Will the latest Liberal scandal take our eyes off a massacre inquiry?

Jordan Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It appears the federal Liberal government may have tried to to exert political pressure on an agency that should be independent from them. Steve, that’s the problem. You have heard this one before. This time, evidence released at an inquiry into the Portapique massacre suggests that the Prime Minister’s office and the Office of Public Safety Minister Bill Blair urged the RCMP Commissioner to publicly reveal the type of gun used in the massacre, in order to tie that gun to an upcoming federal gun control measure.

You can see why, on the surface, that doesn’t look great, right? But is there anything under the surface? The PMO and the Public Safety Minister’s office deny exerting undue influence in this case. So did this come from them or did it come from the Commissioner? What exactly do we know about what happened? When? Who will take the blame? Is this proof of Liberal corruption? Or is it an over eager commissioner trying to curry political favour? And here’s a big question I want us to consider. Will this take our eyes off the ball when it comes to the Portapique inquiry? Will we end up tangled in politics and scandal instead of getting to the bottom of what went wrong during Canada’s largest ever mass shooting?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Stephen Maher is an award-winning Nova Scotian novelist and journalist. He’s writing about the inquiry and the political scandal inside it in The Line. Hey, Stephen.

Stephen Maher Good day.

Jordan Why don’t we just start here? Who is Brenda Lucki and why are Canadians learning her name? Well, Brenda Lucki is the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police. She is the first female Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appointed by the Trudeau government in 2018. And people are learning her name at this time because there are serious questions about an attempt for her to interfere in communications around the Portapique massacre.

Jordan What did she allegedly do? And just to stress, nobody’s admitted to this yet, is that correct?

Stephen Maher There’s still some question about it. So what happened is on April 28, 2020, ten days after the massacre that left 22 innocent people dead, the RCMP gave the first, I would say successful news conference where they shared information about what had happened. A man named Superintendent Darren Campbell gave a fairly long news conference in which he, for the first time, explained some of what had happened. He did not reveal what firearms the killer had used. Lucki summoned him to a conference call after that, along with some other people both in Ottawa and in Nova Scotia, and according to notes that Campbell made that were released to the public inquiry, she chided him for having failed to release the information on the guns.

Jordan Why did she want the information released?

Stephen Maher I’m going to quote redo from Campbell’s notes: “The Commissioner then said that we didn’t understand that this was tied to pending gun control legislation that would make officers and the public safer.” He also wrote that she said she had promised the Minister of Public Safety in the Prime Minister’s office that the RCMP would release this information.

Jordan That doesn’t sound great. And I’m a lay person, I don’t know too much about ethics and government. That sounds not good.

Stephen Maher It’s my view that the Commissioner of the RCMP should not be communicating with her officers about the political priorities of the government of the day. It would have been entirely different if she had said, we need to tell Canadians more about this information and the RCMP should be more open, in which case I would likely be saying, well, good for her. The RCMP should have released the information about the guns and they need to change their communications approach. But that’s not what she said. She said, I promised at that time, Bill Blair, the Public Safety Minister, and the Prime Minister’s office that they would release this. The reason why Trudeau and Blair wanted this release is that another ten days later, they announced a ban on a number of semi automatic, what we call assault style rifles, including one of the guns that the killer in Portapique used. So to put the dots together, you can imagine that the Prime Minister’s office and the Blair’s office are saying, well, we want to be able to tell people that we’re taking action in response to this horrible crime. So they wanted to link, and did in fact link their legislative response to what had happened in Portapique.

Jordan So we learned about this, and correct me if I’m wrong, through Campbell’s testimony at the inquiry.

Stephen Maher Campbell has not yet testified his evidence was released or his notes were released. And it gets a little bit worse for the government in that eventually it became clear, and there was a good story in The Globe about this, that there were two versions of Campbell’s notes made available to the inquiry. The first version sent by the Federal Justice Department, which answers to, ultimately to the Prime Minister excised the four pages in which this controversial exchange was described, and further, that the Justice Department, when they first sent along the notes, did not inform the inquiry that they had held back some of Campbell’s notes.

Jordan That does sound fairly damning. I want to ask first, as we get deeper into this, what has the government and what has Lucki said about this? Do they deny it wholesale? Have they confirmed it? Are they trying to no comment their way through it?

