before, during and after the tragedy — are expected to take the stand in the coming weeks. On the agenda this week: key players Bruce Briers, the RCMP’s risk manager, and Al Carroll, its district commander for Colchester County.
But we know the National Police Federation and the Attorney General of Canada have asked the commission not to put several senior RCMP officers on the stand —including some key decision-makers — but to allow them to testify by videotape instead. One RCMP officer has apparently even asked to testify in a closed room with only the commissioners and commission counsel present.
Although the inquiry’s “trauma-informed” rules do give the commissioners discretion to allow that, I would be surprised — and disappointed — if they say yes.
This is still a public inquiry, with a requirement to be public, transparent and accountable.
So far as I can tell, the lawyers for official participants in the inquiry have not been — despite earlier concerns by some — prevented from putting their own questions to witnesses.
According to senior commission counsel Emily Hill, 23 of the 26 witnesses so far have “answered questions asked by participants’ counsel” as well as the commission’s lawyers. “The only exception has been the witness panel held April 11, when participants’ counsel chose not to ask questions but instead agreed that Commission counsel should ask additional questions.”
But, even if one accepts that the commissioners are doing their best to get to the truth — and I do — the reality, as Tara Miller, a lawyer representing a relative of victim Kristen Beaton, who was gunned down while sitting in her car, is that “We have a daunting calendar with a very tight timeline.”
The next phases of the inquiry will be critical. It shouldn’t be rushed to fit an arbitrary deadline. All questions need to be asked and answered.
That means the commissioners need more time to do their work. And we need more time to see them do it.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/nick-beaton-has-every-right-to-be-angry-but/
Nick Beaton has every right to be angry, but…
Despite many early missteps, the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission is now doing what it needs to do — methodically assembling facts and evidence about what happened during Canada's worst modern mass shooting and exploring the many larger issues the tragedy requires us as a society to confront. The rest of us need to let it do its job.
RCMP Constables Adam Merchant, Aaron Patton and Stuart Beselt, left to right, the first officers on the scene in Portapique, are questioned by commission counsel Roger Burrill at the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry into the mass murders in rural Nova Scotia on April 18/19, 2020, in Halifax on Monday, March 28, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan
It is impossible not to sympathize with the frustrations of Nick Beaton.
His pregnant wife, Kristen, was among the 22 victims of the senseless April 2020 shooting rampage during which a killer — dressed as a Mountie and driving a down-to-the-decals perfect replica police car — wandered, seemingly at will, along Nova Scotia’s highways and byways, murdering erstwhile friends, neighbours, associates, acquaintances, even total strangers like Kristen.
At around 10 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 2020, Kristen — a VON continuing care assistant on her way to meet clients in Masstown and Debert — happened to stop at a gravel pullout on Plains Road near the Debert business park.
A few minutes later, that replica RCMP cruiser drove up beside Kristen’s Honda CR-V. The killer, dressed like a policeman, got out of his vehicle “and proceeded to fatally shoot Ms. Beaton through her driver’s-side window.”
Both Kristen and her husband already knew the key points about what had happened the night before in Portapique, less than half an hour’s drive away.
Multiple murders, fires, a suspect still on the loose…
Kristen and a clearly worried Nick exchanged phone calls and text messages throughout that Sunday morning. Including this series of text messages that began at 8:53 a.m. and ended close to 9:01:
Kristen Beaton: Apparently 9 ppl were shot and 4 houses were lit on fire. Crazzzy.
Nick Beaton: Buddies driving a crown vic… Still on the loose
KB: Oh wow really. That’s scary … Know what colour?
NB: No … But not many crown vic on the road….lol … And it was 4 different places
KB: Wow. That’s insane. … Ya true
I’m headed to masstown and debert for the next few visits
NB: If u see someone walking don’t stop
KB: Ok …
They released who buddy is
NB: They try to get in ur rig ram them or run them over and we will deal with it later …
No not yet
KB: Rcmp sitting at debert exit … They just did release [the name of the shooter] … 51 year old
A little over half an hour later, at 9:37, Nick sent Kristen a Facebook screenshot photo of the now-identified killer along with the official statement from the RCMP:
51-year-old [GW] is the suspect in our active shooter investigation in #Portapique. There are several victims. He is considered armed & dangerous. If you see him, call 911. DO NOT approach. He’s described as a white man, bald, 6’2-6’3 with green eyes.
What the RCMP did not say — even though they’d been aware of the facts from multiple sources since soon after the murders began the night before — was that the murderer was dressed as a Mountie and driving a vehicle tricked out as an official RCMP cruiser.
Twenty minutes later, Kristen Beaton was dead, murdered by a man she would have assumed was a real Mountie.
Nick Beaton speaks to reporters in July 2020. Photo: Yvette d’Entremont
Nick Beaton is convinced that if the RCMP had disclosed the critical information earlier about the killer’s dress and vehicle, his wife would still be alive. And they would be raising the child she was carrying at the time of her death.
No wonder he is frustrated and angry.
Although clearly not alone among family members of the victims, Nick Beaton has been one of the most vocal and persistent critics of the federal-provincial Mass Casualty Commission, which was set up in October 2020 to establish what happened, explore related issues and produce a final report by November 1, 2022, complete with findings, lessons and recommendations.
On Thursday, after attending the commission’s public hearings for the first time — the day commission counsel laid out the inquiry’s “Foundational Document, Plains Road, Debert,” which zeroed in on the events that day leading to the deaths of Beaton and a second woman, Heather O’Brien — Beaton told reporters, “I don’t feel they’re digging into it enough, I really don’t.”
He pointed out that the 61-page document and discussion of it left out too many details, including the fact that Kristen’s brother had been told by police at the murder scene that day that “a young female left with chest injuries. Kristen’s brother called me right then and said, ‘Kristen might still be alive.’ It gave us hope.”
Hope that would be dashed eight hours later when the RCMP finally officially informed Beaton his wife was dead.
The commission, he said, wasn’t probing deeply enough into the RCMP’s actions and inactions that day.
“Right from April 19, 2020, (it’s been) smoke and mirrors,” he said after the hearing Thursday.
We’re just like mushrooms, kept in the dark … There was lots missing today… We pray that changes are going to be made, but at this point I don’t see that they’re digging enough or caring enough to do it. Me and the other family members looked at each other today and said, ‘Is that it?’ We haven’t learned anything we didn’t already know.
It is hard not to feel for Beaton’s anger and his frustration.
But is his criticism of the commission fair?
