On Thursday morning, Premier Tim Houston spoke to reporters at Province House and issued a statement about the fifth anniversary of the mass murders that started in Portapique, N.S.

Houston said Nova Scotia has recommitted to following up and monitoring the work being done to implement the 130 recommendations from the public inquiry known as the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC). About 70 of those recommendations are related to policing in Canada.

Reporters asked Houston if he was satisfied with the pace of these changes from the recommendations.

“There’s a tremendous amount of effort and focus on the partnership with the federal government and the RCMP on this. We’re pushing hard. I think we all wish things would move faster but there is progress being made,” Houston said.

RELATED: ‘It still feels like yesterday that I lost them’: Portapique five years later

The Examiner decided to look at some of the progress that has been made in policing, particularly the RCMP, in Nova Scotia since the mass murders five years ago. We have reported on some of the progress, recommendations, and the final report from the Mass Casualty Commission here. As CBC reported in May 2022, the cost for the inquiry is at least $20 million.

We also wanted to talk with an expert on policing, someone who knows the story of the Nova Scotia mass murders, as well as larger issues around the RCMP and policing in Canada.

Kent Roach is a law professor at the University of Toronto, a well-known expert on policing, criminal law, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Roach was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2015. 

RELATED: Nova Scotia’s Policing Panic

In 2022, he published his book, Canadian Policing: Why and How It Must Change, which was nominated for the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Roach also provided expertise in establishing the Mass Casualty Commission. He’s written about policing and the RCMP in opinion pieces for the Globe and Mail here and here. In this column, Kent said this about the RCMP:

The RCMP is the antithesis of the model of local community-driven policing, patterned after Robert Peel’s Bobbies in London. It remains a colonial and militaristic force right down to the red serge.”

Roach also knows about police governance. In December 2023, months after the Mass Casualty Commission released its final report, Kent resigned from his role as the head of the RCMP’s Management Advisory Board. He served as head of that board for less than a year.

Details about Roach’s resignation are in this article by Catharine Tunney at CBC:

“I took this position on the understanding that the government was committed in the minister of public safety’s mandate letter to ‘enhancing the Management Advisory Board to create an oversight role over the RCMP,'” he wrote to Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc. 

“Unfortunately, I have seen no signs of such a commitment.” 

In other words, Roach knows policing in Canada well.

A balding white man with glasses and wearing a pale purple shirt under a black jacket.Kent Roach. Credit: University of Toronto

The Examiner interviewed Roach on Tuesday to ask him his thoughts on how policing, particularly RCMP, has changed in the five years since the mass shootings.

“It appears like a lot of work has been done. I do though worry that they may be focusing more on the trees than the forest,” Roach said. 

As the Examiner reported in March 2024, the RCMP released its strategy and its progress on recommendations a year after the MCC released its final report.

RCMP commissioner Mike Duheme said the work to that date included improving RCMP policies like the decommissioning of vehicles and limiting access to uniforms, work on recruitment, responding to gender-based and intimate partner violence, and focusing on wellness of victims and RCMP members. The entire RCMP strategy is here.

Roach said the work done within the RCMP has mostly been low-hanging fruit.

“What the Mass Casualty Commission calls for is a fundamental rethinking of the RCMP,” Roach said. 

While the MCC had 130 recommendations from its work, most of which were for the RCMP, Roach shared details his thoughts on ambitious reform the RCMP in just 10 ideas, which are listed this article in Policy Options.

Those ideas include everything from appointing a federal minister whose sole role is to fundamentally change the RCMP, give provinces and territories legitimate options for getting out of contract policing with the RCMP, and closing the RCMP Depot Division in Regina and replacing it with a Canadian College of Policing.

The Examiner spoke with Roach about some of his suggestions for reform. But in our interview, Roach spoke about another review of the RCMP in Canada. It’s this policy document titled “A New Policing Vision for Canada: Modernizing the RCMP” that was released by Public Safety Canada in March.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau had long pushed for reform of the RCMP, calling the federal police force “strained.” Roach said this policy review is Trudeau’s “last hurrah” as prime minister.

As the Public Safety Office mentioned in the policy document, changes in technology mean changes in crime as well, so policing must also change. Here’s a message in that document from Public Safety Canada:

While efforts have begun to make law enforcement more flexible and resilient, municipal, provincial and federal governments need to continue to challenge traditional ways. We need to think differently from a past dominated by information silos, poor resourcing and ad hoc arrangements. All levels of government need to take ownership if we are to collectively meet the new threats facing Canada.

