The Decibel - How the RCMP failed Nova Scotians during the mass shooting

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

The inquiry into Canada’s worst mass shooting has ended with the release of its final report. The 3,000 page document condemns the RCMP in how the police force responded to the tragedy where 22 people were killed in Portapique, Nova Scotia, in April 2020. A number of recommendations call for a complete overhaul of Canada’s federal police force in the hopes that a tragedy like this never happens again.The Globe’s Lindsay Jones is a reporter at the Atlantic bureau who was there as the final report was released to survivors, family and community members as well as government and police officials. She joins the podcast to share the main takeaways from the report and whether the RCMP will take these recommendations seriously.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

My parents were killed on a Saturday night, the 18th of April 2020. And my family never found out until Monday the 20th, quarter to four in the afternoon, only because I had enough. I picked up my brother and me and my brother and my wife. We drove down and I demanded answers. That's the only reason we were told. Because while we were there, we were told that if I wouldn't have drove down, we wouldn't have got our answers until Tuesday or Wednesday.

Harry Bond is the son of Joy and Peter Bond, two of the 22 people killed in a mass shooting in Portapique, Nova Scotia, almost three years ago. We found out through a friend of my brother's that there was something going on in Portapique, Nova Scotia, almost three years ago. We found out through a friend of my brother's that there was something going on in Portapique at 8 o'clock in the morning of the 19th. And that's when my brother got a hold of me. He tried to get a hold of me. My dad couldn't get a hold of me.

And the two of us spent all day and all through the night into Monday morning trying to get a hold of them, trying to get a hold of the RCMP and get answers, and nobody would tell us nothing. So as of 10 a.m. Monday morning, I was on my way to Portapique to get answers. The tragedy is the worst civilian mass shooting in Canada's history. During a 13-hour rampage, the gunman, disguised as an RCMP officer and driving a replica police cruiser, targeted people he knew as well as complete strangers. Afterwards, people questioned how police handled the situation. A public inquiry was set up,

and just last week, it released its final report. Lindsay Jones is a reporter in the Globe's Atlantic Bureau. She's here to tell us about the report's recommendations and how people in Nova Scotia are responding. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Lindsay, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thanks, Mainika. So the final report of the public inquiry into the Nova Scotia mass shooting was finally released. This is after two and a half years of investigation, almost seven months of public hearings. So it's been

a long time. And Lindsay, you were in Truro, Nova Scotia, where the report was released. Can you just describe the feeling and the atmosphere there? So the report was released in a ballroom at a hotel in Truro, Nova Scotia, and it was packed with family members. People came from across the country. It was a very sort of private moment for family members absorbing the recommendations and the findings of the report. There was a hushed feeling in the ballroom where the report was presented by the commissioners.

And did you get a sense like what it meant to the community? Like, I guess I'm wondering, was this an important moment for people? I think this was an important moment. People showed up hours ahead of time. Family members showed up hours ahead of time, as many did during the inquiry. Some wore sweaters, shirts that had photos of their family members on them. I spoke to a lawyer who represents the majority of family members of victims. And he said that for the family members, having these recommendations and this final report doesn't change anything. Tomorrow is going to be the same for them. They're still going to be dealing with grief and trauma from the loss of their loved ones.

And he didn't think that it would ever be otherwise. members were encouraged by the fact that the report highlighted the abject failures of the RCMP and made many specific recommendations. Can you just remind us, what was the point of the inquiry, the Mass Casualty Commission and the final report? What were they actually looking into? So the commission was looking into, their main mandate was to look into how intimate partner violence played into this mass shooting. They also wanted to look back and see what happened, what went wrong, so that they could make findings, make recommendations to improve safety for all Canadians. And the reason why we got this inquiry in the first place is because

family members actually pushed for it, family members of some of the victims. Do we know what they in particular wanted to see from all of this? Well, from day one, the RCMP did not give the public answers. And as the report found, they prioritized their own investigation into what happened over the public's need to know, their right to know, really, the commission found. And the media was not given sufficient information either. And that lack of information is really what drove anger in the beginning for these family members to push for answers, to push for this inquiry. And it took them six months of calling for this inquiry before it was announced. Wow. Okay, so the final report is now out. It's 3,000 pages long. It offers over

100 recommendations, and a large number of those recommendations are directed at the RCMP and policing. One thing the report is highly critical of is how the RCMP communicated with the public. So Lindsay, what did the report specifically have to say around that? So the report pointed out systemic failures within the RCMP to inform the public of a major threat to public safety. They sent out a tweet, which the inquiry found was insufficient and inaccurate in its description of the gravity of the threat. They also found that there were systemic shortcomings within the RCMP to even know that there was the alert-ready system at the disposal of law enforcement in Nova Scotia.