The public inquiry into the tragedy did not get off to an auspicious start. Even before the commission was announced, there was wrangling over whether it should even exist, then what form it should take, followed by an embarrassing shuffling of commissioners.
Five months after the tragedy, the commission was awkwardly order-in-counciled into existence by seemingly reluctant governments in Nova Scotia and Ottawa — and given an almost impossible deadline to do all it had to do and publish its final report by November of this year.
That’s just six months from now!
But there were delays in getting started, followed by a series of open houses in the fall of 2021 to “to share information about our work, answer questions and to gather feedback from community members,” which satisfied no one.
Public proceedings that were supposed to start in late October 2021 were delayed until the end of January 2022, and then postponed again for another month.
Even after the public proceedings began on February 22, there were lingering procedural disputes to be resolved: about whether RCMP officers would be required to testify in person, about the role the murderer’s common-law spouse would — or would not — play in the inquiry, about who would be called to testify, about whether lawyers for the family members would be allowed to question or perhaps cross-examine witnesses …
Some of those questions have still not been finally answered.
To make matters worse — at least in the eyes of many, including some family members — the commission began its public proceedings with a day-long “feel-good” expert panel …
to help normalize and validate emotions people have felt or are feeling, and to help people prepare for the information to come from the Commission’s work.
All of that acknowledged, it is difficult to spend anytime exploring the Mass Casualty Commission website and not come away with an appreciation for the gargantuan task the commissioners have taken on and the methodical way they are approaching it.
There were, its worth remembering, 17 different crime scenes over the killer’s 13-hour murder spree. There are 61 designated participants — victims’ relatives, injured survivors, first responders, police officers and the federal and provincial governments — taking part in the inquiry. The commission’s investigators and lawyers have interviewed hundreds of witnesses — from RCMP and first responders to family members to witnesses to passersby — sifted through 40,000 pages of documents, including video surveillance, cell phone records, text messages, etc., trying to piece together the factual underpinning for understanding what happened, and what may have gone wrong to allow what happened to happen.
The result is a virtual library shelf full of what are referred to as Foundational Documents, along with often-multiple source materials in order to lay out the details of what happened in a complete and cross-referenced if dry legal, investigative bureaucratese. (Thank god for journalists like the Examiner’s Tim Bousquet and others who have used these documents, along with their own independent reporting, to create compelling, digestible narratives for the rest of us.)
So far, the commission has only released eight of these foundational documents. The commission is deliberately — and probably quite reasonably — making them public at the same time its counsel walks us through each of them.
There will, in fact, ultimately be close to 30 location-based and topic-based foundational documents released during what the commission calls Phase 1.
One of those still-unreleased documents — “Next of Kin Death Notification to Families of Victims” — may provide some of the details Nick Beaton is looking for when it comes to the RCMP’s treatment of him and his family in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s murder.
During Phase 2, the commission will release another eight foundational documents on various related topics, including the killer’s violence toward his common-law spouse and others, the violence in his own family and his financial “misdealings.” It will also publish more foundational documents revisiting the issue of notifications to next of kin, including victim support.
In addition, the inquiry has commissioned its own technical reports to provide “factual information such as the structure of policing in Nova Scotia,” and expert reports to “gather and analyze public policy, academic research and lessons learned from previous mass casualties.” There will be nearly 20 of those — from “critical incident decision-making” to a “legal history of the police duty to warn the public” to “supporting survivors and families in the wake of a mass casualty event” — and more may be commissioned in Phase 3 when the commissioners draft their recommendations “to help make communities safer.”
I certainly understand the anger and frustration Nick Beaton and some other family members. They have already been waiting for two years for answers to their legitimate questions.
Given the work the commission still has to complete, I suspect they — and we — will be waiting well beyond November 1 for answers. That may be necessary and someone should acknowledge that soon.
That said, I have less sympathy for Premier Tim Houston’s apparent attempt to play on their anguish by accusing the commissioners, even before the first public hearing, of being “disrespectful” to the families.
Interestingly, Houston also claimed to want an inquiry that is “honest, comprehensive, detailed and most importantly, designed to answer questions.”
If the commission fails to “answer questions,” there will be plenty of opportunities to criticize. For now, Houston — and the rest of us — need to acknowledge the real work being done by the commission and its staff and allow it to unfold.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/province-house/dear-mr-premier-i-know-youre-busy-but/
Dear Mr. Premier: I know you’re busy but…
You need to appoint a public inquiry into the recent mass murders in Nova Scotia. Now. Yesterday. It needs to be open and transparent and broad-based. I have a few suggestions. You're welcome.
Roadside memorial in Portapique to the 22 victims of the mass shooting that began there. Photo: Joan Baxter
Dear Premier McNeil,
I know you’ve been busy, telling Nova Scotians to stay the blazes home and telling our legislators to stay the blazes out of affairs that are none of their business.
Such as government spending. I mean, what gives elected MLAs the right to hold online committee hearings to ask awkward questions about the latest auditor general’s report; or about the long-term crisis in our long-term care homes; or about the still secretive-to-them-and-us state of that massive, billion-dollar QEII redevelopment project; or about who’s-responsible-for-what changes to those new multi-million-dollar highway twinning contracts; or about why anyone in their right mind would want to keep shelling out more millions of our dollars to keep the Yarmouth-Bar Harbor ferry not running for another season?
The opposition parties claim it’s their duty to provide oversight of all the important work your government is doing.
I mean, really?
Who says?
But I don’t want to get off on that tangent…
I do want to say I agree completely with your spokesperson, Stephen Tobin. (I’m sure you were too busy to speak yourself, and he is a “Stephen” too, after all.) When all the Liberal members of the public accounts committee — I may have once, in a fit of pique, referred to them as the Fangless Five, but let’s not go there today — voted, as one collective person, to shut down opposition requests for even an online meeting of the public accounts committee, a reporter from allnovascotia.com had the temerity to ask why. Your spokesperson, Tobin, emailed back with just the appropriate amount of dismissive disdain:
“The premier and his caucus are focused on the health and safety of Nova Scotians, as well as reopening our economy.”
Good on ya, Mr. Premier… or Mr. Premier Spokesperson… Whoever.
So, as I said, I know you’re busy, which is why I thought perhaps I could help with another issue that’s cropped up and which you’ve probably been too busy to turn your full attention to.
It has to do with “the horrifying events in Portapique and elsewhere in central Nova Scotia on April 18 and 19, 2020,” and the growing demands — mine too, I confess — for you to call a public inquiry into what happened and why, and what can be done to prevent future tragedies.