One of the recommendations in that document include eliminating contract policing. That’s one of the three main functions of the RCMP, along with federal policing and specialized policing. The RCMP provide contract policing through Police Services Agreements (PSAs) that are negotiated between the federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments. From the Public Safety policy document:

The federal government should be committed to working closely with Provinces to support a transition away from contract policing, while maintaining strong interoperability with federal policing. The expiration of current Police Services Agreements in 2032 presents the first opportunity for implementing this next phase of policing in Canada. The work to define provincial needs and solutions should begin now. The Provinces have the needed expertise and knowledge of their jurisdictions and community safety needs – and should be on a path to fully exercise their responsibilities over policing.

In our interview this week, Roach said that March document from Public Safety Canada “throws a spanner in the works” of RCMP reform.

“Here’s the RCMP trying to implement 130 recommendations, most of them directed at the RCMP. And now, we have a government document saying, ‘maybe we’re going to get out of the contract policing business altogether,” Roach said.

“The RCMP, in some ways, that they’re being pushed and pulled in different directions.”

Three people sitting at a dais in front of a crowd.

From left to right, commissioners Leanne Fitch, Michael MacDonald, chair, and Kim Stanton deliver the final report of the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry into the mass murders in rural Nova Scotia in Truro, N.S. on Thursday, March 30, 2023. 
Credit: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese
 
Roach has argued the MCC should have made delivery and reform of contract policing the centre of its mandate. He mentions contract policing in three of his 10 ideas for reform. That includes giving provinces and territories as much direction as possible over contract policing.

Roach said he’s frustrated with continued talking about breaking down the siloes, but he said the recommendations in the final report are channeled back into those siloes. For example, police focus on the recommendations that apply to them, while the violence-against-women sector lead recommendations that apply to them. 

“This is where governance is quite important. We need to think of how to break down the siloes when it comes to governance,” Roach said. “That is much, much easier said than done.”

In his list of 10 reforms, Roach said one minister should be responsible for the RCMP. The national police force shouldn’t be part of Public Safety, which he argues is already too big of an organization. Public Safety’s portfolio includes everything from national security to emergency management and preparedness.

“If a new federal government is serious about changing the RCMP, even if it’s partially phasing out contract policing, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a minister whose job it is to oversee the RCMP, not necessarily CBSA [Canada Border Services Agency], Corrections [Service of Canada],” Roach said. 

Recommendation around RCMP training depot

One of the recommendations in the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report was to shut down the training depot in Regina. The depot offers a 26-week Cadet Training Program (CTP) that focuses on community policing and frontline work.

“It seems to be a pretty firm no that the RCMP don’t want to do that,” Roach said.  

 A white man with buzzed grey hair, glasses, and wearing a navy uniform with badges and golden epaulettes speaks into a microphone attached to a silver podium while a Black man with a beard and a navy uniform with gold epaulettes looks on.

Sgt. Sébastien Decaens, right, looks on as Nova Scotia RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dennis Daley, left, gives the apology in North Preston to African Nova Scotians and people of African descent for the historic use of street checks and other harmful interactions.
Credit: Suzanne Rent

The Examiner interviewed Nova Scotia RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dennis Daley in September 2024 and asked him about the recommendation on closing the depot. Here’s what Daley said.

The decision around the future of the training academy and depot will be a government decision, and that question would be better answered by them. I do know our commissioner has come out publicly and to the progress monitoring committee, talking about our training and talking about depot in Regina and how it’s world renowned and we get other countries coming to look at our training. He is not a proponent of adopting another model. We always look at our curriculum, and we’re always evergreen in our curriculum, so perhaps that needs to be tweaked and changed as we always evolve.  

The federal government has had its say on the future of depot. Here’s the Public Safety Canada document from March says about depot.

Training at the RCMP’s training academy (known as Depot) is accorded to RCMP’s federal policing mandate. Specialized training in technical disciplines, such as cyber, foreign languages, forensic accounting, does not occur in the early years of training or recruitment of future RCMP officers, and the absence of a dedicated career path for federal policing presents additional challenges relative to the private sector and other federal national security partners. These issues need to be addressed.

Roach said he knows there are fans of the RCMP depot and the training, but he said closing the depot is more than a symbolic gesture on the part of the RCMP and having a university-educated workforce at the RCMP is more at the “heart” of the MCC’s recommendations.

“The RCMP recruits now are not generally people straight out of high school. They’re people approaching their 30s,” Roach said. “I think the resistance to that kind of recommendation is yes, we’re going to do the smaller stuff but we’re not going to do the big, major rethinking and soul searching, which the Mass Casualty Commission called for.” 

In his own 10 recommendations for remaking the RCMP, Roach said a Canadian College of Policing can replace depot in Regina. That college could have with centres across the country that are connected to post-secondary institutions.