And so just to be clear here, the RCMP didn't actually release a public alert. They released a tweet telling people that something was happening. The police released a tweet and it wasn't timely. So the first tweet came out after people had already been murdered, describing it as a firearms incident in Port-au-Pique. Wow. There was no other communication until the next day. And that first tweet was past 11 p.m., right? Like a lot of people were in bed.

Exactly. Yeah. The next communication wasn't until the next morning, eight hours later after that first tweet. Even though RCMP had information that the gunman was driving a mock police car and was dressed as a police officer, that information was not relayed in the tweet. And then the other thing I was wondering about, we should touch on the 911 calls, right?

Because there was also some criticism of the way that those were handled as well. Once people were actually calling in and saying they were seeing this guy. Then RCMP was getting 911 calls from people reporting that the gunman was dressed as an RCMP officer, that he was driving a mock police car, and that information was not passed on or taken seriously. But as the report says, that was an oversight. They did not take it seriously, and that was a mistake. Yeah, I just want to focus in on this point around the failures of police to communicate,

around this fact that the perpetrator was dressed as an RCMP officer, and family members of some of the victims said, you know, this was a crucial piece of information that could have saved their loved ones. Did we learn anything more from this final report about why the RCMP didn't communicate those important details to the public a little bit earlier? Well, I think these are questions that we've all in the media been trying to get from the RCMP. And yesterday when we asked them to speak to their mistakes that the report found,

the response that we got was we have not read the report yet. As you can appreciate, the report was tabled a couple hours ago and I have not gone through the review just yet and all the recommendations. But I am committed to go through all single recommendations. The RCMP had the report, access to the full report, prior to the media we found, the media found out at that press conference. I've just been speaking with Mass Casualty Commission staff,

and they confirmed that the RCMP were given a copy of the report before the media was. The media received an executive summary around nine o'clock yesterday the full report around noon participants like the rcmp were given the full report at 9 00 a.m you can respond to that as you like but i stepped in line to share that piece of information with everyone but no i you've had you've had it for more than yeah i'm saying that Yeah, I'm saying that I haven't reviewed it. It was limited distribution, but as I said from the beginning, I haven't seen the recommendations. We all got through the recommendations. We were able to absorb them. The interim commissioner of the RCMP was unable to do that and unable to respond to any of our questions. I've personally felt like media was being stonewalled yet again, as we were in the early days after the mass casualty event, with the withholding

of information, the RCMP's withholding of information, which the commission pointed out that they did. There were family members in the room that when pressed about the amount of time that this top ranking officer had to look at the report to be apprised of just the basic recommendations, and he hadn't, to them that appeared to be a failure. Some of the family members in the room were shaking their heads or scoffing, I heard in the background. There were just a few family members in the room during that press conference, so it was not the majority. How is that possible? The RCMP intern commissioner, Mike Duhaime,

basically his response to these criticisms was that he hadn't had time to read it? That's what you're saying? He said he didn't have time to read it. We'll be back in a moment. Lindsay, what does the report recommend then on how to improve communications between the RCMP and the public? Did it say anything that, you know, any recommendations that should be in place, you know, next time something like this does happen? Yeah, I mean, it's a whole revamping of the RCMP. There were 130 recommendations made in this commission report, more than half of them related to police. So there was a lot of confusion on the scene that night. And police did not have clear direction on who should

be in charge. They had no emergency operation plan. And Nova Scotia RCMP had no violent crime in progress emergency operational plan. So, you know, that was a major recommendation, which, you know, we expect these police agencies to be, especially our national police agency, to know how to react in a time of violent crisis. One of the commission recommendations was to implement five principles of effective critical incident response, which includes being prepared, providing information to the public to help people protect themselves during a critical incident, and then evaluating afterwards what lessons could be learned. These are all things that we just take for granted that our police force is doing and using, you know, communicating with the public. Clearly, these things need to be recommended and mandated somehow for in the future to protect the public. Then there was also involving communications staff when there is a critical incident involving them in their response.