Earlier this month, in fact, more than three-quarters of the faculty at the Dalhousie Law School — who, one guesses, know a thing or two about such things — sent you an open letter calling on you to establish an inquiry with “terms of reference that are broad enough to allow for…
- a critical review of the policies, procedures and decisions employed by police on the days in question and in the months and years leading up to these tragic events,
- as well as elements of the broader social and legal context that may have been contributing factors.
Noted the law professors: “The process that your government sets in motion now must be robust enough to assure Nova Scotians that you are doing all that is in your power to ensure that this will never happen again… In a modern democracy committed to state accountability, an internal investigation will not suffice. Independence, impartiality and transparency are essential components of maintaining public confidence in the administration of justice. Only a public inquiry can satisfy these requirements.”
Rather than simply say thank you very much, we’ll consider it, goodbye, you decided to pit your appliance repair operator warranty-manual law schooling up against the combined wisdom of an entire law school. In yet another emailed statement, this time to the CBC, you (or your spokesperson) declared such a public inquiry “can be called only into matters in which the province has constitutional jurisdiction.”
To wit: Not us.
Perhaps you forgot to read your Constitution Act of 1867 or the cheat sheet in the Canadian Encyclopedia, which helpfully sets out specific areas of provincial jurisdiction, including:
… property and civil rights, the management and sale of provincially owned public lands, hospitals, municipal institutions, local works and undertakings, the incorporation of companies with provincial objectives, the solemnization of marriage and the administration of justice.
Oops. Must have missed that.
Anyway, rather than now plead nolo contendere and just get on with doing the right thing by simply announcing the inquiry, you attempted to dump the mess into the lap of your federal Liberal colleague, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, saying you “will wait and see” what Ottawa decides to do.
But Trudeau, just as swiftly and un-deftly, dumped it back on you.
People have many questions about what happened in Nova Scotia, and we are encouraging the RCMP to do its work on the initial investigation, but as we move forward there will be of course larger questions to ask, and we will work with the government of Nova Scotia on getting those answers.
Ping. Pong… Your turn.
As I said, I know you’re busy with other matters, so I thought I’d help out by reminding you how another Nova Scotia government responded to an unanticipated mass tragedy. On Saturday morning, May 9, 1992, an explosion ricocheted through the underground tunnels of the Westray Mine in Pictou County, killing all 26 miners working the overnight shift.
Two days later, when the legislature resumed its session and even before MLAs had marked a minute of silence in tribute, then Tory premier Donald Cameron — a politician who had actively supported the mine’s development — stood up in the legislature and declared:
A judge from the Nova Scotia court will soon be appointed to chair an independent public inquiry into the disaster at the Westray mine. This judge will have all the powers of the inquiries commissioner under the Public Inquiries Act and the Coal Mines Regulation Act. The commissioner will seek and hire expertise as he or she deems necessary.
Four days after that — just six days after the disaster — Cameron was ready with details:
Today, I am announcing the appointment of the Honourable K. Peter Richard of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court Trial Division as Inquiry Commissioner… It is essential that Nova Scotians know all the answers to the questions surrounding and leading to this tragic event. Mr. Justice Richard’s inquiry will not be limited to the events of the early morning of May 9th. Nothing and no person with any light to shed on this tragedy will escape the scrutiny of this inquiry. The commissioner will be able to seek and hire expert, independent advice as he deems necessary. He will have all the powers to subpoena witnesses if necessary. The inquiry will proceed with the full cooperation of the Government of Nova Scotia, its departments, agencies and commissions. The commissioner’s report will be made public. Mr. Speaker, the answers to many questions leading to the terrible events of May 9th can only be obtained through an independent, thorough and all-encompassing investigation… We owe this to those died, to their families and to all Nova Scotians who were touched by this tragedy.
All you — or your spokesperson — really needs to do is to crib Cameron’s words to show how much your government cares about getting to the truth of Portapique and to make sure such a tragedy never happens again. You’d be a month late, but better late than never.
If you’re worried about how to craft the specific terms of reference to make sure everything of significance gets properly examined — I am thinking here of the role of domestic violence in particular — you could certainly start with the general term suggested by the law professors’ letter. And then add in more specific terms, as needed. If you’re still worried you might miss something, I have one more suggestion for a concluding term of reference. The inquiry should…
make recommendations to the Governor in Council respecting… such other related matters which the Commissioners consider relevant to the Inquiry.
Those words come from the Order-in-Council appointment of three judges to look into the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Donald Marshall, Jr. Its 1989 report, which used that last term of reference to expose systemic racism and unequal treatment in the province’s justice system, sparked a whole series of important reforms.
Perhaps this inquiry could do the same.
Like I said, I know you’re busy. So, I wanted to help.
You’re welcome.
Sincerely,
A Friend
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/portapique-tragedy-we-need-a-full-public-inquiry/
Portapique tragedy: We need a full public inquiry
It isn't about assigning blame. But there are questions we need to answer, and it isn’t good enough for the RCMP to conduct an internal investigation into what happened and why, and then tell us what they decide we’re allowed to know.
RCMP briefing, April 19, 2020.
Late on the afternoon of Sunday, April 19, I sat in front of my television waiting for an RCMP briefing I fully expected would help me make sense of the confusing cascade of disjointed, disconcerting, increasingly frightening news bytes and bulletins that had tumbled out and over one another all that day.
I’d woken to a radio news report of an active shooter in Portapique, Nova Scotia. I had to look it up on a map. Police were advising people there to lock their doors and stay inside, the CBC newsreader said. And then the news kept becoming newer, and more bizarre. “Several” victims … The alleged shooter is a Dartmouth denturist … Considered armed and dangerous … He might be driving a car decked out to look like an RCMP vehicle … He might be wearing a facsimile Mountie uniform … Sighted here … Seen there … House fires … Definitely multiple casualties … Police officer shot … Police cars ablaze … Gunman apprehended at the Enfield Big Stop, nearly 100 km from Portapique! … Wait! What? How? … Gunman reported dead … At least one police officer killed …
The RCMP briefing, when it happened, was almost as surreal as the day. Lee Bergerman, the commanding officer of the RCMP in Nova Scotia, began, not by recapping what was known or even indicating how many people had been killed or wounded, but with a heartfelt eulogy for Heidi Stevenson, the 23-year veteran officer and mother of two who’d been killed in the line of duty that day, and she also shared the news that another, then-unnamed officer had been wounded but was recovering and would be supported by his RCMP “family.”
It was understandable, it was human, it was important to know.
But — at least by itself — it was not nearly enough to allow the rest of us to begin to comprehend the magnitude of the very public tragedy that had just happened in our province.
