The Ben Mulroney Show - The Tumbler Ridge shooting hits home... and causes confusion online

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

GUEST: DR. Laura Targownik /  associate professor of medicine and director of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Toronto / Also, a trans woman in her 50s GUEST:  Adam Zivo / national post columnist  GUEST: ERIN UBELS / News Anchor at 730 CKNW If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. I wish I could just take this all away. I've lived through my entire life. I would never thought. I've always said that this is the best place to live and to raise my kids. And now I have kids that don't want to go to school, don't want to leave the house. I mean, it was my friends. and kids that I played talk to you with on my street and grew up with

and now never like it's Tumblr like it just doesn't feel real a very difficult day for the nation this morning parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers in Tumblr Ridge

will wake up without someone they love the nation borns with you Canada stands by you If you have a beating heart, it is broken today. With the tragedy that has befallen, a town of just over 2,000 people in the BC interior, we mourn the loss of life in Tumblr Ridge with a total deaths of 10, which includes the shooter, with at least 25, maybe even as high as 27 people, wounded with some suffering, life-threatening injuries.

Mark Carney, I believe, showed the appropriate emotion in making that statement. The moments of support and positions that were taken in the House of Commons today by the Prime Minister, Pierre Poliev, were real and they were raw. and they were the emotions felt by parents. I dropped my daughter off at school today. Our kids are supposed to be safe at school. The first place they're supposed to feel safe is at home. And right after that is school. And the fact that it turned into what it turned into

for that entire town is why we need answers. It's why we have questions. We're going to do our best today. as rationally and as fairly as possible to ask really important questions. This is a really difficult conversation. The delta between what we know and what we deserve to know is wide. And so we're going to do our best on this show today to get those answers or at least start asking the right questions. In the meantime, some of those answers were provided by the Deputy BC RCP Commissioner Dwayne McDonald.

He was in front of a microphone just a few short minutes ago. Let's listen to a little bit of what he had to say. Police from Taborage, RCMP, and surrounding detachments responded immediately, with members from the local detachment arriving within two minutes of the initial call. Upon arrival, there was active gunfire, and as officers approached the school, rounds were fired in their direction. Officers entered the school to locate the threat. Within minutes, an individual confirmed to be the shooter, located deceased with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

So we're learning more about the timeline of events and how the shooter first began their shooting spree at home, killing their mother and their stepbrother before going to school and unleashing hell. But why? Here's the deputy commissioner talking about motive. We understand the community has questions. and we understand they want to know the motive behind this tragic incident. We do believe the suspect acted alone,

and there are currently no other outstanding suspects. Our investigators remain on scene, actively gathering information, determine the full circumstances of what transpired. So we're learning more about, we're getting drips and drabs. We're going to get more details for sure as the investigation goes on. but all we can do is piece it together as best we can, like a puzzle with the information that we're being given as it's being given. And we're learning that there were many mental health visits by the police. They were called to this person's home many times over the years.

We know there were guns in the house. We know that there were guns on this person's social media pages. There were red flags. We have to find out. We need more information to determine whether, these red flags were taken seriously because it seems at first blush

that this is the roadmap that one would look at and say, oh, if only we knew then what we know now, we knew a lot back then, we knew a lot. Let's listen again to the deputy commissioner talking about showing up that house, seizing firearms. Police have attended that residence in the past

approximately a couple years ago where firearms were seized under the criminal code. I can say that at later point in time, the lawful owner of those firearms petitioned for those firearms to be returned and they were. Yeah, those are some red flags. And we now know that the shooter's name is Jesse Van Routzilar, 18 year old. Now, according to the police, female, left school four years ago. Here's the issue. And here's where I want to be very judicious and I want to be respectful,

but I am not going to shy away from saying the thing that needs to be said. This person left school four years ago. They were identified by this deputy commissioner as female Jesse Van Rutzelar. A journalist then said, asked a follow-up saying, we are hearing online that the shooter was trans. Can you tell us if that's true? and why didn't you tell us in the first place? To which the deputy commissioner said,

well, first off, thank you for your question. We're not hiding it. In fact, you're the first media to ask the question. I will say this. We identified the suspect as they chose to be identified in public and in social media. I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male, who approximately the information that I have, approximately 60 years ago, began to transition to female

and identified as female, both social. socially and publicly. This is where things are going to start getting a little dicey. Because we have to take the world as it is, not as we want it to be. And of course, the world that we want to live in is one where everyone lives the fullest expression of their truth and how they see themselves. Something happened to this person that made them inflict damage the likes of which this country does not often see. they ripped a community apart. And you know who's responsible for 94 to 97% of all mass shootings?