“It should offer both general, continuing and specialized training. The RCMP should reject the idea that Mounties are fungible,” Roach said in his list.

But the closing of the depot has some critics in community. In September, Daley delivered the official apology from the Nova Scotia RCMP to the African Nova Scotia community during an event in North Preston. As the Examiner reported then, one of the goals under the Nova Scotia RCMP’s action plan is to increase recruitment of African Nova Scotians, racialized, and underrepresented people to the RCMP.

Elder Mary Desmond, who offered the libation early in the event, said she wants to see more African Nova Scotians in the RCMP, too, but said closing the depot wasn’t the way to go.

“I think that would be a big mistake for the recruiting of African Nova Scotians. It’s hard to get African Nova Scotians into university,” Desmond said.

Slow progress by the Progress Monitoring Committee

The provincial and federal governments created the Progress Monitoring Committee in 2023 to monitor the work being done on the 130 recommendations of the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report. That included the work the RCMP is doing on the 70 recommendation that apply to policing.

One of the committee’s goals is “creating mutual accountability.” That term is on the committee’s website here.

The committee has a three-year mandate, and its members include family of victims. The current chair is Myra Freeman, former Nova Scotia lieutenant-governor.

Jennifer Henderson reported on the first work of the committee in December 2023, writing that progress at that time was slow.

Questions about the committee’s role of creating accountability were raised even before the committee first met. Stephen Kimber wrote about the secrecy of the committee’s work in this column:

There is, it seems to me, something odd, even unseemly, about a committee whose avowed purpose is to “create accountability… exchange knowledge and information… [and] support engagement and transparency,” but then meets behind closed doors, promising only to later publish what will almost certainly be a cherry-picked and antiseptically sanitized official account of what happened in private.

If Lee’s committee is serious about any of the boxes it’s supposed to be checking — engagement, transparency, accountability — its meetings would be open to the media and the public. 

A white woman with short white hair, wearing blue framed glasses and a navy jacket, smiles as she sits at a table with a microphone, in front of a maple leaf flag and the flag of Nova Scotia.
Myra Freeman, chair of the Progress Monitoring Committee of the Mass Casualty Commission Credit: Jennifer Henderson

The committee released its first update on May 1, 2024, under then chair and retired judge Linda Lee Oland.

How effective that monitoring committee will be remains to be seen. As Tim Bousquet reported after that update, the committee wouldn’t comment on the speed or effectiveness of the implementation of those recommendations. From Bousquet’s article:

“The purpose of the committee is to monitor progress,” explained Oland. “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether I, as an individual, I’m satisfied, dissatisfied, or elsewhere on that spectrum. What the committee will do is present what we have seen, and I think that it will be for Nova Scotians and Canadians to decide whether they are satisfied.”

The Progress Monitoring Committee held a media update in November 2024. The Examiner reported on that update in which committee chair Myra Freeman said at that point, the RCMP hadn’t been formally assessed on its work on the recommendations.

“But let me assure you, and let’s be clear, the work they are doing is comprehensive. We are having regular updates at the committee meetings,” Freeman told reporters.

When the Progress Monitoring Committee held that update in November, three women had been killed by their intimate partners. Freeman addressed the murders of those women in the update when Blair Rhodes, a reporter with CBC, asked if the recent murders are evidence that work to address gender-based violence in Nova Scotia is working. Here’s what Freeman said.

It’s heartbreaking to see these tragedies unfold in our communities, but they are very strong reminders that this is very important work, and we have to continue to move this forward.

Since then, several more Nova Scotian women have been killed by their intimate partners.

On Thursday, the Progress Monitoring Committee sent out this statement that included the list of the 23 people killed in the mass shootings (the victims include Kristen Beaton’s unborn child). That statement also noted the Nova Scotia women who were killed by their partners in the last several months.

That statement, however, doesn’t mention any timelines, announcements, or other news about the committee’s progress.

We remain committed to monitoring and reporting publicly on the initiatives that the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, are undertaking in response to the Mass Casualty Commission final report. We will take the time to mourn and reflect, and then we will continue our work.

Roach said such civilian-led groups can only do so much, especially when they are working on the committee part time, as are the members of the Progress Monitoring Committee.

The Progress Monitoring Committee meets only a couple of days at a time, a few times a year. Roach said those meetings likely only include presentations from the Nova Scotia RCMP on the work they’ve done on the recommendations so far.

Roach said when it comes to governance of police, these committees need expertise, plus a complement of full-time support staff to do the work properly and ask the right questions.