RCMP Chief Supt. Chris Leather, who followed Bergerman to the podium, offered little more in the way of concrete detail. In fact, it wasn’t until the first reporter asked the first obvious question that we began to get even imprecise factual information.
There were “in excess of 10 people” killed, Leather explained, the final tally unclear “because, as we’re standing here, the investigation continues into areas that we have not yet explored across the province.” That too was unexplained.
Again, all of this seems understandable in the shell-shocked, still-smouldering immediate aftermath of what we now know was the largest mass killing in Canada, a rampage made all the more complicated and confusing for investigators because the killer managed to zigzag his way through the heart of the province, setting fires, switching vehicles, settling scores, shooting strangers with both malice aforethought and seemingly incidental savagery. When all was said and done, the death toll topped 22, the crime scenes numbered 16.
The problem was that the RCMP’s public communications didn’t improve in the days that followed. There were briefings with little information, briefings with questions that went unanswered, cancelled briefings.
While that too may have been partly the result of all the still unfolding investigations unfolding in real time, it also seems — in too large a part — the result of a traditional close-to-the-vest, knowledge-is-power police culture that still does not understand the public’s right to know or that the RCMP needs to be as transparent and forthcoming as possible.
Which is why it isn’t nearly good enough for the RCMP to conduct an internal investigation into what happened and why, and then tell us what they decide we’re allowed to know. Or for the Serious Incident Response Team, which includes ex-police officers, to be the only semi-outside agency to investigate the police’s use of force during the incident.
This isn’t just about the RCMP’s actions or inactions during the incident.
- What are the rules around individuals being allowed to own even cobbled-together lookalike police and emergency vehicles? Should they be changed?
- If some of the weapons the killer used came from the US — as seems to have been the case — how did he get his hands on them, who sold them to him, how did he get across the border? That’s a larger gun-control question we need to answer for all sorts of different good reasons.
- We now know the killer had been charged at least once before with criminal assault. And we know, from reporting by journalists, that acquaintances had expressed concern about his “controlling behaviour” with his girlfriend, whose assault last Saturday night was just the first attack in what became his murderous spree. Had she sought help before? Had others ever flagged his behaviour with her to authorities?
- And then, of course, there is that troubling question everyone is now asking: why did the RCMP not issue an emergency alert to warn other residents in other parts of the province there was a gunman on the loose, probably driving an RCMP-alike vehicle and dressed in a Mountie uniform?
There are so many questions to answer.
But those answers, it’s worth noting, shouldn’t necessarily lead to blame.
A map showing the path
While I understand the anger some family members of murder victims have expressed about the lack of an alert, I also believe it’s easier for the rest of us to find fault than it is to put ourselves in the unfathomable position first responders and emergency dispatchers must have confronted after a quiet rural Saturday night in the middle of a COVID-19 lockdown suddenly exploded in violence and mayhem.
As RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell put it when he belatedly released the Mounties’ own still incomplete timeline of events on Friday, April 24, five days after the killings: “The police officers responding to the initial 911 call and the subsequent calls did not have the benefit of the knowledge I am about to share with you. The initial complaint was of a shooting.”
Let’s follow that train.
- At 10:26 p.m. on April 18 — even before the first officers arrived at the Portapique home from which the initial 911 call came — they encountered a man who told them he’d been shot by another man in a passing vehicle. Police called in emergency responders to tend to him and moved on.
- As police units began arriving on the scene, they discovered “several people” dead in the road. When they began checking nearby homes for victims or suspects, they discovered eight different residences on Portapique Beach Road, Orchard Beach Drive and Cobequid Court “where people were found deceased.”
- In the darkness, they also saw flames shooting skyward from several nearby “structure” fires. With a shooter on the loose, however, firefighters were unable to battle the blazes, and the structures burned to the ground. Was anyone inside?
- The RCMP activated its critical incident response program. “At this point perimeters were established,” Campbell explained. “Specialized units responded, including police dog services, emergency response teams and a DNR helicopter. We also had the explosives disposal unit, crisis negotiators and the emergency medical response team on standby. Within a very short time, we also engaged specialized units and resources from J Division in New Brunswick… First responders engaged in clearing residences, searching for suspects, providing life-saving measures. Telecommunicators remained on the line with witnesses in the immediate area.”
- While all that was happening, police identified the suspect, discovered he possessed “a pistol and barrelled weapons” and learned he lived in one of the burning structures where both the house and garages “were fully engulfed in flames.” Was he inside? Had he committed suicide? Or was he still on the loose?
- Knowing he owned several lookalike police vehicles, two of which were burning, the Mounties asked Halifax Regional Police to dispatched officers to the suspect’s Dartmouth denturist’s office in the middle of the night where they found what they initially believed was his only other police-alike car.
- The manhunt went on throughout the night in the area around Portapique where — having established their perimeters — the Mounties still believed the killer would be found.
- After 6:30am., the suspect’s girlfriend — who’d been assaulted and had been hiding in woods overnight — emerged after calling 911. She told police he owned a fourth, unregistered, “fully marked and equipped replica” police cruiser, was wearing a police uniform and was loaded down with weapons.
- Realizing he might have slipped through their cordon, the RCMP issued a BOLO — be-on-the-lookout — bulletin to all police officers in Nova Scotia.
- Officers on the scene, however, continued to search for the suspect in and around Portapique in case he was still there.
- This is where things get murky. According to the police version, “more than 12 hours after our initial arrival in Poratpique, we began receiving a second series of 911 calls” from the Wentworth area, more than 60 km north of Portapique.
- Thanks to Tim Bousquet’s weekend reporting for the Examiner, we now know the gunman had actually been spotted driving in the area hours before those calls, at around 6:30am., and that he’d probably been killing people on Hunter Road, north of Wentworth, since at least 7am.
- He murdered Alanna Jenkins and Sean McLeod, a couple who were “known to the gunman,” and set their house on fire. When Tom Bagley, a retired firefighter who lived nearby, came to investigate, he was shot dead in their driveway at around 8:45am.
- Lillian Hyslop was walking by the side of the road when the gunman killed her. Police received that 911 call at 9:35.
- Soon after, he “pulled” a vehicle off the highway and shot one of the occupants.
- Then, he “encountered a second vehicle and shot and killed that female victim.” Those victims were Heather O’Brien and Kristen Beaton, both VON nurses. Beaton was pregnant.
- At some point, the gunman also knocked on the door of a house on Highway 4, but the occupants — who knew the man and saw he was carrying a weapon — didn’t answer. They called 911 instead. The man left.