Men, it is a nearly exclusive male issue. And to let it linger out there that it was a woman responsible for this mass shooting muddies the waters. and in a time where we demand, expect, and require clarity, the fact that this person was transitioning should have been volunteered. It should not have been, oh, well, nobody asked us the question, so we didn't say it. That's unacceptable. This community and this nation deserves clarity and precision in answers.

I am not making a case against trans people. I am making a case that we require precision. I don't understand why that wasn't volunteered. Was being trans something that impacted the situation? We don't know. But we also don't know it wasn't. Talk radio is a place for responsible speculation. It is expected of us.

And I believe I can responsibly speculate that in a town of 2,500 people, this individual who identified as trans was probably one of one. Probably didn't have a community of other people with whom she, he could identify. And this town is tiny. So it's isolation, built upon isolation.

left school at what, 13, maybe even 12, I think I can speculate that possibly there was bullying going on. I may be wrong, but I don't think it's irresponsible to put that out there. All of this is germane to this person and why they ended up doing what they did.

And to simply say it was a woman denies the journey that this person was on, denies the trauma that they possibly experienced. It is irresponsible of the police not to be precise in their language. We demand, we require more and better from them. So there's a lot to get into, and we will continue asking those questions.

Much more to come right here on the Ben Mulroney show. Enjoy amazing days for one more week at Metro. Save big on selected varieties of Nestle Real Dairy Ice Cream for only $4.97 each. And lean ground beef value packs just 544 per pound. Only till February 11th. Shop in store or online at metro.com. Welcome back to the Ben Mulrini show as we attempt to wrap our heads around this national tragedy that took place in the BC interior in Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia, where a shooter ripped that community apart, killing nine and eventually themselves, and wounding almost 30 other people. I think it's time to add some voices to this conversation. So please welcome Dr. Laura Targovnik.

She's Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Toronto. Also, a trans woman in her 50s. Doctor, welcome to the show. Hi there. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. And Adam Zivo, National Post columnist. Thank you for being here. Adam, really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. So this is where I want to be careful. I want to be judicious. But I also don't want to shy away from the question. that have to be asked and answered. And Dr. Laura, I was taken aback in listening to the RCMP, where they stated that the shooter was female. And it was only upon questioning from the journalist,

did they specify that this was a trans woman? And I want to be clear, the only reason at this point that it matters to me is because the journey of a first of all women these mass shootings are almost exclusively the domain of of men 94 to 97% of them

are mass shootings are done by men but two to say it was a woman there's a particularly journey that a woman has a natural born woman versus a trans person in a rural area

who left school and started transitioning possibly hadn't been in school in years it's a different journey and the precision that we weren't offered that was not volunteered is concerning to me. Yeah, no, I can understand the concern, you know, in, you know, in this setting.

You know, part of the problem we're running into is that we don't really have a firm definition of what makes someone a trans person. And a lot of this, you know, comes about perhaps somewhat intentionally because, you know, we came up in an age where, you know, we believed that people's identity was something. something that was fixed, probably established at birth, and that if someone said that they were trans, that we were supposed to take them at their word, and not sort of question that assessment and to enable them to, you know, seek to live in a role of compatible with the other gender, compatible with the other gender.

That being said, when people are able, when people really self-identify, it actually, and we sort of grant them the same status. as someone who actually is, you know, has gone through the process, is under medical supervision and lives full time and has been sort of screened, it creates a lot of confusion in the public because, and like I said, we're just still learning a lot of this case, and I don't want to get into specifics because there's a lot we have led to learn about this person's specific journey. But I think we do the trans community at a disservice when we sort of classify

by people like this, or at least how it's sort of shaping up to be, people who just merely identify and take on an identity as opposed to people who are living their full lives. It sort of collapses these categories down to one thing when really we're talking about something that has actually played heterogeneous. Yeah. Yeah. I want to let Adam jump in. Adam, your thoughts.

Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think there are many different ways to be trans and that there are traditional transsexuals who I think most of us can have a lot of sympathy for. People who just want to assimilate, whose conception of womanhood is, you know, quite normal and who don't want to, you know, make a big issue in life. We're generally not noticed. But sometimes we have people who identify as trans in very different ways who are more fetishistic and who often are struggling with severe mental illness. And I was actually reviewing the old Reddit accounts and YouTube accounts of, you know, of Jesse, the shooter. and I think that he definitely falls in that second category.

