OTTAWA, March 31 — Canadian police need major reforms to restore trust and prevent another national tragedy, a commission concluded in a damning report Thursday on the nation’s worst mass shooting, which left 22 people dead in 2020.
The word “failure” appears over and over in the Mass Casualty Commission’s 3,000-page report, which also makes 130 recommendations including addressing systemic deficiencies in policing, stricter gun safety regulations and better public communication by authorities.
The report also draws attention to an “epidemic” of domestic abuse as a root cause of mass violence.
Denturist Gabriel Wortman, 51, dressed as a policeman and driving a fake police car, killed 22 people including a police officer and a pregnant woman during a 13-hour rampage.
It started with a violent assault on his partner in the beachside community of Portapique, Nova Scotia, and ended at a gas station 90 kilometers (60 miles) away where he was killed during a manhunt.
The commissioners said in the report there had been “many warning signs of the perpetrator’s violence and missed opportunities to intervene” in the years before, as well as “gaps and errors” in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s response to the shootings.
They concluded that the RCMP must undergo “fundamental change.”
The report notably criticises police for underplaying the Portapique incident at the start by tweeting that they were investigating a “firearms complaint.”
This “in no way conveyed the threat presented by the perpetrator at that time,” it said. Police did not send out another message until the next morning.
Wortman, it noted, had a “pattern of violent and intimidating behaviours” and illegally owned several firearms, some of them smuggled from the United States.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has sought to tighten firearms regulations since the shooting, including announcing a handgun ban last year.
Police were also faulted for not using an alert system to warn that a gunman was on the loose, so the public could “take measures to better protect themselves.”
Information from 911 callers about the shooter was not always shared with officers on the ground, and an unclear command structure led to chaos, said the report.
And police did not “fully grasp” that, after killing 13 neighbours and setting several cottages ablaze, Wortman had escaped their net until the next morning when he killed nine more people.
Confusion led police to almost shoot another man believed to be the suspect, and to fire a hail of bullets at a firehall where Wortman was mistakenly believed to have holed up. — AFP