- At 10 to 11am that morning, the killer — still driving his RCMP lookalike vehicle — came upon Cst. Chad Morrison about 100 km south of Wentworth at the intersection of Highway 2 and 224, just off Highway 103 near Stewiacke. Morrison, who had been waiting to meet Cst. Heidi Stevenson as part of the ongoing response to the killer on the loose, wasn’t surprised to see a marked RCMP vehicle pull up beside him. But it wasn’t Stevenson; it was the killer. He shot and wounded Morrison, then crashed his fake police car head-on into Stevenson’s arriving vehicle. The two exchanged gunfire, and he killed her, as well as Joey Webber, a passerby who had happened on the scene. The gunman took Cst. Stevenson’s gun and ammunition, set fire to his and Stevenson’s vehicles, and escaped once again, this time in Webber’s silver SUV.
- A few minutes later, he stopped at a home on Highway 224 where he shot and killed Gina Goulet, a denturist he knew, then changed out of his police uniform and stole her red Mazda 3.
- Continuing south for 20 more km on Highway 224, the killer finally arrived at the Irving Big Stop in Enfield where he stopped to get gas. “While he was at the gas pumps,” Campbell reported, “one of our tactical resources came into the gas station to refuel their vehicle. When the officer exited the vehicle, there was an encounter and the gunman was shot and killed by police at 11:26 a.m.” …
Thirteen hours, 22 murders, seven fires, 16 crime scenes…
Even laid out in an ordered timeline, the events of that night and morning are mind-bogglingly impossible to wrap your head around. I’m guessing none of the officers on the ground or the dispatchers in the ether — who were all attempting to make sense of what they were confronting in real time — had ever encountered such an unlikely scenario, even in the most intense active-shooter, mass-murder training exercise.
We need to be kind to all of them even as we rightly demand answers to our many legitimate questions.
The fact is the murderer is dead. There will be no trial. There is no need to put off asking — and answering — questions.
The best — perhaps only — way to get those answers now is through an independent public inquiry. The province’s justice minister can call a fatality inquiry into any violent death. So can the chief medical officer. Perhaps most significantly, the premier can appoint a full-on public inquiry into all aspects of the tragedy and make recommendations to prevent such a tragedy happening again.
Stephen McNeil should do just that. Now.
The mass murder isn’t “senseless” in a culture that excuses the violence of white men
Why can't we understand how the impunity with which white men are allowed to threaten, to follow around, to fixate and to harm connects to how GW was able to move in silence until it was too late? Our culture continues to give white men a pass and then act shocked in the aftermath.
The killer’s replica police car. Photo: RCMP
After she wrote an article naming “white male terrorism” in the Nova Scotia mass shooting and other mass killings in Canada, Robyn Bourgeois, a woman of Cree heritage, predictably woke up to death threats from white men. Of the many things we were told it was “not the time” for in the wake of the killing, there is always time to threaten and harass women of colour.
It is past time to come to terms with how white male violence is implicated not only in these shootings, but in the ways white men are given license to bully, harass, threaten, and attack women of colour constantly, while it is the women of colour who are silenced.
The concern for it being disrespectful or too political or not the time or pursuing an agenda never seems to extend to confronting the speech of white men, and only ever seems to be dedicated to telling Black women and other women of colour to be quiet.
Not tragedy, nor pandemic, nor respect for victims, nor the need to be unified has ever stopped white men from taking time out of their days to harass Black women.
Following an article in the Chronicle Herald about the rise of racism during COVID-19 — while we are being told it’s “not the time” to ask for racially disaggregated data or discuss the impacts of race on health — a white man sent Dr. Rachel Zellars hate mail. Her crime? Discussing how her 14-year-old son was racially profiled and reported to police by white people when he was playing basketball alone in a playground. Here is what white men still have time for during a pandemic:
…If they can’t follow public health recommendations like everyone else, then that area should have been locked down immediately by the authorities so they couldn’t go outside of their community and possibly infect people that actually follow the rules. So again, that is not racism it’s reality. Blacks like to use the race card all the time, so they don’t have to take responsibility for anything, they can just continue to blame everybody else for their bad choices in life. That is nothing new. And FYI, blacks get more help through affirmative action unfair policies, so if you want to talk about racism how’s that for racism. Why should blacks be rewarded for not being as educated or qualified for a job? It’s not my fault or anyone else’s that most of them lack the intellectual ability to excel. Systemic racism it’s just a left-wing liberal made up term so that blacks don’t have to take responsibility for anything. So spare me your left-wing liberal nonsense, nobody is buying your lies anymore. You have some nerve crying racism when all the evidence clearly shows the Chinese were responsible for the coronavirus, and that here in HRM, blacks were responsible for their own actions and it was perfectly acceptable for their community to be called out for their reckless disrespect for the law. I wouldn’t expect a brainwashed liberal SJW with a mere PhD, which isn’t even a real Doctor, or a BA that anyone can get, to understand anything that deals with actual common sense, that’s reserved for people who are real Doctors like Dr. Robert Strang, MD
There is nothing unusual about this email. We receive this kind of abuse all the time. Black women are not the ones committing mass acts, and yet while men like this receive no social sanctions, all kinds of energy is devoted to policing us and telling us how and when we can speak.
This shooting is constantly referred to as being “senseless,” despite it following well-worn patterns of male violence that occur over and over again in mass killings. But beyond the extreme violence of this shooting is the everyday background of white male aggression that is just what we are expected to put up with. “Nobody takes them seriously,” we are told when we are harassed in comments sections, in emails, online, as if not taking white men’s threats seriously isn’t what brought us here.
There are hard questions to be asked of a culture that constantly polices the words of Black women while overlooking the acts of white men. Why can’t we understand how the impunity with which white men are allowed to threaten, to follow around, to fixate and to harm connects to how GW was able to move in silence until it was too late? Our culture continues to give white men a pass and then act shocked in the aftermath.
Alexandre Bissonnette had a history of harassing women online. Nobody reported him. Such behaviour is just normal. The majority of mass shootings begin with domestic violence, yet it is only in hindsight that people identify the red flags.
The RCMP has told us that GW’s movement across the province was “greatly facilitated” by the fact that he was dressed as a police officer. What is not being said directly is that this movement was possible because GW credibly looked like a cop. While Black officers report racial profiling by their fellow officers, GW was able to amass multiple police cars and an authentic police uniform. RCMP spokesperson Darren Campbell said he was “not aware” of any concerns raised by neighbours.
