10 years after Moncton shootings, RCMP still struggling with supervisor training

Almost 10 years after a disturbed man with a rifle killed three Mounties in Moncton. the RCMP have yet to fully implement a key recommendation from a 2014 review aimed at preventing such deadly encounters.

On the evening of June 4, 2014, Justin Bourque was armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a shotgun when he left his mobile home on a self-described mission to kill police officers. Driven by paranoia and hatred for government, the 24-year-old labourer fatally shot constables Fabrice Gevaudan, 45, David Ross, 32, and Douglas Larche, 40.

Two other constables, Darlene Goguen and Eric Dubois, were wounded during Bourque's 20-minute shooting rampage before he escaped into a wooded area at the edge of a residential subdivision.

For more than 29 hours, the city would remain under a virtual state of siege until the crew aboard a surveillance aircraft used an infrared camera to spot the gunman's glowing heat signature on the night of June 5, 2014.

Bourque was sentenced to an unprecedented 75 years in prison, but the New Brunswick Court of Appeal reduced his parole ineligibility period to 25 years after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the law that had made such long sentences possible.

Six months after the slayings, retired RCMP assistant commissioner Alphonse MacNeil released a report with 64 recommendations. Among them was a call for the police force to "examine how it trains front-line supervisors to exercise command and control during critical incidents."

In his report, MacNeil found that on that night, RCMP supervisors "were confronted with a situation that in many ways exceeded what supervisors are trained to deal with," adding that the moment shots were fired, "chaos ensued."

"Nobody established a command presence during this period. Members were acting on their own accord without a unified tactical plan ... Nobody at a supervisory level had an overall view of where resources were positioned and this remained the case for the next hour or more."

In response to the recommendation, the RCMP developed two courses on critical incident response management: a 90-minute online introductory course and an advanced, 16-hour course. And the courses were made mandatory for all front-line supervisors in 2018.

But in the years that followed, few Mounties signed up for the courses. That problem was revealed by the public inquiry that investigated the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia that saw another lone gunman kill 22 people — including an RCMP officer — during a 13-hour rampage on April 18-19, 2020.

The final report from the Mass Casualty Commission, released just over a year ago, confirmed that none of the RCMP's commanders who initially responded to the Nova Scotia mass shooting had taken the advanced course, and only one had completed the introductory course.

"We find that many of the supervisors involved in the initial critical incident response in Portapique, N.S., had not received the training that ... MacNeil recommended," the inquiry's report says.

The supervisors who co-ordinated the RCMP's response that night "were in no better position than their colleagues had been in Moncton in June 2014."

The commission of inquiry also challenged the Mounties' claim to inquiry investigators in 2022 that they had already implemented MacNeil's recommendation.