stephen.kimber@ukings.ca 902 422-1271 ext. 150

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.

Thursday, 23 July 2020

Independent panel 'a slap in the face,' says daughter of N.S. shooting victim

El Jones - Judges

el jones

David Amos

Hmmm

 

Butter O'Halloren

"This video is dedicated to all the courageous prisoners..." Hmm... so raping a child and going to prison for it is courageous? Killing in cold blood and getting caught and sentenced for it is courageous? Scamming elderly people is courageous? Trafficking pounds of heroin to teens and young adults is courageous? At what point are you going to ponder where personal responsibility comes in to play? Where the concept that decisions have consequences come into play? I couldn't care less what your opinions are but when you try in some weird, roundabout way to vilify Sidney Crosby for simply going with his team to the white house while at the same time heralding prisoners for getting what they truly deserve, it's clear your perceptions are completely misaligned with reality. Stop race-baiting. The white house trip was neither about race nor politics, and attending was not an act of moral cowardice. Sidney Crosby owes you nothing. Nor does any professional athlete. The fact that you were poet laureate of Halifax makes me question the honor of that title.

 

 

Janice Oostveen

El Jones sexually assaulted me.

Canada is So Polite - El Jones

Janice Jo Lee

Rollling

Me thinks we need more Marxist professors on universities to make Canada great again.

 

jimmycrackedcorn226

We do need more marxist professors everywhere.

 

Nabi Rasch

Maybe Stalinist. Just so we stay on track.

 

David Amos

"Me thinks" Interesting choice of words from an anonymous soul EH? However its far more interesting to mean old me that my comment was deleted after I paid Madame Jones a compliment and sent the proof that I did so to many folks before it went "Poof"Hence Methinks I have the right to say that the Lady Doth Protest Too Much N'esy Pas?

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.

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.

July 17, 2022 By Stephen Kimber4 Comments

 

Lisa Banfield testifies at the Mass Casualty Commission on Friday, July 15, 2022. 

Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

 

“We keep getting confronted by people who seem to have a perception of what a cross-examination 

is from television,” [Michael Scott, lawyer for families of victims of the Nova Scotia mass shooting] 

 said. “They say, ‘Why do you want to berate this person?’ That really shows a misunderstanding of 

what this is.” The principles of cross-examination and testing a witness’s evidence through questioning 

have been a foundation of the courts for centuries, he said.

Globe and Mail

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.

June 26, 2022 By Stephen Kimber1 Comment

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 28^th 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.

https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/province-house/the-mass-casualty-commission-and-the-catch-22-of-accommodation/

 

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.

May 29, 2022 By Stephen Kimber2 Comments

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.

https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/province-house/the-clock-is-ticking-down-on-the-mass-casualty-commission/ 

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

1. the causes, context and circumstances giving rise to the tragedy,
2. the responses of police, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and municipal police forces, and
3. the steps taken to inform, support and engage victims,
4. police policies, procedures and training in respect of active shooter incidents,
5. policies with respect to the disposal of police vehicles and any associated equipment, kit and clothing,
6. policies with respect to police response to reports of the possession of prohibited firearms, including
7. communications between law enforcement agencies, and
8. 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/

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/featured/portapique-tragedy-we-need-a-full-public-inquiry/ 

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.

https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/the-mass-murder-isnt-senseless-in-a-culture-that-excuses-the-violence-of-white-men/ 

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.

 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.

 https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/a-nightmarish-crisis-and-the-mistakes-that-may-have-been-made-by-the-rcmp/

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

By Stephen MaherMay 13, 2020

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

 

In memory of Emily Tuck, the young fiddler from Portapique

The Tuck family (Tammy Oliver-McCurdie/Facebook)

You can see Emily Tuck’s shy pride in the video her father made of her last month for a kitchen-party Facebook group that Nova Scotians created to share tunes during the pandemic.

Tuck, 17, is holding her fiddle, dressed for quarantine in gym socks, pyjama pants and a T-shirt, standing in the living room of the Portapique home where she and her parents Aaron and Jolene were later murdered.

“OK,” says her dad. “Your contribution to the COVID kitchen party.”

“Herbie MacLeod,” she says, and smiles shyly, and then bends to her fiddle and lifts her bow.

“Wicked,” he says, right proud of her.

The song is In Memory of Herbie MacLeod, a sad but sweet air, written by late Cape Breton fiddler Jerry Holland in honour of a friend in Massachusetts who often hosted travelling Capers. It is slow waltz, wistful and lilting, with a bittersweet Celtic sadness, and in the video Emily plays it well, head bent, intent.