Consider this in the context of street checks, the purpose of which is not only to stop and surveil Black people, but to gather and hold our data. While this information is preserved, the RCMP repeatedly told us GW was not “known to the police” and “had no record” despite a previous conviction for an assault on a minor, as well as reported incidents with his neighbours and with the police.
Whiteness granted GW an immunity from a culture that continues to allow white men to act how they want, say what they want to whoever they want whenever they want and however they want without question. The default assumption is that the women they abuse — particularly women of colour — did something to deserve it.
Until we come to terms with the ways we treat the violence of white men as natural and expected and nothing to pay attention to other than to shame its victims, we should not be surprised when the violence they so often threaten becomes a reality.
When real life turns surreal
Leo McKay Jr: A gap has opened between what we thought the world was like and how it now appears. In Nova Scotia, there is surreality upon surreality.
A woman pays her respects at a roadside memorial on Portapique Road in Portapique, N.S. on April 24, 2020 (CP/Andrew Vaughan)
Leo McKay Jr (@leomckayjr) is a writer and teacher in Truro, N.S.
After more than 26 years as a high school English teacher, my way of looking at the world has been deeply affected by the material I teach: poetry, plays, short stories, novels, and films have come to shape my perception of the world, so that a few years back, when there was a shocking murder just a few blocks from where I live and I was seeing social media calls for revenge, I was prompted to post, as part of a general admonition against revenge, a quotation from Romeo and Juliet: “Confusion’s cure lies not in these confusions.”
And apparently, I am learning, it’s not just the works of literature that have so thoroughly entered my consciousness, but some of the literary terms and concepts I’ve been teaching generations of young people have also become a part of the lens through which I see the world.
So in the midst of this pandemic I’ve been thinking a lot about a technique called defamiliarization. Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature tells me that defamiliarization is a process of great art by which “the familiar” is suddenly “made to seem strange,” and that through this estrangement we are made to realize that “we have eyes and ears.”
In other words, by seeing the familiar presented in an unfamiliar way, we can learn to perceive more fully.
Defamiliarization is perhaps an alien word for many, but it is a common technique. There are examples large and small. One of the most famous is the opening sentence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four: “It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” In the 70-ish years since that book was published, there have been many opinions expressed about the exact meaning of that line, but whatever it means, whatever its full significance, it is obviously a signal to the reader: This is a world like the one you know (There are clocks. There is a month called April.), but the fact that the clocks are striking 13 is off-puttingly unfamiliar. That’s defamiliarization.
In the midst of the slow-moving catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all heard people remark on the state of our newly-changed world: “I went to the grocery store and it was surreal.” “I had to stand in a weird line-up of masked people to get into the pharmacy. It was like a movie.”
READ MORE: In memory of Emily Tuck, the young fiddler from Portapique
This strange, surreal, post-apocalyptic feel that our world has suddenly taken on is not so much a characteristic of the world itself, but of our bewildered response to it. This is defamiliarization not in art, but in real life. A gap has opened up between what we thought the world was like and how it currently appears.
This past Saturday night and Sunday morning, in the area of Nova Scotia where I live, a fast-moving catastrophe got superimposed on the slow-moving catastrophe of the pandemic. We found ourselves in the midst of what would later be determined was the largest mass shooting in Canadian history.
I live in the town of Truro, about 35 minutes from Portapique. Portapique is in the catchment area of the high school where I’ve been a teacher for more than 26 years. I know and have known lots of people from Portapique and the surrounding communities: Bass River, Economy, Great Village, Londonderry. And perhaps because my sense of community is shaped by my years as a teacher, I think of all the places where my students come to my school from, on busses, in cars, and on foot, as one big community.
From the moment I awoke on Sunday, this event felt like something that was happening to me and to the people closest to me. And I’m sure most people in the town of Truro felt the same way.
The first thing I did when I realized that whatever was happening in Portapique was serious, was to make a quick mental list of who I knew out that way. And I did what most people do in emergency circumstances: I sent texts. To three people. A colleague who lives in the community, a friend and former student who lives very near Portapique, and a colleague whose family has deep roots in the area. The texts I sent were some version of: “Hey. Looks like something crazy is going on in Portapique. Hope you’re okay.”
What you almost invariably get back when you send a text like that is: “Yeah. Everything is good. Thanks.”
This time what I got ran something like: “I’m okay, but my friend has been shot and killed.” “I’m okay, but my co-worker lives on that road and I have not been able to contact her.” And “We’re worried about a family member we have not been able to get through to.” In an instant, our familiar world had been transformed into something strange.
Even by the sick standards of mass shootings, the details of this event are bizarre. Like many people lucky enough to only be indirectly affected by the violence, I experienced the mass shooting through social media. And I spent a lot of the morning cautioning my young adult children not to trust the seemingly exaggerated details they were seeing local people post. The gunman is driving a police car. He’s pulling people over like he’s a cop and then just shooting them. Photos of houses and police cars on fire. I was reminded of the hoax photos that emerge during hurricanes: sharks swimming through shopping malls. “This can’t all be true,” I kept telling my family members.
But I was wrong.
And now we have surreality upon surreality. “I feel like I’m in a weird movie” has turned into “I feel like I’m in a terrifying movie.”
The artistic effect of defamiliarization, the effect of seeing a world presented in an off-kilter manner, is often a state of useful bewilderment. The difference between how we expect the world to appear and how it appears in, say, some post-apocalyptic film, opens up a useful gap. A space for reflection. A moment where it’s possible to ask potentially beneficial questions such as: How is my world different to the one depicted here? How is it similar? Could my world end up like this one? How?
Orwell’s most famous novel is intended as a warning: this could happen.
So is there something to learn from the defamiliarization we experience not in art, but in real life? Can we learn from the strangeness of the pandemic? Many people are expressing just such a hope. That we’ll come to trust public institutions again. That we’ll be more willing to think flexibly about our economy and the environment.
As for this mass shooting, I think it’s a bit much to expect a devastated community to start some sort of learning process. Hurt people must grieve. The immediate lessons in this event will doubtless be emotional: How to keep loving each other. How to rebuild trust in others when that trust has been violently breached. How to heal communities when the people in them, for the time being, cannot even be in the same room with each other.
Personally, and I say this only for myself, I pledge to begin to face the maleness of acts of violence such as these. As my radical feminist daughter points out to me: Violent acts like this are attempts to control, and these attempts stem from a sense of entitlement that is problematically linked to our cultural ideas of what it means to be a man. I pledge to acknowledge this misplaced sense of entitlement when I see it in myself. I pledge to call it out in others when I see it in them. I pledge, myself, to face hard truths, even when they implicate me and others in my social reach. I pledge to listen to knowledgeable people who have ideas about how to curb and eliminate femicide and male violence. I pledge not to shrug in the face of violence and pretend there is nothing that can be done.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the opinions or official policies of his employer or of any organization of which he is a member.