“The RCMP is huge organization; close to 30,000 people. I’m not sure people, even with the best of intentions, who are serving part time in getting together on a quarterly basis are really in the best position to actually make sure that the reforms are working,” Roach said.

“There’s a huge asymmetry of information and expertise. The RCMP do this for a living. Those people who are supposed to govern them do it on a part-time basis.” 

Roach knows about such governance well. He said one of his frustrations in working as head of the RCMP Management Advisory Board (MAB), the role he resigned in December 2023, was the lack of independent staff.

The federal government formed the MAB in 2019. The board consists of 13 independent 13 external experts who meet at least four times a year. Its current chair is Angela Campbell, a law professor at McGill University.

“I very much believe in civilian oversight, but I also think if you don’t have your own full-time staff behind you, you’re really going to be at a disadvantage on how seriously you take what you do,” Roach said.

“You’re there and you’re listening and you’re there part time and you’re dealing with people who do this all the time.”

One of Roach’s 10 proposed reforms for the RCMP is transitioning the management advisory board into a transparent and representative national police board that holds public meetings and gives advice to a minister responsible for the RCMP.

Not-so-public Nova Scotia police review

There is another review of policing underway in Nova Scotia, although progress on that work is slow. And so far, its work and progress are quite secret.

In March 2024, then Minister of Justice Brad Johns announced that Deloitte would take the lead on a comprehensive review of policing in Nova Scotia. There are 10 municipal police agencies in the province, while the RCMP is the provincial police agency.

The review committee was co-chaired by then Halifax councillor Lindell Smith and Hayley Crichton with the Department of Justice. Smith did not offer for reelection in October 2024; the Justice Department has not publicly indicated whether Smith still serves as co-chair of the review committee or if he’s been replaced.

Part of the Deloitte’s work included hosting surveys and public engagement sessions.

According to the March 2024 announcment, the review, which may make recommendations around policing in Nova Scotia, was expected to be released this month. A July 2024 announcement said “the policing review is expected to be completed by the spring of 2025.”

Last April, on the fourth anniversary of the mass shootings, Johns resigned as justice minister. That was after he made comments saying he didn’t think domestic violence was an epidemic.

In September 2024, Nova Scotia passed a bill that states domestic violence is an epidemic. 

A man wearing a suit and tie and glasses clasps his hands while looking ahead.

Nova Scotia Justice Minister Brad Johns chairs a meeting of the Law Amendments Committee in Halifax on Monday, April 3, 2023. 
Credit: Zane Woodford

So, what is the status of the police review? Jennifer Henderson wrote this story in December 2024 asking how just how “public” those public engagement sessions were.

From Henderson’s story:

On July 10, after Barbara Adams replaced Brad Johns as the justice minister, the province issued a news release announcing the public could participate in the review of police services through an online survey that would run until July 31. “In person” engagement sessions were promised for the late summer and early fall.

The future of policing was clearly a topic of considerable public interest. The anonymous online survey received 7,000 responses during three weeks in the middle of the summer. As a point of comparison, the online survey that was part of the public consultation on coastal protection drew 4,000 responses. 

As Henderson wrote, the in-person meetings where invisible and didn’t appear to be open to media.

Henderson got an update on that review committee’s work on Tuesday. Here’s a statement we received from Department of Justice spokesperson Lynette MacLeod:

We are extremely pleased to have received approximately 7,000 completed surveys and had over 200 people engage in group sessions facilitated by trusted community leaders across the province. We remain committed to the timeline that has been communicated, and more information will become available, including information about what we have heard from Nova Scotians, soon.

Lessons for RCMP from James Smith Cree Nation

Roach has studied another mass murder in Canada where the response of the RCMP came under a microscope. That was the mass stabbings in James Smith Cree Nation in Saskatchewan on Sept. 2, 2022. Eleven people were killed. Myles Sanderson, 32, was arrested after a high-speed chase. In her testimony during the investigation, Const. Heidi Marshal said she was ordered to “take the vehicle out” that Sanderson was driving.

Sanderson died in police custody days after the stabbings.

A national joint board of investigation, but not an inquiry, was launched months after the stabbings. As Kelly Geraldine Malone with CBC reported in March 2024, that investigation released 14 recommendations, many of which focused on Correctional Service of Canada and the parole board.

That investigation had three recommendations for RCMP:

  • Consider implementing mandatory enhanced driver training, including a specific tactic used in pursuits to force another vehicle to abruptly turn (commonly known as a PIT maneuver).
  • Consider a policy review of criteria in high-speed pursuits in the interest of the safety of all involved.
  • Consider additional training in the form of enhanced extraction techniques for arrest takedowns.

Roach said RCMP learned some lessons from Portapique, which was just over two years prior to the murders in James Smith Cree Nation.

