Lucki's gun call wasn't political interference but new rules are needed: N.S. mass shooting report
CBC
A report on the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia says then-RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki's infamous call to local Mounties was "ill-timed and poorly expressed" — but did not amount to political interference.
The sprawling report calls for clearer guardrails between Ottawa and the RCMP, saying last summer's scandal "illustrates that misunderstandings about police operational responsibility and ministerial policy responsibility persist within the RCMP and in broader public conversation in Canada."
"In a matter as fundamental to democracy as police/government relations, the police, the government and the public are not well served when they depend on convention alone," says the executive summary to the Mass Casualty Commission report.
Lucki, who retired earlier this month, was at the centre of claims that the federal government interfered politically with RCMP operations in order to boost the Liberal government's planned gun control legislation.
RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell and three other Nova Scotia officials have testified that Lucki reprimanded them during a phone call on April 28, 2020 for not offering information at a news conference earlier that day about the makes and models of the guns that were used in the killings just a few days earlier.
On a recording of that call, made public last fall, Lucki raises the Liberal government's intention at the time to introduce firearms legislation.
"Does anybody realize what's going on in the world of handguns and guns right now?" she says on the call.
"The fact that they're in the middle of trying to get a legislation going, the fact that that legislation is supposed to actually help police and the fact that the very little information I asked to be put in speaking notes at around 11:30 this morning ... could not be accommodated?"
The allegations lead to multiple parliamentary committees and calls from the federal Conservatives for Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair to resign.
"Lucki's audio recorded remarks about the benefits to police of proposed firearms legislation were ill-timed and poorly expressed, but they were not partisan and they do not show that there had been attempted political interference," says the report's executive summary.
The commission says that call contributed to the deterioration of the relationship between the Nova Scotia division and RCMP national headquarters after the shooting.
"The anger and disappointment of H Division personnel who attended the meeting did not resolve with time," says the report.
The commissioners called for changes to clarify the relationship between the commissioner and the minister.
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