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/
The killer's name
Terry Glavin: What kind of person would do such a thing? Contrary to the PM's advice to journalists, there is nothing destructive in asking and seeking answers.
RCMP officers surround a suspect at a gas station in Enfield, N.S., on April 19, 2020 (Tim Krochak/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
Among the first questions that reasonable people were asking in the early aftermath of the massacre that unfolded over 14 horrifying hours in Nova Scotia over the weekend were these three: What the hell just happened? Why would somebody do something like this? What sort of person would do such a thing?
There is nothing macabre or morbid or in any way wrong or destructive to social cohesion in asking these questions out loud, and in wanting and expecting news organizations to seek out accurate answers to them. These are in fact precisely the questions the RCMP is setting out to answer. In a free and democratic society, it is right and proper that journalists are making the same sorts of inquiries and reporting the facts as they are discovered.
For these reasons, it would be reckless for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to give the appearance of instructing or advising journalists in how they should do their jobs, or to prejudge Gabriel Wortman’s motives, or to encourage weird ideas about how Canadians will or should respond to the barbaric acts of mayhem Wortman committed over the weekend.
But however well-intentioned he may have been, Trudeau did all three of these things at his Monday press conference. Trudeau asked the media to avoid so much as mentioning Wortman’s name or publishing a photograph of him. “Do not give this person the gift of infamy,” Trudeau said. Then there was this: “No one man’s action can build a wall between us and a better day, no matter how evil, how thoughtless or how destructive.”
READ MORE: Nova Scotia shootings leave at least 19 dead: What we know so far
Are we not all shocked and grieving and united in our sorrow and disbelief? Isn’t Trudeau himself proposing a wall between journalists who merely choose to name the killer and those of us who would expect them to, and editors who will ignore Trudeau’s advice and those of us who would want them to? Wouldn’t a wall like that immediately divide the mourners into Trudeau’s more ardent supporters on one side, and his equally fervent detractors on the other?
If there was any sort of wall going up in the early innings of this heartbreaking tragedy, its foundations could be found in the hours immediately after the first inklings about Wortman’s personality began to find their way into news reports about the massacre. Its bricks and mortar were expressions of outrage that Wortman was being somehow “humanized” by news reports to the effect that he was just a mild-mannered denturist from Dartmouth, whose friends and acquaintances regarded as a perfectly nice fellow, perhaps a bit odd, but otherwise harmless. And that this sort of treatment would only be afforded a white man. Or so one ubiquitous argument goes.
But reputable news organizations were similarly subjected to a thrashing in July, 2018 for merely reporting the sympathetic portrait drawn from the way friends and acquaintances described the horribly ill Faisal Hussain, whose Toronto shooting rampage ended when he took his own life after gunning down 15 people, killing two of them.
The “wall” between us back then was being built from the bricks and mortar of lies and half-truths and hysteria incited by fringe right-wing polemicists who insisted that Hussain’s shooting spree was some kind of Islamist-inspired act of terrorism. It was absolutely nothing of the kind.
Neither are Trudeau’s comments easily warranted by the example set by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last year, following the terrorist atrocity carried out by the white nationalist Australian Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch. “He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety,” Ardern said back then, “and that is why you will never hear me mention his name. . . He is a terrorist; he is a criminal; he is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless.”
With these words, Ardern spoke both a moral truth and an objective truth, and if anything, she understated the case. Tarrant’s desire for notoriety wasn’t the half of it. His rampage was specifically intended as “propaganda of the deed.” He slaughtered 50 Muslim people and left another 42 badly wounded. He broadcast his savagery by livestreaming it all. He simultaneously published a 74-page fascist manifesto setting out his sociopathic intentions.
New Zealand’s news organizations generally followed Ardern’s example. Whether or not it was wise, in retrospect, the mere possession of Tarrant’s manifesto was made a criminal offence. Genuinely astonished and curious New Zealanders were obliged to rummage through the detritus of far-right websites to find it.
All of that suggests a vastly different set of circumstances than anything known so far about Wortman, who went about his horrifying business in the masquerade of an RCMP officer, which may end up being all there is that’s worth knowing about him. The sooner we all forget Wortman’s name, the better, but we all have a right to know what it is, just as we all have the right to know the names of the victims he left strewn across the Nova Scotia countryside between the town of Portapique on Saturday night and the gas station in Enfield where it ended on Sunday.
There is a case to be made that Canadian journalists should pay close attention to the American experience with mass shootings, so as to minimize the risk of news coverage that might encourage sociopaths to imitate Wortman’s bedlam. But at the same time, there isn’t a mass shooting of one kind or another in Canada every two weeks or so.
Canadian journalists are not children who require direction from the Prime Minister. There should be no wall of any kind between Canadians in taking up the duty to console and comfort the survivors and the loved ones as they mourn their dead.
So let’s not build one.
Trudeau addresses the Nova Scotia mass shooting: 'We stand with you and we grieve with you' (Full transcript)
In the PM's daily briefing on April 20, he addressed the shooting that killed at least 18 people in Nova Scotia this weekend, announcing a virtual vigil will be held on Friday, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during his daily press conference on COVID-19, in front of his residence at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, on Sunday, April 19, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a daily update on the coronavirus crisis each day in front of his home in Ottawa. Today, he mainly addressed the mass shooting that occurred in Nova Scotia this weekend. Here are his remarks for April 20, 2020.
Good morning, everyone.
We are a country that stands united in our effort to defeat a pandemic, to save lives and to help each other make it to a better day. But yesterday we were jolted from that common cause by the senseless violence and tragedy in Nova Scotia. A gunman claimed the lives of at least 18 people.
Among them, a woman in uniform whose job it is to protect lives, even if it endangers her own. Constable Heidi Stevenson of the RCMP. Constable Stevenson died protecting others. She was answering the call of duty, something she had done every day when she went to work for 23 years.
This happened in small towns: Portapique, Truro, Milford and Enfield are places where people have deep roots, places where people know their neighbours and look out for one another. There, everyone knows a Mountie because they’re everything from police officers to social workers to teen counselors.
Now these communities are in mourning and Canada is in mourning with him. To the grandparent who lost a child, the children lost a parent to a neighbour who lost a friend. We are so sorry for your loss. Such a tragedy should have never occurred. Violence of any kind has no place in Canada. We stand with you and we grieve with you. And you can count on our government’s full support during this incredibly painful time.
