In the early hours of the Nova Scotia shooting spree, the RCMP’s communications team was all but silent.
A single tweet sent by the Mounties warned the public of a “firearms complaint.”
But as word of the killings spread on social media, Nova Scotians started to panic. Some of the victims’ families begged police for details about their loved ones to no avail.
Now, according to details released as part of the ongoing public inquiry into the killing spree, it seems this information blackout was part human error, part mistrust of the media and part design.
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Human error because the only public relations officer on duty that weekend told the inquiry she fell asleep during the killing spree. Mistrust of the media because the force’s director of strategic communications established a “no news zone” because she thought media coverage was “too negative.” Design because the RCMP had “no standard operating procedure” at the time of the shooting for directing public communications during the critical incident.
Given these issues, some may find it surprising that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki now stands accused of bowing to political pressure and wanting to release too much information about the gunman’s firearms.
If former Public Safety Minister Bill Blair did indeed pressure Lucki to release details about firearms used in the attacks, he would have been going up against a culture within the RCMP many legal experts have long criticized as secretive by default.
“We see on the part of the RCMP … a lack of willingness to provide basic facts and other information the public is entitled to receive,” said Nova Scotia lawyer Adam Rodgers.
Rodgers has been closely following the ongoing public inquiry into the shooting spree, which is tasked with investigating how police responded to the tragedy, including how they communicated with victims’ families and the public.
He said the testimony to date reveals a deep-seated, institutional distrust within the RCMP of both the public and the media.
He also said structural failings, such as not including communications officers as part of the critical incident response team, left the RCMP flat-footed as they scrambled to warn the public about a murderous rampage.
“This attitude of mistrust, of secrecy, that is something that really goes to the culture of the RCMP,” Rodgers said. “And that’s going to be something that’s difficult to overcome.”
Asleep on the job
At 11:32 p.m. on April 18, 2020, Nova Scotia RCMP sent a tweet warning residents in Portapique about a “firearms complaint” and asking them to stay indoors.
By the time the tweet was sent, officers in Portapique had already discovered multiple bodies and burning homes, and were reporting the sounds of gunshots and explosions.
#RCMPNS is responding to a firearms complaint in the #Portapique area. (Portapique Beach Rd, Bay Shore Rd and Five Houses Rd.) The public is asked to avoid the area and stay in their homes with doors locked at this time.
— RCMP Nova Scotia (@RCMPNS) April 19, 2020
The public information officer who sent the tweet, Cpl. Lisa Croteau, was the only communications team member on call that weekend. She told inquiry investigators in September 2021 that she knew several people were dead before she sent the tweet.
“(Sgt. Andy O’Brien) did mention there was some people that were … that were dead at the scene,” Croteau said. “I didn’t get into too much of the detail. He just wanted that information sent out.”
O’Brien, who wasn’t on duty that weekend and was notified of the shootings by one of his on-duty team members, has acknowledged that he had four or five alcoholic drinks earlier that evening, but claimed he wasn’t intoxicated.
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Croteau, meanwhile, told investigators she believes she fell asleep after sending the tweet.
The force’s director of strategic communications, Lia Scanlan, who told the inquiry she is “always available” to respond to a crisis, was also asleep that night.
Croteau told investigators she tried calling Scanlan several times but got her voicemail. She also said she tried calling Scanlan’s second in command, Cindy Bayers, but got her voicemail, too.
“The fact that the communications staff wasn’t available during the midst of a critical incident is a really serious issue,” Rodgers said.
The first conversation Scanlan had with anyone on the scene in Portapique was at 7 a.m. on April 19. That’s roughly 10 hours after the first 911 call from Jamie Blair was received – a call the public inquiry has described as a “contemporaneus report of murder.”
Blair told 911 operators her husband, Gregg Blair, had been shot by a man with a large gun who was driving a police car. The call ended with Blair screaming as the gunman shot her through her bedroom door.
Jamie and Gregg’s two children, ages nine and 11, were hiding beside their parents’ bed when the gunman killed her. The children survived and later called 911. They shared all of these details with police dispatchers.
The children’s call was placed more than an hour before Croteau sent the RCMP’s first and only tweet that evening.
RCMP ‘disgusted’ by the media
Mistrust in the media and a tendency toward secrecy may also have contributed to the lack of information coming from the RCMP during and after the shooting spree.
Scanlan, who was responsible for the force’s post-shooting communications strategy, told inquiry investigators in September 2021 that she was “disgusted” by the media and that she couldn’t ever imagine working with the media again because of how they “revictimized” families.
She also criticized the media for speaking with people who knew the gunman prior to the shooting spree and for asking questions that she believed weren’t directly linked to the investigation.
Scanlan also said it was better for the RCMP to speak directly with the public via Twitter, rather than sending press releases to the media, because journalists can’t necessarily be trusted to get things right.