So how do you mean? How do you mean? Well, so for example, his YouTube account, you know, it's all just anime women. And in his Reddit account from his post from 2023, he mentioned that he's watching a lot of anime and that he finds himself often comparing himself to these anime women and that he partially wants to transition to be like them. And so I think when you have a, oh, and on top of that, he also mentioned that he was severely depressed, that he was on antidepressants, antipsychotics, that he was using cannabis,

copious amounts of mushrooms, that he was experimenting with DMT, which is a very dangerous and very potent, lucigenic. And so you have someone like this who was clearly very, very mentally unstable, and their conception of transness is rooted in anime and aspiring to be a hypersexualized, voluptuous anime woman, you know, I think that that is very different from what most normal trans people experience. And I think that it's unfair when we try to make equivalences between these different modes of transness. And I think that the traditional transsexual, you know, is, you know, not, it's very, I don't find them controversial, to be honest, and I feel bad that the trans community is being associated with the second group,

which is so unstable. Yeah. And Dr. Laura, I was just listening to a podcast where a young trans woman said that, you know, she lived in a big city and she said, but she didn't have a community until she became, you know, a content creator on YouTube. And that's where she found her tribe. That's where she found them. And so, which is why I think it is germane to the conversation to talk about this in this case, because in this rural area, 13-hour drive from Vancouver, 2,500 people in this town. it's entirely possible that Jesse was one of one with no community to speak of.

And it's isolation upon isolation. I think that is why it's important. Unfortunately, we have to, I mean, I don't know, it's focus on it, but we cannot discount it. Yeah. So I think there's two sides to it. So if I want to talk a little bit about my own journey, which was, you know, like I transitioned my 20s, but part of the reason that sort of prompted me to transition was, you know, so I was born in the 70s And I was in my 20s, in the 1990s, when I first got on the internet, and one of the first things I did was try to reach out to try to figure out why was I feeling the way I did and who were people who were feeling like me.

And it really, in some ways, enabled me to take my transition because I was able to identify with other people who were similarly situated to me, other people who are young professionals, other people who are otherwise successful, who were making lives and living as recognizable females and showed me that this was a way that was possible without me sort of losing my job. losing my family necessarily. And I personally been able to make a wonderful life for myself. And so I don't want to totally demonize sort of, let's say, internet exposure because it really, as you're alluding to, can be a way for people who feel isolated. And, you know, as someone at that age in the 90s where I didn't know any of the trans people in real life, the internet really opened that up for me. But I think what I wanted to want to come back to is there are some differences between

people like myself who knew that they were different, who were feeling dysphoric, like, you know, the sense of wanting, of really feeling that she should have been female or wanting to be female and then finding out a way that it's possible. And once again, I don't want to speculate too much about Jesse because we're still learning a lot about them. But, you know, here we have someone who, at least by initial reporting, appears to just be a very troubled person. You know, and I don't know about the early childhood experiences, but I think there was even a comment that maybe even when this child was seven about having sort of behavioral issues. and obviously struggling with a lot of mental health issues. And I think people like that are often looking for like, why do I feel the way I do? Yeah.

I only have a little bit of time left. I want to give the last word to Adam. Oh, we've got two segments. Oh, good. Okay, we've got lots of time. But Adam, I want to ask you, with all of this stuff, again, we're learning as we go. But I think it's fair to say that Jesse was a troubled person with some mental health issues. And the question is, how did this person pass the mental health requirements to transition?

Well, see, that's, I think, the big question here. So from those 2023 Reddit posts that I was able to excavate, Jesse did mention that he was exploring HRT and was on a wait list to see a specialist in Prince George, which is the largest major city near his place. And so we don't know if Jesse went through with medicalized transition began hormones, but it appears that he, and I'm using here, because, like, I'm trying to be, you know, accurate about biological sex here because it matters. You know, he went and potentially saw a medical expert who didn't flag these huge problems.

And it's tied into a larger conversation over whether gender affirming care is provided responsibly. Because oftentimes we've seen the UK and Canada and in the United States, you have gender clinicians who think that just giving someone hormones is sufficient and you can ignore all of the other mental health issues that they have, right? They think that this is the silver bullet for their patients when obviously you have patients who are coming in who are gravitating sometimes transgenderism because it's their way to cope with their immense trauma and these clinicians are not asking questions and giving them the adequate care that they need to address these other problems.