I also want to wish a full and speedy recovery to all those injured, including another RCMP officer.
Canada is a vast and sweeping country filled with long stretches of lonely roads. With unwavering courage and compassion, our Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrol these roads to keep us safe as they have for over 100 years. I know that from coast to coast to coast, the women and men who wear the Red Serge in service to Canada are grieving deeply the loss of one of their own and one of our best.
This tragedy is a painful reminder of the risks all of our first responders take to keep us safe, of the sacrifices they make every single day to protect our communities. Paramedics, doctors, nurses, firefighters and police officers, they are always here for us. They’ve been stepping up through the pandemic, and yesterday in Nova Scotia, they showed that bravery. I want to take a moment to thank them all for their professionalism and their courage. Many of you are already working overtime because of this pandemic. Our communities need you now more than ever. And I know that can weigh on you at times. These are exceptional circumstances. Yet you did what you always do. You ran towards danger without pause, without hesitation. You put your life on the line.
On behalf of all Canadians, thank you for your service.
This day is made all the more difficult because of the precious lives lost and the senseless act of one person. Just how could this happen? We may never know why, but we do know this. No one man’s action can build a wall between us and a better day, no matter how evil, how thoughtless, or how destructive. Canadians are kind and generous. We are there for each other and we look out for one another. As families grieve the loss of a loved one, all Canadians are standing with them.
The pandemic will prevent us from mourning together in person, but a vigil will be held virtually to celebrate the lives of the victims at 7 p.m. on Friday through the Facebook group Colchester Supporting Our Community. As we learn more about what happened yesterday, it’s important that we come together to support communities.
In the hours since the tragedy, I’ve spoken with Premier McNeil, RCMP Commissioner Lucki, Minister Blair and many Nova Scotians, including our Nova Scotia caucus. We will continue to work together to see this through. I know that people have a lot of questions. This is an ongoing investigation, but I can assure you that the RCMP and local authorities will keep you updated.
I want to ask the media to avoid mentioning the name and showing the picture of the person involved. Do not give him the gift of infamy. Let us instead focus all our intention and attention on the lies we lost and the families and friends who grieve.
I want to close today by addressing all the kids in Nova Scotia and right across the country. I know the world can seem like a mean and ugly place right now, but there’s a whole lot of good in the world, too. You’ll see it in your neighbours and in Canadians in the days and weeks and months ahead. This is a difficult time and it can be a scary time, too. But we’re here for you and we’re going to get through this together, I promise.
“The whistleblower just hmmmed.”
What kind of a hmmmed was it? An agreeing one or a not that but something else one?
Seems we should be digging deeper into his child/youth/young adult life.
Gina: the source was inscrutable. I sensed it could be true, he had killed before. However, the source was determined to get to the major point… Wortmans relationship to the police. The source might have been a great actor, but in my experience, was being truthful. The focus was on that one that one explosive thing. I did the story now because I thought it was important to find the truth. I want everyone or anyone to get the so-called scoop. I really am sanguine about who wins, just that we the public win. I thank Tim for recognizing the relevance and acting with expedience. Thank you, Paulp
Gina : If GW did anything weird in his childhood or high school years he concealed exceedingly well. But a good place to start would be at UNB, where he was voted weirdo of the year, awarded the CHUCK COSBY award by his dorm mates. Even though he was an adult, he had gathered a pile of false IDS and false names and used them when he mysteriously disappear for days, never explaining to his room mate where he had gone. People found him kinky, an exhibitionist, quick to take offence, always making mountains out of molehills, strange, odd.
To me he is a garden variety psychopath/sociopath. I’ll leave that up to others. The other story is about the RCMP. That’s my focus. Maybe we should do a psychological profile of the Mounties. Is there a doctor in the house?
The RCMP is a corps of mostly well intentioned men and women working for a sociopathic organization. This has been clear since the report of the MacDonald commission in the 1980s. This is the big secret.
You are dead on. The McDonald Commission is the root of all evil when it comes to what has happened to the RCMP. The subsequent politicization has helped to create the chaos that is considered normal today. Good for you Bill. You get a gold star from the history teacher, but not spelling … I believe it’s McDonald.
I’d like to reply to a few comments raised on this issue. First to the obviously esteemed former member of the RCMP, Calvin Lawrence, who would have, by my estimates, retired in approximately 2003. I can assure you, Calvin, as a member who served when you were in the force and still serves today, that the training related to active shooters is 200% greater than it was in your day. For you to sit there in your rocking chair and cast judgement on the members who responded to this tragedy, which is unprecedented in virtually North America, let alone Canada, is incredible to me. As a former member, you should be supportive to your fellow members, instead, you for some unknown reason, feel the need to say that “although members carry guns, they likely don’t know how to use them in a desperate situation. What factuality is this statement based on? Nothing of course. You continue to blabble your bs, by saying that we should “have a way to deal with crazies.” Well we do now have yearly active shooter training, unlike in your day, when that was unheard of. You wouldn’t have had a clue how to deal with a lunatic like this, because, quite clearly, when you were a member, this training didn’t exist. I know, because I was there back then. So to make myself clear, shut your mouth, because you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
Thank you for proving my point about the cult-like attitude of the RCMP. You said: “As a former member, you should be supportive to your fellow members…”
“So to make myself clear, shut your mouth.” That’s old-school, closed-rank RCMP bullying at his finest. Thank you for the demonstration.
Mr. Lawrence has many policing credentials beyond his stint in the RCMP, including training. His comments to me were supported by others.
In lambasting him, Mr. Bryce, you seem to have overlooked the shooting up of the Onslow fire hall by a Mountie or two. Tell us more about the training, please.
Reputation VS Character… All policing bodies in Nova Scotia have difficulty between the two… The RCMP and HRP both have lost the respect of the citizens they serve because of the lack of accountability, zero transparency and no real rapport with anyone…
I hope to address those issues soon.
Wetting the bed as a child, though? C’mon, lots of kids do this for psychological or physical reasons and it’s not really cool to link that to someone’s definition of a psychopath or sociopath.
You can look it all up. It wasn’t intended to be offensive to any individual and certainly not all who display any of those traits evolve that way, thank the heavens. But some do, along with many other characteristics they pick up along the way in the great nature vs nurture continuum. It is what it is.
I will do my best but I am confident that other journalists and their fellow citizens are pushing on all fronts and I encourage their success. On the flip side, hopefully the RCMP diehards wake up and recognize that this latest incident is a clear signal that the RCMP is in distress and not just something else to be swept under the rug.