Tactical team leader during N.S. shootings blasts RCMP for lack of support

The leader of the Nova Scotia RCMP's tactical team left the force in frustration six months after responding to the mass shooting that started in Portapique, N.S., and told lawyers for a public inquiry the "abuse" inflicted by his employer was worse than the "war zone" his team faced during the April 2020 massacre.

"I don't expect upper management to fight us and abuse us ... to treat us the way they treated us after I gave the best I could give," Tim Mills said in a September 2021 interview with Mass Casualty Commission lawyers and staff. 

On April 18-19, 2020, Mills was the leader of the 13-person Emergency Response Team (ERT) that responded to high-risk situations across Nova Scotia, except in metro Halifax and the Sydney area.

The work usually involved racing to crime scenes in the middle of the night. Though they trained to deal with active shooters like the one in 2014 who killed three Mounties and injured two more in Moncton, Mills said they were more often dealing with armed people who needed to be contained and talked down. 

In Portapique and then Glenholme, Debert, Shubenacadie and Enfield they faced an unusual situation — carnage spread over a large area and a gunman on the loose who was speeding between communities killing people at random.

While pursuing the shooter in the direction of Halifax, Mills came upon the body of his slain colleague Const. Heidi Stevenson and learned from a witness the gunman had just fled in another victim's SUV.  Within half an hour, one of the tactical officers and a dog handler he was travelling with shot and killed the shooter after recognizing him at a gas station. 

"Moncton was bad, really bad. This was ten times worse than Moncton…. It was a war zone," the former corporal said in his interview.  

Mills said he was proud of the way his team responded with the tools and resources they had. But he also highlighted challenges including being short-staffed, having no overnight air support and not having the technology to locate tactical team members in the dark subdivision where the violence started. 

He said that the RCMP's management never checked in personally in the days that followed and did not back up promises to support his team's mental health, refusing to give the part-time tactical officers more than a few days away from their regular shifts to decompress. 

When the call came in to rush to Portapique that Saturday evening in April, Mills said his team was operating five people short of what would be ideal or recommended — with just five full-time members and eight officers who worked part-time in addition to doing their general duty shifts. 

Because of that, Mills said he decided to stay with the group as an extra body on the ground instead of doing tactical operations and working alongside the critical incident commander overseeing the response from the command post, as team leaders normally would. 

"I won't be able to see where everyone is, I won't have a good picture of what's going on, I'm going to stay embedded with the team," he explained of the decision to inquiry staff. 

Technology was another factor, he said, because the ERT team could not pinpoint each other's locations. 

In the past, Mills said they had access to software that could be opened on their phones or in a command centre and would map out icons showing where members and their vehicles were positioned. They could insert an address so people could see where it was in relation to their position.