Mounties blasted over response to mass killing

Commission calls for overhaul in wake of police failures

In the end, when the final report was presented, when findings were outlined and recommendations highlighted, when the public inquiry’s commissioners left the podium, there was silence in the packed hotel ballroom.

For almost a full minute that silence lasted, not a word spoken, nor the scraping of a chair, until, almost reluctantly, the first person rose to take their leave.

It was a testament to how emotional, how draining the process had been — two and a half years and more than $20 million to conduct the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry into the worst mass shooting in Canadian history.

“Turning the Tide Together” was the culmination of all that, a 3,000page, seven-volume report cataloguing a litany of RCMP failures and inadequacies surrounding the massacre that left 22 victims dead in Nova Scotia three years ago.

The report is sprawling. It envisions — if implemented — a full overhaul of Canada’s national police force, a strengthening of gun control laws, an assertion of the separation between policing and politics, and more attention to preventing gender-based and domestic violence, among many other calls in its 130 recommendations. Seventy-five are directed at the RCMP.

With the report’s release, the commission’s work came to an end. For the survivors, though, for the families of the victims, there is no end — they will forever have to deal with the loss of loved ones. But the nature of the report, and many of the recommendations therein, gave some cause for cautious optimism.

That lasted about as long as it took the RCMP interim commissioner to sit down in front of a microphone.

“It’s going to make changes,” said Scott McLeod, the brother of victim Sean McLeod. “Nothing will bring my brother back or any of the other people that we lost in this horrible ordeal. (But if ) we can get the positive side of this and move things forward, you’ll know that these people didn’t lose their lives for nothing.”

Several minutes after McLeod spoke, RCMP interim commissioner Michael Duheme sat down in the same seat and admitted that — despite the RCMP receiving the report the previous morning, more than 30 hours earlier — he hadn’t read it.

“I haven’t reviewed it,” he said. “It was limited distribution. But as I said from the beginning, I haven’t seen the recommendations.

“It doesn’t minimize the impact of what took place. I just haven’t had time to go through the recommendations.”

The picture painted by the commission did not cover the national police force in glory.

In fact, in the 317-page executive summary of that report, there are 65 versions of the word “failure” and 33 of the word “inadequate,” most in close proximity to a reference to the RCMP.

Duheme said he’s committed to reviewing all the recommendations and to repairing public trust. But he refused to commit to any specifics.

Where the commission recommended that “the RCMP adopt a policy of admitting its mistakes, accepting responsibility for them, and ensuring that accountability mechanisms are in place for addressing its errors,” Duheme refused to admit mistakes were made in Portapique.

Officers did the best they could with the equipment and training they had, he said repeatedly.

Chief Supt. Darren Campbell, at the time of the shooting a senior RCMP officer in Nova Scotia, apologized emotionally for the response in Portapique.

“I apologize for failing,” he said in July at the end of his testimony to the inquiry. “I haven’t cried in two and a half years. I’m truly sorry that we failed you. I promise that we’ll do better.”

Asked about the recommendation to replace Depot, the RCMP’s 26-week training program, in favour of a three-year training period, Duheme balked. “I think just saying shutting down Depot without having a proper analysis from the RCMP and other people … we have to have a deeper dive.”

Over 13 hours on April 18 and 19, Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people and torched several houses in northern Nova Scotia, beginning in Portapique with an assault on his common-law spouse, Lisa Banfield, and ending nearly 100 kilometres away when police shot him at a gas station.

In its volume on policing, the report delves into specific failures on the night of April 18.

The report highlights the Mounties’ discounting of the fact that multiple witnesses told them in the early hours of the shooting that the gunman was driving a replica police car, and failed to alert the public about that until almost 12 hours later, and then by social media.

“This information should have shaped the command decisions from that time forward,” wrote the commission.

“The failure to recognize that the perpetrator had disguised himself in this way was a product of deficiencies in the RCMP’s process for capturing, sharing, and analyzing information received during a critical incident response.”

Although it lauded the first three officers on scene who went into Portapique hunting for the gunman, the report castigated their supervisors for a fragmented chain of command, which sowed confusion as the team searched Portapique in the night amid explosions and fires.

Reinforcements were told to hold fast at the entrance to Portapique, for fear of officers shooting each other. This despite the GPS tracking system built into the Mounties’ hand-held radios — a system that had never been activated and which the team searching Portapique did not even know existed.

The RCMP failed to implement a previous recommendation — in the review of the 2014 shooting incident in Moncton in which three RCMP officers were killed — to be able to geo-track its members in emergencies, the commission said.

The fact that there were only three officers in Portapique for the first 90 minutes of the RCMP’s response, combined with fragmented leadership and a lack of knowledge of the area they were policing, was a factor in the killer’s escape from Portapique that night, the report concluded.

The commission also took the RCMP to task for the amount of time it took that first night to find many of the victims.

“A systematic door-to-door search was not conducted until 19

hours after the first 911 call from the Portapique community. This is an unacceptable delay.”

It went further, criticizing, among other things, the RCMP’s failure to co-operate with other agencies, poor communication within the force and with both the public and victims’ families during and after the mass shooting.

Despite its recommendations, the final report acknowledges that change in the RCMP is hard to come by. The report mentions at several points recommendations from previous inquiries and reviews that have been ignored.

The MCC also recommended having the force having a long, hard look at what it calls “unhealthy aspects of the RCMP’s management culture.”

A further three recommendations deal with ensuring the next public inquiry has an easier time getting requested evidence in a timely fashion from the RCMP, something the commission said was a problem during this inquiry.

Though the report had plenty to say about the RCMP, it also spent a significant chunk of time addressing both gender-based and domestic violence.

The report made several findings and recommendations relating to gender bias and domestic violence.

Notable was the finding that the way the RCMP treated Lisa Banfield in its investigation was an example of the kind of “revictimization” that would make it less likely that female survivors of genderbased violence would seek help from police.

The report recommended that federal and provincial governments develop programs to counter victim blaming and “hyper-responsibilization” of women survivors and also that they create safe space for women to report violence against them.

It also recommended that police and prosecutors be handed extra discretion to lay criminal charges in case of intimate partner violence.

The report made several findings and recommendations relating to gender bias and domestic violence. Notable was the finding that the way the RCMP treated Lisa Banfield in its investigation was an example of the kind of ‘revictimization’ that would make it less likely that female survivors of gender-based violence would seek help from police