Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair appears as a witness at the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on July 25.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The Conservative opposition says that Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair and RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki need to resign now that a newly released audiotape has revived allegations of political meddling in the police investigation of the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting.
On Friday, Conservative public safety critic Raquel Dancho said both officials should step down because of apparent inconsistencies between their sworn testimony to Parliament and what Commissioner Lucki said during an RCMP conference call recorded days after the massacre.
In July, Commissioner Lucki and Mr. Blair told the House of Commons public safety committee that their offices had only ever engaged in routine and necessary information sharing. Nova Scotia RCMP officers alleged that Commissioner Lucki had fallen under apparent political pressure from Mr. Blair to release sensitive details about the gunman’s weapons, because the government had pending gun control legislation.
“Let me be very clear. At no time did I ask Commissioner Lucki to reveal that information,” Mr. Blair testified in July. “At no time did I direct her in any way on communications. She did not make any promise to me.”
But Ms. Dancho said that the newly released tape of the Commissioner’s April 28, 2020, call casts doubt on that version of events because Commissioner Lucki can be heard on the tape referencing “a request I got from the minister’s office”
“It’s not every day we ask for a minister to resign,” Ms. Dancho told reporters outside the House of Commons. “But given that he [Mr. Blair] lied point blank at committee and pressured the RCMP Commissioner of Canada to politically interfere in the investigation of the worst mass killing in Canadian history, on those two fronts we believe he should resign today.”
Commissioner Lucki and Mr. Blair deny doing anything improper. “I have not been asked to resign, nor am I considering stepping down as Commissioner of the RCMP,” Commissioner Lucki said in a statement Friday.
The minister’s spokeswoman, Annie Cullinan, said that “at no time did Minister Blair ask Commissioner Lucki to release details of the firearms used in this tragic event.”
But an NDP MP said Friday that his party will be calling for renewed rounds of inquiry by the House of Commons public safety and national security committee. “This recording points to deeply troubling interference, and New Democrats are calling for an emergency meeting to force the minister to testify,” said Alistair MacGregor in a statement.
On Thursday, a tape of an RCMP conference call held on April 28, 2020, led by Commissioner Lucki was released by the mass-casualty commission that is probing all facets of the police response to that month’s massacre, in which a gunman killed 22 people in rural Nova Scotia. (It is not clear why this audio recording has surfaced only now, after the public inquiry’s testimony phase concluded last month.)
On April 18 and 19, 2020, a gunman was driving replica RCMP cruiser in an attack that spanned multiple communities and lasted 13 hours before the Mounties shot him dead.
Records show that on April 23, Commissioner Lucki was exchanging e-mails with RCMP commanders in Nova Scotia to tell them Ottawa officials needed answers. “Wondering if we had the inventory of weapons used and weapons seized,” she wrote, adding “Minister anxiously awaiting.”
Later that day, Commissioner Lucki e-mailed Zita Astravas, Mr. Blair’s chief of staff, the list of guns but warned it was to be kept secret. “Do not share this information past the Minister and the PM,” she said.
Commissioner Lucki also said she could not provide a completed chronology of the Nova Scotia shootings ahead of a briefing. “Zita my apologies for the delay. This is all I have for now.”
Five days later, Commissioner Lucki convened the tense conference call. She told Nova Scotia Mountie commanders they were not providing her office clear information quickly enough. She said she was upset that the division had caused her to tell political officials – in error – that the Nova Scotia RCMP were poised to publicly release details about the gunman’s weaponry.
“To hear what the Minister and the Prime Minister had to say about the RCMP’s inability to communicate I will never forget it,” Commissioner Lucki said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters in B.C. on Friday that no details about the gunman’s weapons were publicly released until months after the massacre. “Every step of the way we recognized and supported the fact that the RCMP, [the] police of jurisdiction, are the ones who decide what is released and when.”