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TORONTO — A public inquiry into Canada’s worst mass shooting found “significant and comprehensive systemic inadequacies and errors,” particularly in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s response, and attacked authorities for reading a litany of warnings about the shooter’s history of violence and ignored illegal firearms.
A 3,000-page report released Thursday included recommendations such as revising the system for alerting the public to emergencies, taking steps to prevent intimate partner violence, tightening gun laws and potentially restructuring the RCMP, which could entail a “reconfiguration of policing in Canada.”
Public safety depends on a system “that ensures clear and consistent communication, collaboration and coordination… as well as accountability at all levels of government and ultimately to the public,” the report said. “Such a collaborative system did not exist in April 2020 and this situation still exists today.”
The report came nearly three years after Gabriel Wortman launched a 13-hour rampage through rural Nova Scotia on April 18-19, 2020, killing 22 people. Wortman, disguised as a Mountie and driving a replica RCMP cruiser, was eventually shot dead by police at a gas station.
While the report offers a broad indictment of the entire “Canadian public safety system,” it is an exhaustive catalog of RCMP missteps. It comes amid a reckoning of the RCMP’s role amid complaints of systemic racism, sexual misconduct and other dysfunctions in the force and their resistance to admitting mistakes.
“The RCMP must finally undergo the fundamental changes that previous reports have called for,” Leanne Fitch, one of the inquiry’s three commissioners, said in a prepared statement. “Canadian society is at a critical juncture regarding the future of policing.”
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The request faulted the RCMP’s response as compromised by “system-wide” poor communication and coordination, and failure to share accurate and timely information with the public so they can take steps to protect themselves. In some cases, the investigation said, the inaccuracies in the information shared with the public “occurred in circumstances where a more complete account… would have poorly reflected the RCMP’s response.”
Nova Scotia’s RCMP used social media to communicate with the public rather than Canada’s Emergency Alert System. The investigation concluded that the system, which would have sent alerts to mobile phones, TVs and radios, was the “best tool available” to warn people of the massacre.
The first tweet about the shooting was posted on April 18 at 11:32 p.m. It said police were responding to a “firearms complaint” in the town of Portapique – although officers already knew there had been four murders and that the gunman was large.
The next tweet at 8:02 a.m. the next morning mentioned an “active gunner situation” but left out key information, including that the gunner was driving a replica RCMP cruiser. That detail was shared at 10:17 a.m. — more than 12 hours after an 911 call first alerted police to Wortman’s vehicle.
There were many other failures. The investigation found that authorities did not adequately process crime scenes and victims’ families found evidence and “biological matter”. The treatment of Wortman’s partner, Lisa Banfield, by the officers he assaulted before he went on his killing spree made her “victim again.”
The investigation also found that authorities had received several complaints about the shooter well before the massacre, including allegations of domestic violence, illegal firearms and death threats. But these have not been adequately studied or ignored.
“The perpetrator’s privilege as a wealthy white male contributed to his immunity from adverse official or social consequences for his violence,” the report concluded.
The report describes Wortman’s 19-year relationship with Banfield as “marked by his violence, coercion and controlling demeanor” that turned to paranoia during the pandemic. He hoarded groceries, gas and ammunition and withdrew $350,000 from his bank account, “convinced that Covid was a big government program” and that “the world was shutting down,” Banfield told police.
“All too often, gender-based, intimate partner and family violence are precursors to forms of violence that tend to be viewed as being of greater ‘public’ interest,” the report concluded. “We ignore these forms of violence at our collective peril.”
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After the tragedy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on 1,500 makes and models of “military” assault weapons. His government introduced legislation last year to introduce a mandatory buyback program for such weapons.
Several RCMP officials told the inquiry about a conference call several days after the shooting in which they allege Brenda Lucki, then-RCMP commissioner, berated them for not disclosing information about Wortman’s guns to the public. They said Lucki said she told Trudeau’s office the force would release the information in what officials saw as an attempt to strengthen the government’s pending gun control measures – fueling subsequent claims that Ottawa had politicized a tragedy and interfered in a police investigation.
Lucki, who retired in February, and federal government officials have denied the allegations. The inquiry concluded that her remarks were “mistimed and poorly worded, but not partisan and did not show that there had been any political interference”.
Wortman, a 51-year-old dentist, did not have a gun license and had obtained his guns illegally. Three of his five guns, including an AR-15, were smuggled in from Maine. The investigation criticized the poor exchange of information between the Canada Border Services Agency and other law enforcement agencies, which allowed him to cross the border often and rarely with problems.
Unlike federal police services in other countries, the RCMP is also charged with providing local and provincial police services for approximately 70 percent of Canada. In recent years, critics have accused this model of being flawed and in need of reconsideration.
The commission recommended that the Federal Minister of Public Safety identify which RCMP tasks “are appropriate for a federal police agency” and identify those that would be better assigned to other agencies, “including potential new police agencies”.