Gun policy comments made by then-RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki in a contentious call to Nova Scotia RCMP officers after the mass shooting in 2020 did not amount to political interference, the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC) final report concludes.
"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," reads the commissioner's findings in the report's executive summary.
Questions over whether anyone in the federal government interfered with the RCMP's investigation into the mass shooting became a dominating story in Ottawa in June of last year after documents released as part of the MCC alleged that the tragedy was being used by the Liberals to help push forward a new gun ban.
Central to the claims was that in a meeting several days after the killing rampage that left 22 people dead, Lucki allegedly expressed her disappointment with the Nova Scotia division's handling of press briefings, because she wanted them to release specific information on the firearms used by the perpetrator.
In handwritten notes, Nova Scotia RCMP superintendent Darren Campbell wrote that Lucki indicated she promised then-minister of public safety Bill Blair and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office that the RCMP would release this information, and that this was tied to pending gun control legislation intended to make officers and the public safer.
At the time, the Nova Scotia RCMP — which was under heavy scrutiny for its handling of the case from the start — said releasing additional information would jeopardize the ongoing investigation into the perpetrator’s access to firearms.
Days later, the prime minister announced a ban on 1,500 assault-style weapons, including weapons used in the Nova Scotia shooting. Moving forward on gun control measures was a pre-existing Liberal commitment, dating back to their 2019 election campaign.
At the time, Blair, Lucki and Trudeau all denied that they put any undue influence or pressure on the officers investigating Canada's worst mass shooting.
The MCC's findings appear to have come to the same conclusion but did determine, however, that the meeting "both reflected and contributed to the deterioration of the relationship between [Nova Scotia's] H Division and RCMP national headquarters after the mass casualty."
The report notes that Nova Scotia RCMP leadership and the communications personnel who were on the contentious call "experienced considerable personal and professional strain in the aftermath of the mass casualty," and at the same time national leadership including Lucki were "concerned by what they perceived to be inadequate internal briefing practices and poor public communications."
"The damage from this meeting did not resolve with time," the report states.
Lucki has said repeatedly that she regretted the way she approached the meeting, and the impact her approach had.
This controversy largely played out on Parliament Hill, seeing a House of Commons committee hold a series of hearings in search of a full airing of the facts around the allegations. It also became part of the commission's extensive hearings, and in October 2022, partial recordings of the tense meeting were released.
Though, in the context of the thousands of pages released Wednesday, this was a minor takeaway in a sea of findings on the RCMP's failures before, during, and after the tragedy.
One of the most significant recommendation's made by the commission is for the federal government to advance further gun control efforts, including reforming the classification system for firearms and prohibit "all semi-automatic handguns and all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that discharge centre-fire ammunition and that are designed to accept detachable magazines with capacities of more than five rounds."
A Liberal proposal to further tighten gun laws to include “red flag” provisions and restrict legal access to handguns remains before Parliament, after a proposed amendment to enshrine in law a definition for "assault-style" weapons, became a point of contention.
Lucki retired as RCMP commissioner just two weeks before the report was released. The commission said it had secured a personal promise that she'd champion implementing the MCC's recommendations, and it is now expecting her successor to uphold that commitment.
On Thursday, interim RCMP commissioner Mike Duheme said while he can't change what happened, he's committed to seeing the national police force improve.
Reacting to the report's findings on Parliament Hill on Thursday, Blair said he thinks the report "correctly" concluded "that there was no partisanship, and certainly no interference in this case."
"I know that there had been some speculation and even some innuendo about that at the time, but quite frankly, I think that’s a distraction from the real issues," Blair said. "This is a tragic event for the families and the communities in which this took place, and it demands the best response from all orders of government, from the RCMP, from all of us."