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After former Nova Scotia premier Stephen McNeil used an April 21 press conference to question why an emergency alert wasn’t used to warn the public about the gunman, Scanlan said she had no choice but to tune out the media altogether.
“I made our office, like, a no news zone,” Scanlan told investigators. “I know that sounds crazy, but I had to do it when things changed.”
Scanlan told investigators she believed the premier’s comments made everything go downhill for the RCMP, fast. After McNeil’s remarks, she said, there was no sympathy for the force, only discord and anger.
“No news was allowed to enter our area because it was too negative,” she said.
Internal strife about response
Scanlan is also at the centre of the controversy around allegations of political interference.
During an interview with inquiry investigators in February 2022, she said Blair and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were “weighing in” on what the RCMP could and couldn’t say about their investigation.
She also accused Lucki of bowing to political pressure, telling investigators Lucki “doesn’t push back.”
In a letter Scanlan sent to Lucki in April 2021, she said she was “appalled” by Lucki’s actions during a meeting on April 28, 2020.
Scanlan alleges Lucki criticized local investigators for not releasing details about the gunman’s firearms. She also said Lucki told meeing participants about “pressures and conversations with Minister Blair, which we clearly understood was related to the upcoming passing of the gun legislation.”
“I remember a feeling of disgust as I realized this was the catalyst for the conversation and perhaps a justification for what you were saying about us,” Scanlan told Lucki.
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Lucki has acknowledged the April 28 meeting took place and said she should have been more sensitive to what local RCMP officers were experiencing at the time.
She, Blair and Trudeau have denied any political interference or pressure in the investigation.
Meanwhile, Scanlan’s role in developing the RCMP’s post-shooting communications strategy has also been scrutinized by the inquiry.
A report from the inquiry shows Scanlan approved a plan to tell the public there were “in excess” of 10 people killed by the gunman, even though she knew that figure was inaccurate.
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Scanlan then questioned why Lucki gave a different, more accurate number of people killed during media interviews.
Internal emails published by the inquiry show Scanlan said these discrepancies looked “awful” and that she told her staff to turn off their phones because so many journalists were calling for clarification.
“Lord help me!” she wrote in an email sent to RCMP headquarters.
Supt. Darren Campbell, who also made notes about the April 28 meeting with Lucki, repeatedly refused to release information about the gunman’s firearms.
He and Scanlan have both said releasing these details would have compromised the force’s ongoing investigation.
But more than two years later, no one has been charged with any firearms-related offences, including the people who helped the gunman obtain illegal, semi-automatic guns in the United States, which he then smuggled into Canada.
“It seems like a rather convenient excuse to explain away some pretty spotty and significant omissions in information,” said Wayne MacKay, professor emeritus at Dalhousie University’s law school.
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Campbell has also been accused of being opaque and misleading by victims’ families.
A proposed class-action lawsuit filed by the families in June 2020 alleges the RCMP “deliberately misled” the public during a press conference on June 4, 2020, when Campbell said none of the victims were pulled over and shot by the gunman on the side of the highway.
Six weeks earlier, at another press conference, Campbell told reporters two of the victims – nurses Heather O’Brien and Kristen Beaton, who was pregnant – were killed by the gunman after he pulled them over with his lookalike RCMP cruiser.
The RCMP later claimed these differences were based on new interpretations of witness statements.
“The RCMP has handled the spree and its aftermath in a high-handed, self-serving and disrespectful manner,” the proposed class-action lawsuit claims.
Structural concerns with communications
Scanlan also testified in person before the public inquiry on June 8.
She said the RCMP has no standard operating procedures for how to communicate with the public during a critical incident.
Communications team members also aren’t embedded within the critical incident command structure, she said.
During the April 2020 shooting spree, commanding officers in the field decided what information to release to the public and when to release it.
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This hierarchical approach meant there were delays between the time information was relayed from officers in the field to public relations officers who were working either from home or from RCMP headquarters in Dartmouth.
There was also confusion about who needed to give the final OK before something was sent out, Scanlan said. In some cases, information could be shared without her approval, but not always.
One such “bottleneck” occurred when Cpl. Jennifer Clarke was waiting for Scanlan to approve a tweet warning the public about the gunman’s mock RCMP cruiser. The tweet had already been approved by an officer in the field, but Clarke sent it to Scanlan for her OK.
According to internal RCMP records released by the inquiry, it took 28 minutes for Scanlan to approve this tweet. The gunman killed two more people during this delay.
Scanlan told the inquiry she missed Clarke’s email amid the chaos that morning.
Both women expressed regret for this delay while testifying at the inquiry and said they would do anything to go back and change things.
These kinds of structural errors are exactly what needs to change to prevent similar tragedies in the future, said Carleton University criminology professor Darryl Davies.
“I’m sympathetic to the fact that when a crisis is unfolding, it’s difficult to share information because you don’t want to put out a false report. But at the same time, where is their plan? Where is their policy? Where is their training?” Davies said.
“It speaks to the total breakdown of this institution as a national police service.”