So that would have been crucial in this case, you know, around especially around this insufficient, inaccurate tweet that went out. It was surprising to read through the list of recommendations for police on the ground. One of them was that supervisors had not taken mandatory online training in critical incident response. So most of the supervisors responding in Portapique didn't have any of that training. I mean, these are just basic things that we expect of our police officers, that they would complete mandatory training, that they would be aware of how to respond to a critical incident. I want to ask you about something else that was also in the recommendations. When we're talking about the police response that night, on a previous episode, we talked about some of the questions around police behavior, including how an off-duty officer, Sergeant O'Brien, was issuing orders that

night, even though he had consumed four or five rum drinks. He was off-duty when he was drinking, but he was then brought in. Did the final report have anything to say on that point? Yes, it did. I think he self-deployed is how they described it. He chose to come in and act as a supervisor that night. And yeah, the commission found that the police needed to add to their rules that you cannot consume alcohol or recreational drugs while on the job. And if you are not to come to work or self-deploy, as they call it, if you have. So that's another thing that it's shocking in a way that that has to be pointed out to police officers. Wow. I want to turn now to another area that the report focused on, which is

the warning signs behind extreme violence like this. So let's hear what one of the three commissioners of the report, Michael McDonald, had to say on this point. One question we considered is whether mass casualties can be predicted. We concluded that rather than prediction, the focus has to be on prevention and effective intervention. While no person or institution could have predicted the perpetrator's specific actions on April 18th and 19th, 2020, his pattern and escalation of violence could have and should have been addressed. So we know that the perpetrator's common-law spouse, Lisa Banfield, she faced almost 20 years of abuse from him, from the gunman,

including the night of the rampage. She was actually the first person that he attacked. So what does the report say specifically about her treatment by the RCMP and the public as well? The commission found the RCMP did not treat Lisa Banfield as a surviving victim of the mass casualty. She was instructed to reenact the mass casualty, walking through the woods with police describing in minutia what happened to her that night. They did not treat her as an important witness who would

require careful debriefing and who would need support services. And so you're saying she's not treated as a victim, even though she suffered abuse for a long time, she was actually seen as kind of in a way implicated. That's right. She was, the RCMP charged Lisa Banfield for providing ammunition to the gunman, a charge that was later dropped, not taking into account, obviously, that she was coercively controlled by the gunman at the time of that. It is fueled a sense of victim blaming in her case that has led to her, she fears for her safety now. She is not treated as a victim. Yeah. And this, I mean, this gets back to the conversations where, you know, in the last few years, we've understood a lot more about IPV, intimate partner violence, and how, you know, if you're in a situation like that,

you don't have a lot of agency. Absolutely. And the report outlines that and has many experts describing what coercive control is. I mean, with everything that we've talked about with the police here, it sounds like there's an issue of trust going forward, that people in this community simply might not trust the RCMP the way that they once did. What do we know about how the police force needs to change in order to regain that trust? In Nova Scotia, it's going to take a long time for people to trust the RCMP again. People are still traumatized by what happened. If you're driving in central northern Nova Scotia and a police officer puts his lights on, you'll be rattled in a way that you never were before. That's how people were murdered.

I think a good start would be to read the recommendations and respond to them openly with accountability, which they have pledged to do. And so I think we just we need to wait and see whether there's going to be action or not. Before I let you go, Lindsay, I want to leave on a question that was asked of Scott McLeod, whose brother Sean was killed. Let's let's listen to this clip. What is your message to them, to those in power, if they do not heed, if they do not listen to the report's recommendations? I'm hopeful that they've listened. If they haven't, I mean, this has been such a publicized event right from the get-go that I feel it would be a major hit in any of their careers to not at least work with the people to get stuff done. To ignore this at this point would be, I think, very detrimental to any of their careers because it would just look that bad on them.

The report puts forward recommendations which are not binding. So, Lindsay, is there a sense that these recommendations will be actually taken seriously by the RCMP and governments? Well, government is responding, saying that they will look at these recommendations seriously and review them. And that includes the RCMP, the province, the public safety minister. However, residents in the area are, you know, they want to have hope, but they're lacking confidence. Their expectations are low. They have seen how other public inquiries that resulted in recommendations were highlighted in this report as having not been implemented. And so, you know, the confidence level is low at this point, I would say. Lindsay, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you. That's it for today.

I'm Mainika Raman-Wellens. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.