All right. Adam, Dr. Laura, we're going to take a quick break, but much more to come. I'm so glad to have you both here. Don't go anywhere. The Ben Mulrudey show continues. We are learning more about the things. victims of the shooting in Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia, 39-year-old female educator, as well as three 12-year-old female students, two male students aged 12 and 13. Two additional victims were a 39-year-old female and an 11-year-old male who were located,

deceased at a local residence, later confirmed to be the mother and stepbrother of the shooter. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney-Shion. Thank you so much to Dr. Lauren Adam Zivo for sticking around. around. Dr. Laura, I'd love to spend just a little time talking about your transition, your journey, because as you said, you transitioned in your 20s. And here I am looking at this, at this person, Jesse, who as we said, had a history of mental illness. There was stories of violence. There were guns in the house. Again, possibly quite isolated in this very small town with no, no mentor, no one to talk to with a lived experience that they could

pull from, you know, very few limited mental health, limited mental health resources in this town. And the only guide through what I have to believe is a turbulent and uncertain time is the internet. And so I've got to wonder, you know, if ever there was somebody who, who, I, wish could have followed your path. It's this person, doctor. Yeah, so I don't know if that's necessarily the best framing. You know, and the reason I say that is that I think there's something very different going on with someone like Jesse than what was going on with me. And, you know, here we have someone who, like I said, was had, you know, a high level of mental illness.

and had latched onto, sort of, you know, I think Adam alluded to this too, had latched onto transgenderism as sort of perhaps the solution, you know, I imagine this is someone who is like searching for, why am I so off? Yeah. Maybe this is why. And maybe got turned, you know, found some other people and maybe found a story that resonated. I think what really, the responsibility here is, and I'm not, and I don't want to default the parents that we know very few details about this, is that this is that this is someone who

needed mental help. I mean, help with their mental health. Yes. And their mental health issues needed to be engaged with, as did maybe their feelings about detachment from, about detachment from their birth sex or feelings of maybe desire to be the other sex and really sorted out what's driving this. Because it may be that this was just sort of, you know, an attempt to cope with a lot of struggles in this person's life. And maybe this is something that fades away. And or maybe once the other issues are dealt with, assuming they can be dealt with, this can be dealt with, I mean, the gender issues can be dealt with separately. So I don't want to make it, you know, I don't want to fall down the trap of saying,

oh, if only they had someone to talk to that would have straightened out there, that would have let them sort of facilitated transition that this wouldn't have happened today. I don't think that's the right way to frame it. Fair enough. Yeah. No, fair enough. I appreciate that. Adam, I think, you know, when what we learned today from that press conference with the RCMP

is that there were some pretty big red flags. there were some pretty big red flags. If only we had known then what we know now, well, what we knew then was concerning to say the least. And I don't know that the authorities are going to acquit themselves very well if that's the story that we end up as the record on this. There was a lot of stuff should have told us, hey, we got to watch out for this person.

Well, so for some context, first of all, I want to emphasize that, you know, obviously most trans people are perfectly fine and lovely people. Right. But what we have seen over the past 10 years or so is that people who are very mentally unwell will sometimes gravitate towards transgenderism because they believe it explains why they're different. And they believe that medical transition will solve all of their problems. And usually that occurs in the context of young females, I don't know, identifying as men abruptly when they're 13 or 14 years old. That being said, it can sometimes happen with young males. And so it appears that this might be what's the case here.

You had someone who was very mentally ill, who gravitated towards transgenderism because they were struggling with so many different problems. The problem is that in the late 2010 and in the early 2020s, there was this focus on affirmative care. Basically, if someone who says that their transgender comes to you and says that they have gender dysphoria, you as a clinician are supposed to just give them their hormones and not ask any follow-up questions. And so we know across the anglosphere many mentally unwell youth who said that they were

gender dysphoric or were incidentally gender dysphoric received substandard care. And so I think the big question here, as mentioned in our previous segments, is where were the clinicians here that were seeing Jesse for dysphoria and why did they fail to provide more mental health supports to someone who was self-reportedly suicidal and based on their Reddit post saying that they almost burned down their own home and a bit of psychosis after taking too many mushrooms. Well, you know, last week's announcement by the American Medical Association, which is the largest physicians organization in the United States, they reversed its position on gender affirming surgery for minors. And if you go into what they emphasize, they want more rigorous

psychological assessment, more parental involvement, more oversight by multidisciplinary teams, more emphasis on long-term data and research gaps, that in and of itself last week was an important story. But in light of what we're talking about today, I think takes on even more importance given, I mean, it just doesn't feel like in that small town, those resources, the resources that are listed by the AMA as to what would be required were anywhere close to available doctor. Yeah. So I think what this comes to, is it's really a mental health crisis that we're dealing with here.

