It was a tragedy.
It was a crime.
It was a galvanizing event in Nova Scotia history.
And the worst mass shooting in Canadian history was also a fatal workplace incident that was investigated by the federal government. RCMP officer Const. Heidi Stevenson was among the 22 people killed and her colleague, Const. Chad Morrison, was wounded.
The 13-hour rampage in April 2020 was the subject of a lengthy public inquiry, which culminated in a final report released in 2023, which condemned the RCMP’s failures in its response to the mass shooting and called for dramatic reforms.
But the workplace incident report has never been made public. Until now.
The report’s existence was only disclosed in the spring of 2024, when senior RCMP officers updated their efforts to respond to the criticism of their actions four years earlier.
Following that RCMP news conference, CBC requested a copy of the workplace incident report through an access to information request to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). An unredacted copy of the full report was delivered to CBC News in Halifax last November.
Then, in late December, federal officials said the unredacted report had been sent in error and should be returned. The department offered a redacted version instead.
The report looks at more than the attacks on the two RCMP officers. It also explores what the RCMP did and didn’t do on that weekend. While it covers much of the same ground as the report from the public inquiry, it is more tightly focused on the RCMP.
The mass shooting that began in Portapique, N.S., is the third time the conduct of the RCMP in a deadly crisis has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the last two decades.
In May 2005, four RCMP officers were shot and killed while executing a search warrant in Mayerthorpe, Alta. The incident raised serious questions about how the RCMP handles crises in rural areas, a concern echoed in the events in Portapique 15 years later.
In June 2014, three RCMP officers were killed by a gunman in Moncton, N.B. The analysis of that deadly episode pointed to lapses in training and inadequate equipment, deficiencies that were raised again six years later in Portapique.
The RCMP was found guilty of workplace safety violations in the aftermath of the Moncton murders and fined a total of $550,000. Individual Mounties also launched civil suits against the force.
When CBC News asked why no workplace charges were laid following the Nova Scotia murders, a spokesperson for ESDC replied in an emailed statement.
“The Labour Program prosecutes in cases where other compliance and enforcement measures were unsuccessful in getting an employer to comply with the Code.”
The investigators released their final report in May 2024 and found that the RCMP has either complied with or is in the process of complying with all of the investigators’ findings. The report lists 49 specific corrective and preventative measures to address gaps and deficiencies the investigators found in RCMP operations on that April weekend.
The first were gaps in the chain of command as people were shifted around to cover jobs that had been left open by staffing shortages, among other things. There was confusion on the evening of April 18, 2020, about who was in charge and who was filling which roles as the crisis unfolded.
The RCMP has since received extra funding to make sure there will always be a front-line supervisor on duty, including on evenings and weekends.
RCMP Supt. Sean Auld is the Support Services Officer for Nova Scotia RCMP and has overseen changes made since 2020. Auld said in an interview with CBC News last week the RCMP now have a much clearer idea of how to respond.
“If an active threat comes in, the first person taking command of that scene will be the risk manager, until we get a member on the actual scene and that person will become the ad hoc incident commander; the person with the best knowledge because they’re there at the scene,” he said.
“And then as the event spools up, that member will transfer and transition that command to our critical incident program, which will include a critical incident commander.”
As the gunman travelled across northern and central Nova Scotia on April 18 and 19, 2020, information was getting lost — especially information being collected by 911 operators and others not directly involved in the pursuit of the gunman. Information like the gunman’s first name, Gabe, and the fact he was driving a replica RCMP cruiser. Or the existence of an alternate route out of Portapique Beach, one that would bypass the roadblocks set up by the RCMP.
RCMP now have analysts, people designated to collate that kind of information and make sure it gets widely distributed to officers on scene. The analysts are on 24-hour call and work alongside the incident commanders as any crisis unfolds.
“There’s been a lot of work done on training, a lot of work done on policy revisions and a lot of work done on equipment improvements,” Auld said.
In 2020, the Mounties’ Operational Communications Centre (OCC) was in Truro, N.S., in a space that the RCMP had determined was inadequate for their needs.
The OCC is now housed deep inside RCMP headquarters in Dartmouth, N.S. The room is the nerve centre for all RCMP operations in the province. Giant monitors adorn the walls, some of them displaying the Blue Force Tracking program which identifies all members through their cellphones.
Other monitors show Pictometry, a program described by one RCMP senior officer as “Google Maps on steroids.” It not only shows up-to-date maps of the province, it also provides aerial photographs of locations in all seasons.
Auld said that means that a path that may be obscured by foliage in a summer photograph would be revealed in a winter image. None of that technology was available to the officers responding on April 18, 2020.
It was the inability of officers to identify one another clearly and quickly that led to confusion around Stevenson and Morrison. They each thought they were approaching one another when they saw what appeared to be a marked RCMP cruiser. It was, in fact, the gunman, Gabriel Wortman in a replica cruiser.
He shot both Stevenson and Morrison in separate engagements. Morrison survived but Stevenson succumbed to her wounds.
“Blue Force Tracking keeps track of everybody via their cellphone,” Auld said.
“And so, unlike the car, where we have automatic vehicle locators. As soon as someone leaves that car we couldn’t track them before. Now we can track them in very real time and there’s specific colours for specific job functions and each tab is noted by the division and the officer, the speed, the location.”
Auld demonstrated how he can access Blue Force Tracking on his own cellphone, which displayed a map of the province covered in pinpoints. He said the program not only locates individual officers, it can be used to mark items of interest officers encounter as they move.
Such a system could have averted the near tragedy at the Onslow Belmont fire hall that weekend, where two Mounties mistakenly opened fire on an RCMP cruiser parked in front of the building with an officer inside.
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