Then, when she finishes, she grins at her dad, her chin stuck out with pride. “There’s some fiddle for ya.”

In Memory of Herbie MacLeod was the first tune that Emily learned.

At the time the family was living in Sydney, where Aaron had roots. He and Jolene had met in Alberta, while he was out there working. They fell in love, had Emily and eventually moved to Cape Breton when Aaron’s mother, who lived there, was ill.

Emily was having some difficulty in school and Jolene hoped that the fiddle would help her.

“One of the things that was pretty tough for her was confidence,” says Shawn Macdonald, who taught her to play. “They didn’t have very much in line of money or anything like that. They worked really hard. So it was really hard for her to grow up where everything is always designer this or designer that. So Jolene enrolled her with me and you know, helped boost her self confidence.”

Her dad brought her to the lessons and sat and listened to her, encouraging her.

“He was pretty rough around the edges but deep down he was a great guy,” says Macdonald.

“Every time that Emily came over to my house, he wanted to sit in the lesson room and listen to her play. Never missed a lesson. And sometimes I would go over to her house, when their car was on the bum or whatever, and I’d spend an hour with her in their living room, and he’d sit there and have a beer, and listen to her and say, ‘By Jesus that’s good, Emily. You know, honey. That’s great.’ He was always trying to give her encouragement.”

Paula Williams got to know Aaron 25 years ago when they were both single and childless, both working in shops at the Truro Mall, down the road from Portapique. One night they decided to go to the Engine Room Pub for a beer and a few games of pool. Aaron introduced Paula to a friend who later became the father of her children. She remained close with Aaron, staying in touch over the years. Aaron sent her a link to Emily’s fiddle video when it was posted, for instance.

When Aaron’s father was dying, he stayed with Paula’s family for a while. He was a doting husband and father, Williams says.

“If he didn’t call them one thousand times a day he called them a million times a day,” she said. “Jolene and Emily were his life. And he would say, ‘Did you do your fiddling today’ ‘Yes, Dad, I did.’”

She often played for visitors.

“Anytime you went to visit them they always asked Emily to bring out the fiddle and play us all a tune and she gladly would,” says Lisa Floyd, a friend from Sydney.

“She was the light of his life as well as Jolene. He loved those two girls more than anything.”

The family moved to Portapique two years ago after Aaron’s father, Bruce, passed away and Aaron inherited his house, not far from Portapique Beach. At that time, Aaron started going by “Friar,” which had been his father’s nickname.

“I feel like Jolene and Aaron and Emily were their happiest there in Portapique the last two years,” said Tammy Oliver-McCurdie, Jolene’s sister, who lives in Alberta.

Oliver-McCurdie, who is grieving her sister, has established a fund to help the family manage the funeral expenses and start a bursary in Emily’s name.

While the family lived in Portapique, Jolene was working at the Engine Room, the same pub where Aaron and Paula became friends. Emily was attending the Cobequid Educational Centre in Truro. She would have graduated in June.

Aaron, who had previously worked as a cobbler and mechanic, had hurt his back lifting an engine, so he couldn’t work. He kept busy improving their home, though, and working on the family’s clapped out Pinto, which Emily enjoyed helping him with.

The house, which had no running water or power when they moved in, needed a lot of work and they steadily made progress on it. Aaron got the water to run, and surprised Jolene with it. They added a greenhouse. Aaron made a hand-cranked washing machine. Friends say the door was never locked, whether they were home or not, and they welcomed everyone in their home.

Emily was happy working with her parents on the place.

“It’s very seldom you see a 17-year-old girl that loved spending time with her parents,” says Cheryle Blaikie, a friend from Truro. “True family love. When Aaron spoke of her his eyes beamed with pride. They didn’t have a lot but they loved each other.”

Friends say that Aaron had spoken of a conflict with their neighbour, who last week murdered them. But nobody who knew them wants to talk about the killer. They want to celebrate the family. On Facebook, thousands of Canadians have shared the video of Emily playing her fiddle.

They have also shared a video of her heartbroken teacher, playing the same tune, his tribute to her.

“I want the world to know that this kid had a future,” says Macdonald. “Whether it be a musical future or some kind of future. She had something that she was working at, and she was good at it, and she had confidence in herself doing it. You can tell when she was playing that air on the kitchen party. She had a smile on her face. She loved it. It was an accomplishment for her. Glad to be a part of that. And that’s why I posted it last night. I just wanted the world to know. This 17-year-old deserved to live. Did not deserve to die.”