Monitoring implementation of the Mass Casualty Report’s recommendations. So far, so bad …

Commissioner Michael MacDonald, chair, leaves the stage after delivering the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry’s final report into the mass murders in rural Nova Scotia in Truro, N.S., on Thursday, March 30, 2023. The problem begins with the self-serving decision by Ottawa and the province to make the committee that’s supposed to be publicly accountable for […]

The RCMP’s offensive PR offensive continues

As a longtime Halifax Mooseheads fan, I’ve spent some time this spring inside a downtown arena named after a bank watching our Quebec Major Junior Hockey League team compete for the Gilles Courteau trophy as their league’s best. The games on the ice have been excellent, but I often find myself drawn to what’s happening […]

It’s time to fix policing, not ‘integrate’ the local Mounties and the HRP

Let’s start with this… Defunding the police is, in many ways, about reinvesting in fundamental, and historically under-funded, community resources… [Our] last recommendations relate to municipal and police budgeting. One of these recommendations is that any funds diverted from the police budget going forward be redistributed through participatory budgeting processes. Defunding the Police: Defining the […]

The Mass Casualty Commission report meets the ‘somewhat surprised’

I was not surprised by the numbers of people who pronounced themselves “somewhat surprised” by the sweeping and consequential content of last week’s report of the Mass Casualty Commission. Many of those same people had spent much of the past three years dismissing, marginalizing and otherwise declaring the whole exercise a waste of time at best, […]

Lisa Banfield: criminal charges v discretion, compassion, common sense

Let’s start with this scenario. A woman with a decades-long history of having been brutalized and controlled by her common-law partner — a history that was known or should have been known to the police — is coerced into helping her partner transport ammunition for his cache of largely illegally obtained weapons. Does the RCMP […]

Internal RCMP report raises questions about officers’ actions — but SIRT too

Last week’s seemingly out-of-sync release of an internal RCMP report into the shooting at the Onslow Firehall during April 2020’s mass shooting raises troubling questions. Some are more easily and satisfactorily answered than others. Let’s start with what happened on April 19, 2020, shortly after 10:20 a.m. outside the firehall located about 35 kilometres from […]

Did the Mounties charge Lisa Banfield to distract from their own failures? Probably

There are still too many unanswered questions about what prompted the RCMP to charge Lisa Banfield, the common-law spouse of the Nova Scotia mass killer, for supplying him with ammunition a month before the deadly rampage. That’s one reason why Banfield’s decision to sue the federal and provincial governments for “malicious prosecution” — she says […]

Will the mass casualty commission report even matter?

Last week, Examiner editor Tim Bousquet asked ‘What’s the point of the Mass Casualty Commission?’ In his column today, Stephen Kimber offers a (slightly) more hopeful take. He says it’s too soon to know. So… is it already too late for the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report to matter? Was its credibility irreparably shredded even […]

Lisa Banfield and the search for ‘truth’

Cross-examination isn’t the only valid — or always best — truth-seeking method of 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 the truth was all that was being sought. “We keep getting confronted by people who seem to have a perception […]

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 the worst mass killing in Canadian history. It’s a long list. [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 […]