HALIFAX—The country’s top Mountie says it was growing frustration with bad communication — not a political agenda — that led to her tense exchanges with colleagues in Nova Scotia during the aftermath of Canada’s worst mass shooting.
RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki testified Tuesday at the Mass Casualty Commission in Halifax, presenting her side of events that for two months have led to accusations that she tried to interfere with the investigation into the April 2020 massacre.
In doing so, she painted a picture of a conflict between the RCMP’s national communication unit and its counterparts in Nova Scotia — ostensibly in the name of greater transparency.
That conflict culminated in what Lucki called “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Just prior to a news conference scheduled on April 28, 2020, Lucki told the commission, she got a question from then public safety minister Bill Blair’s office, asking whether details about the gunman’s weapons would be revealed at the briefing.
She said her communications staff reached out to their counterparts in Nova Scotia, who said they would. Lucki said she passed that information along to the minister’s office.
In fact, emails previously presented as evidence at the inquiry showed explicitly that Darren Campbell, then the senior Nova Scotia Mountie in charge of the investigation, opposed the release of details about the weapons, saying it would compromise the probe.
According to those emails, that information reached Deputy Commissioner Brian Brennan’s eyes. In a previous interview with the commission, Brennan said he would have told Lucki, his commanding officer, that information.
Lucki said Tuesday she doesn’t recall him doing so.
“The weapons themselves did not matter to me,” she told the inquiry. “It was the fact that I was given erroneous information that bothered me, because I pride myself on giving the right information.
“It was just yet another example of the miscommunication over the past eight to 10 days.”
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Lucki told Michael Scott, lawyer for most of the mass shooting victims’ families.
When Campbell omitted details on the weapons from that news conference, it set the stage for a teleconference between the Nova Scotia and national RCMP contingents, where, according to his notes, he took a browbeating from Lucki over his decision.
According to Campbell’s notes, released to the public in June, Lucki told the Nova Scotia contingent that she’d promised Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office that those details would be released. Lucki said that the release of that information was “tied to pending legislation,” according to Campbell’s notes.
“The commissioner was obviously upset,” Campbell wrote in his notes.
“The commissioner accused us (me) of disrespecting her by not following her instructions.”
Campbell’s account was supported by Lia Scanlan, then the communications director for the Nova Scotia RCMP, who was also at that meeting. In a letter to Lucki almost a year later, Scanlan wrote of the meeting: “I was embarrassed to be privy to what was unfolding. It was appalling, inappropriate, unprofessional and extremely belittling.”
And on Monday at the public inquiry, Lee Bergerman — now retired, but in April 2020 the commanding officer of the Nova Scotia Mounties — backed up Campbell’s version of events as well, characterizing Lucki as “angry” on the teleconference.
“(Lucki) felt disrespected and disobeyed,” Bergerman said. “Legislation, like there was gun legislation coming up … and that we didn’t understand the big picture as it related to that.”
Campbell’s notes led to accusations — subsequently denied by Lucki and the federal Liberals before a House of Commons committee — that she was interfering in the Nova Scotia investigation in order to bolster the government’s incoming gun control legislation.
Lucki disputes the Nova Scotia contingent’s description of the teleconference.
She said Tuesday she wanted to make it clear that her expectations weren’t being met. She said her communications team had grown frustrated with the way the Nova Scotia communications team was handling the flow of information in the days after the shooting but insisted that she didn’t get angry on the call.
“I’ve been trying to explain myself seven different ways from Sunday here,” she said during a testy exchange with Scott.
“I find myself a little bit frustrated because, honestly, I know the conversations I had with the minister, I know the conversations I had with the minister’s staff, with the deputy minister, with the national security adviser.
“There was never any direction provided, no interference, no political pressure.”
“Was there pressure? Yeah, there was a lot of pressure, most of it coming from the media itself. But as far as what people think happened? It didn’t.”
In 13 hours over April 18 and 19, 2020, Gabriel Wortman, a 51-year-old denturist, killed 22 people and torched multiple homes in northern Nova Scotia before being spotted and killed by police.
Lucki told the inquiry that the Nova Scotia’s communications team was not set up to deal with big events such as a mass casualty, that they were overwhelmed and that her national communications crew became extremely frustrated with their Nova Scotia counterparts, pushing them for more transparency, with an eye to mitigating what they say as a “negative narrative.”
“My comms people look at things strategically, so they watch what’s going on in the communications with media. They look at what the criticisms are, what the gaps are in the communication.
“There was a lot of questions about the weapons. They were really trying to push them to be more transparent in their approach to communications instead of not being transparent because of an investigation.
“The narrative was changing negatively towards the event and towards the RCMP. And my strategic communications was looking at that and trying to figure out how we could best address that and counter that.”
Lucki is scheduled to testify at the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry again Wednesday.
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