And we know this is not just related to the trans issue here. There are a lot of kids who are struggling with a lot of different issues with poor mental health, whether it's due to depression, anxiety, you know, post you know difficulties with stressful childhoods adverse experiences of childhood abuse substance abuse that our mental you know our mental health system is not designed to manage appropriately it sounds like this person irregardless of you know this interplay of the transgenderism needed probably more mental health services and were likely available to them in this small remote town in you know northeastern British Columbia you know this is a story that's repeating itself over and

over and over again, once again, having nothing to do with transgenderism, but just with children who really need more help than our current healthcare system can provide. Like, we have a mental health crisis here. And so, like, I don't want to pin too much on individual physicians who make, you know, like I think a lot of physicians who are working in mental health are doing the best they can with an overburden system, with an increasing prevalence of kids who are struggling, and with little and without the capacity to really give them the holistic care that they all require.

Yeah. It's, look, when all is said and done, and this show is done, I want to make sure that I have not tarred and feathered and painted an entire community with unfairly with a brush. I think these are important questions that people have on their mind. I'm so glad to have you both here to answer them. And I hope I'm doing so with respect, because my intention here is to, look, the weird thing about this entire thing. I remember watching Columbine on television.

And that was 25 years ago. And the fact that there was so very little imagery, there was no cell phone footage. There was very little that came out of this, that people I feel are feeling uneasy and unsettled because of the lack of information. And so I want to be that information. I want this show to be that vehicle today.

And I hope we're landing the plane. Yeah, no, I appreciate what, which, you're trying to do here. And I think, because I think there is a tendency whenever there's a tragedy like this. And there is a hint, even, that there is a gender issue. There is a tendency, especially for people who are opposed to anything related to trans to jump on and saying, the reason this happened is because this person is trans. And we try to pin all of society's troubles and all this person's motivations on the transness or on the hormones that they may not have gotten or what their parents being too lax or a medical system that is being too affirming or whatever.

whatever it is. This is a problem of young men who are disaffected, who are socially isolated, who don't find themselves well connected with imperial groups, who often find themselves on unstable families, who are lashing out at society because they don't find a way that they fit. We've got to leave it there. Dr. Laura Targovnik, thank you so much for sharing your story and your insights. Adam Zivo, always great to have you on the show. Really appreciate how you see things as well. Thank you both for being here today. Thank you so much. To all of our callers who picked up the phone to give us a call, unfortunately we're going to have to stick a pin in that

because we're being joined now with an update on the investigation by Aaron Eubles, the news anchor at 730 CKNW. Aaron, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for how to you, then. Thank you so much. So I paid attention to the press conference by the R.CN. Beyond that, is there anything new that can be added to the story to give us a little more focus and a little more depth? Yeah, a lot of stuff came out of that press conference there with the BCR, TMP. The Deputy Commissioner, Dwayne McDonald's, but we now know they had originally said there were nine victims. We now know there are eight victims, and among those deceased is an adult female teacher, three female students, and two male students.

So students are between the ages of 13 and 17 years. old. So we also know now as well, the other two victims that were found deceased in the local residents, those two victims are confirmed to be the mother and stepbrother of the suspects. And we also now know the name of the gentleman is 18-year-old Jesse Van Brutzler of Tumblr Ridge. So a few things did come out of that press conference that we are still following this afternoon. Are we aware of the status, the health status of some of the people who were wounded but not killed? We do know that Two of those victims that are the two of the people that were injured in the shooting, they were airlifted to hospitals with serious injuries.

So we are looking to reach out to those victims and hopefully speak with them. But, yeah, we know that 25 people were treated on scene, two people airlifted in serious conditions. Aaron, how are people in British Columbia taking this news? It has been absolutely devastating. I mean, I live down on the South Coast here, but it just really, really hits everybody in Burge, Columbia, straight across the nation and even around the world. But coming out of Tumblr Ridge, it's a small community. It's just over 2,000 people.