“There wasn’t friendly fire. There was a better method of alerting people to what was going on,” Roach said. “As citizens, we have to demand more of our police, but we also have to recognize that we’re asking with our police to deal with problems they were never really designed or equipped to deal with.”

Roach said it’s impossible to know if other mass murders could happen again.

“It is important that the RCMP respond to this in a national way and take into account the lessons of the 11 people who died on James Smith Cree Nation,” Roach said.

“It’s easy to focus on the police because they have this cultural significance. We know what it’s like to be a police officer, maybe not so much a social worker.”

Yukon offers examples for community policing

Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) now has a public safety office and a public safety strategy. Most recently, Halifax Regional Council voted in favour of funding for a community crisis team pilot.

Still, police in Halifax continue to get more money. Council also voted for increases to the budgets for Halifax Regional Police and the Halifax Regional Detachment of the RCMP. Council also voted in favour of a $600,000 armoured vehicle for HRP.

Over the next two years, Halifax RCMP will establish satellite offices in Eastern Passage, Fall River, and Beechville, and hire 23 more officers. The current community RCMP office in North Preston will serve as the model for the three satellite offices. 

A sign with blue posts that says "Royal Canadian Mounted Police" sits on a grassy area next to a driveway and in front of a building.

The community office of the Halifax RCMP in North Preston. 
Credit: Suzanne Rent

Roach said he’s not seeing much effort in community policing.

“It seems like there was a very short conversation after George Floyd [was murdered by police] in 2020 about de-centreing the police or adding other community safety responses,” Roach said. “That really seems to have gone by the wayside in most places.” 

Roach said Canada does have excellent examples for how community policing can work. He said the in the Yukon has community safety officers that work in First Nations.  

“I think that’s probably the way to go because particularly when you’re dealing with Indigenous and racialized communities, there’s a lot of reason they might have more trust in their own community-selected people,” Roach said. 

There’s also the Yukon Police Council to govern the RCMP contract. That council, which was created in 2012, includes representation from First Nations, as well as the deputy justice minister, and gives direction to RCMP in the territory.

“That’s something I hope Nova Scotia is looking at. If contract policing is going to survive and get better, we have to get the governance issue right,” Roach said.

“Obviously, the Mass Casualty Commission documented that the RCMP detachment boards were not working particularly well.”

Still, there are issues with policing in rural communities. Roach said the MCC has a very ambitious proposals in putting a lot more money into rural areas.

Some of the commission’s recommendations detail how policing in rural communities can be reformed, including that the RCMP create a career stream for officers who want to specialize in rural or remote policing. Currently, many RCMP officers only stay in rural and remote communities for a couple of years early in their careers and then move on. That means they don’t get to really know or understand residents or the issues in a community.

Another recommendation says RCMP should offer new officers to a rural or remote community an orientation program to learn more about the community.

There’s no easy fix for policing in rural areas. Response times are going to be slower in rural areas. That’s just a fact of life.

Again, I don’t know how many of the Nova Scotia RCMP come from Nova Scotia or would necessarily spend their full careers there. In a large organization, especially one that seems to be getting out of contract policing, I worry about that if you put resources, you develop community relations, and then two, three years down the road, you get a promotion and you’re on the road to Ottawa or Saskatchewan.

Roach said the coroner’s inquest into the death of Rodney Levi in New Brunswick suggest the RCMP provide dedicated, uniformed community liaison officers to detachments that serve First Nations.

On June 21, 2020, Levi of the Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq Nation was shot twice in the chest by RCMP Const. Scott Hait. The recommendations from that inquest are here.

“One of the things we need to do it think creatively about how we use community safety officers, community liaison officers, and so on. I don’t see the RCMP leading in that area, not that I can point to a lot of police services that are doing that,” Roach said. “They need to seriously think about that.” 

Policing is ‘deeply fragmented’

Roach said Canadians are right to demand changes in policing. Still, he said, policing is hard to change, especially since there are conflicting interests and roles.

Roach said policing in Canada is “deeply fragmented and there are a lot of questions to be asked about who does what and when it comes to policing. What orders of government takes on what roles and how? Should a federal minister oversee the RCMP? Or should it be a police board or even a municipal council to oversee the organization?

Regardless, there’s a lot of work to be done.

“I think we still have to think our way out of this problem as well as out of work our way out of the problem,” Roach said. “With 130 recommendations, 3,000 pages [in the final report], there’s a danger of losing the forest for the trees.”  

Suzanne Rent covers City Hall, contributes to Morning File, and more.

Jennifer Henderson is a freelance journalist and retired CBC News reporter.