Recordings released of tense call between RCMP boss Brenda Lucki and N.S. Mounties after mass shooting
Lucki #Lucki
A new series of recordings released by the inquiry into Canada’s worst mass shooting reveals, to the greatest extent yet, some of the tensions between the RCMP commissioner and her Nova Scotia counterparts in the days following the massacre.
In the recordings, from a teleconference on April 28, 2020, RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki gives the Nova Scotia contingent a tongue-lashing for its communication failures in the wake of the shootings on April 18 and 19.
Lucki weathered calls for her resignation in June amid accusations that she had sought to interfere with the Nova Scotia RCMP’s investigation into the April 2020 shootings, allegedly at the behest of then-Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office, who were in the midst of trying to pass gun-control legislation.
Those accusations stemmed from the handwritten notes of Chief Supt. Darren Campbell — then the senior officer in charge of the investigation into the mass shooting — wherein he indicated Lucki was upset at the April 28 teleconference because she had promised Blair and the PMO that the specific makes and models of the guns involved in the shooting would be made public at a news conference earlier that day.
Listen to the recordings here:
That information was withheld by Campbell at the time, over what he said were fears that it would compromise the RCMP investigation.
Blair, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Lucki have all denied any interference in the investigation.
In the newly released recordings, which document a portion of the teleconference between Lucki and Nova Scotia senior RCMP officers — including Campbell and then-assistant commissioner Lee Bergerman — Lucki bemoans the withholding of specifics on the guns used by the killer.
“It was a request that I got from the minister’s office, and I shared with the minister that, in fact, it was going to be in the news release,” she says at the beginning of the newly released recordings, though it is not explicit that she is referring to the information about the guns.
As the meeting went on, Lucki, becomes increasingly exasperated.
“Does anybody realize what’s going on in the world of handguns and guns right now?” she asks.
“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 … could not be accommodated.
“Does anybody wonder why I feel frustrated when I feel like I’m not being heard?”
In August, during her testimony at the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry, Lucki maintained that she got a question from Blair’s office asking if the details on the killer’s weapons would be revealed at the April 28 news conference. She said her communications team contacted their Nova Scotia counterparts and were told that the details would be revealed, whereupon she passed that information on to Blair.
Emails presented as evidence at the inquiry showed explicitly that Campbell was opposed to releasing specifics on the guns. That information reached the eyes of Deputy Commissioner Brian Brennan, who said in an interview with the commission that he would have told his commanding officer — Lucki.
Lucki said she doesn’t recall him doing so.
Lucki also took issue with the lack of information being fed to her from the Nova Scotia team.
In the newly released recordings, she notes that the national RCMP offered the Nova Scotia team communications help on three consecutive days following the shootings, but that help was declined.
And yet, she complains, she only had two situation reports in the four days following the shootings, and much of the information getting out to the public was coming from places other than the RCMP.
“I know people are working as hard as they can, but we have a responsibility,” she says in the recordings
“Every time we have dropped the ball on providing information, you know who’s filled that gap? The media has filled the gap. Retired members who haven’t been in the field for 10, 15, 20 years are filling the gap. Why? Because we are not filling that gap.”
On a couple of occasions, Lucki mentions she is frustrated that Nova Scotia RCMP had promised her a chronology of events and a map by April 24 — five days after the shootings — which she had in turn promised to Blair and Trudeau for a briefing. Neither, she says, was forthcoming.
She expresses apparent frustration over how the force was being perceived.
“To watch what happened last week, to watch the media chew us up, eat us up and spit us out and to hear what the minister and the prime minister had to say about the RCMP’s inability to communicate. I will never forget it because I know we’re better than that,” she says during the teleconference.
“I cannot let this happen again. I already have a request sitting on my phone that the minister wants to speak with me, and I know exactly what it’s going to be about. And … there’s not much I can say, except that once again I dropped the ball.
“That’s going to be the fourth time I’m going to say that to him.”
Bergerman, the top RCMP officer in Nova Scotia says that the Mounties had been unable to produce a timeline and a map for Lucki until the day after that deadline because they were sifting through mounds of data.
“That’s not because we’re all sitting here doing nothing, we were trying to put it all together with a lot of information,” says Bergerman on the recording.
Later, Bergerman, in her testimony to the inquiry, characterized Lucki as “angry” on the teleconference, a portrayal Campbell agreed with.
“The commissioner was obviously upset,” Campbell wrote in his notes.
“The commissioner accused us (me) of disrespecting her by not following her instructions.”
“Some in the room were reduced to tears and were emotional over this belittling reprimand,” he added later.
On April 18 and 19, 2020, a gunman killed 22 people and torched several homes in northern Nova Scotia during a 13-hour rampage before being killed by police at a gas station in Enfield, almost 100 kilometres away from Portapique, where the shootings began.
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