But, Aaron, I guess that's why I wanted you to paint the picture, because from what I understand, it's a 13-hour drive from Vancouver to get up to Tumblr Ridge. It's an isolated community. And from here in Toronto, I'm feeling gutted. And does British Columbia, even though these places can be remote and they can be isolated, but there's a feeling of connection between the communities? Certainly. It is absolutely heartbreaking.

I mean, just things that came out of Temple of Ridge yesterday, it's everybody's really, really feeling it here. If it's not something normal that happened, especially here in Canada. And, yeah, it's tough to explain. It's really weighing heavy on people here. Well, it's just, you know, the, I heard a phone call by a father who was relaying that

his 12-year-old daughter is homeschooled, but four of her friends or three of her friends were killed by the gunman's bullets. and I was trying to put myself in his shoes because I have a 12-year-old daughter who's probably the most social person to ever walk this earth since my father. And if she had lost three of her best friends whom I know very well, I don't know that she would ever be the same person again after that. And it's hard to wrap your head around it when it breaks your heart so much.

Absolutely. I mean, it's a traumatizing situation and how do you put yourself in those shoes? You know what I mean? It's, and I'm so you really just hear it from the people that have been impacted. It is really tough to put yourself in somebody else to choose because there's such a traumatizing, devastating situation. It's heartbreaking if you put it. We as of yet don't have a motive for this horrendous chronic. this violence that was wrought down on this quiet community. There is, I think there, we can responsibly speculate. If, if, if Jesse left school at 14 or so, you know, dropped out of school, I don't think it's unreasonable to posit that there might have been some bullying going on or,

or some sort of anti-social behavior, either by people at the school or by Jesse themselves. and I just, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the motivation of someone like this. Well, I mean, it's possible. We asked the deputy commissioner, you've probably heard there in the press conference. We asked him if there was any going or anything like that because we did hear that Jesse have been transitioning. And then there was also speculation about the potential motive. but we aren't really saying anything about that. I think we all could have our own opinions based on it.

And it does sound like there could be some belief, but it is really, it is tough to say that, as you said, they dropped to the school four years ago. So it kind of just speaks for itself. What are people pointing fingers at? There's a lot, depending on your perspective, on the world, depending on your perspective on certain issues, this is either a mental health issue, a guns issue, a trans issue.

do, is it too early to start building out those theories? It is tough to say, in my opinion. We did, again, we did ask the R.P&P, and he said that there were a number of times that we've had attended Jesse's home. Yeah. In relation to mental health, she was also apprehended under the Mental Health Act as well. So there are those things that you could maybe sort of keep together. puzzle. As a news anchor, what's your journalistic internal compass telling you about how careful

you need to be as you present this story? It's quite careful. It is, as you said, it's a horrific situation. Nobody would ever imagine for something like this to happen, and you need to handle it delicately. A lot of people were impacted, and it will change their lives forever. So it needs to be handled in a careful, in a careful way. I mean, 2,500 people and over 30, 30 people affected by this, I mean, everyone in that school was affected and will be traumatized for a long time to come. I don't know that you could have blanketed a community with more trauma in such a short period of time. No, no, not at all. And it's tough for me to even say, because I live in a larger city here in B.C.

So those of our old towns are, they're small. They're tight-knit. Yeah. And hopefully everybody comes together in the situation. We're working. Are you hearing from listeners about your coverage? Are you getting any feedback from the community? We've had positive feedback here on our ends with the way that we are covering things.

Again, it's still a developing story. So it is, it's tough, right? It's tough to pull it all together. And we're constantly learning new things as the day goes on. Well, Aaron Eubles, thank you so much for being here. Aaron's the news anchor at 730 CKNW. We really appreciate your time and we appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule.

What I'm sure is an emotionally wrought day for you, but we thank you for joining us here on the Ben Mulroney show. Absolutely. Thanks very much, Ben. Yeah, I'm, this is, this is, this is, look, this is not even the, of course, this is where our focus is today. But right before we came down, We learned to have another shooting in Quebec where a father allegedly turned a gun on his 10 and 12-year-old children and then turn it on himself in the area of Maniwaukee.

Today is not a good day. Today is not a good day. And like I said, if you have a beating heart, then it is absolutely broken today. Our intel chain is compromised. New on Showcase. You were hacked. You're telling me it's real. Someone's been watching and listening through you.

Simulio. We can either attempt to remove what's in your brain or we keep back open. Melissa Barrera. We need to use you to find them and destroy them. Tell me why you chose me. We either save the mission or save his life. The Copenhagen Test. All new Tuesdays, only on showcase.

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