Stephen Maher So Lucki put out a statement in which she did not contradict the version of events as described by Campbell. She said, I regret the way I approached the meeting and the impact it had on those in attendance. One of the things that Campbell’s notes say is that Lucki was really giving them a tongue lashing to the point that at least one person on the call was crying. I personally found that surprising given the horrible pressure that these Mounties in Nova Scotia were under with so many crime scenes and so much grizzly work to do, and the fact that they had lost their close colleague Heidi Stevenson, who died in a gunfight with a killer, and now they’re getting chewed out by the Commissioner, which in the RCMP world, the intensely hierarchical structured culture of the RCMP, getting chewed out by the Commissioner is really not something that you want to happen. So she appears to be saying, well, I regret the intensity of my expression, but she’s not contradicting him about the fact that she invoked Trudeau and Blair and their political agenda.

Jordan What about Trudeau and Blair or their offices?

Stephen Maher So Trudeau, who was in Europe when this came out, I think in Europe might have been Africa, actually, but traveling, he said that he brought no undue influence. And Blair similarly denied attempting to have Lucki exert political influence over the decisions of the investigators. I should point out likely that Campbell’s view, and this would be within the tradition of the RCMP is that they hold back information like that because releasing it could impact the investigation. There’s a separate question here over whether that’s a good policy to have, but that’s the way the RCMP rolls.

Jordan So I don’t intend this as a rhetorical question because I just have commented on what the optics are. But if this is true and the PMO’s office and the Minister of Public Safety’s Office did indeed exert pressure and Lucki went along with that, fundamentally, why is that a problem?

Stephen Maher Most modern police forces are governed by a police services board, the point of which is to keep them at arms length from politicians who might have a political agenda. This has often been recommended for the RCMP and successive governments have failed to do it. The idea that politicians should be advising or exerting influence over the conduct of investigations is disturbing. We don’t want politicians saying, I think you should investigate my opponents, for example. Sure. Or Your officers are investigating, my friend. And we think that’s not good for the country. These people will do that. Politicians as a class has a long history of that kind of thing. Right. Everyone who studied this knows that the RCMP should be kept at arm’s length from government. And it appears here that Lucki was allowing the political agenda of Trudeau and Blair to interfere with an investigation.

Jordan I want to leave the inquiry off to the side here for a second because obviously that’s its own separate thing that really needs to work and really needs to get to the bottom of what went wrong. Let’s talk for a moment about the political reaction to this news in particular, what is the public reaction been? Is this a story so far? In the minds of the average Canadian voter. Do we know?

Stephen Maher It’s not entirely clear to me whether this is a big scandal. A damaging thing about it for the government, potentially, I think, is that it follows a similar pattern to the conduct that we saw in the SNC Lavalin affair where the government was trying to influence what ought to be at arm’s length from them for political reasons.

Jordan I’m glad you mentioned that because as somebody who covers this government and has for a while, Stephen, it must be hard for you, and I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth but hard for you to give these government officials the benefit of the doubt given this has all the hallmarks of scandals we’ve seen from them in the past.

Stephen Maher Yes. Although I am not coming to the conclusion that Blair and Trudeau exerted undue influence over this. To me, it’s an open question. It’s possible that Lucky was sort of freelancing here, that she knew that the Liberals wanted the information about the investigation to be released and so she took it upon herself in an effort to curry favour. It’s also possible that some vaguely thuggish type in the PMO or Public Safety Minister’s office said, well, listen, we need this. We’ve got a big announcement coming up and you better get it for us. At this time, we don’t know. I did think it was interesting that Trudeau used the phrase undo influence, which suggests that he may have actually exerted influence, but that he considered it to be reasonable. It’s all kind of fuzzy. We may find out because the inquiry is continuing. And also there are to be later in July parliamentary hearings where some of these actors will be called before a committee and asked to explain themselves.

Jordan And in terms of the partisan reaction in Ottawa to this, I am sure that the Conservative Party and their MPs and leadership candidates are being very relaxed about this news.

Stephen Maher Yes, they’re greeting it all with equanimity. Now, it fits into a narrative for the Conservatives about the corrupt Liberal government. And there’s a delicate position here where the Liberals and the NDP have reached a governing arrangement that’s supposed to last for three years, that Jagmeet Singh could withdraw his support at any time if he should choose to do so. So the Conservatives might hope to use this as a wedge to separate New Democrats from Liberals and bring about a different kind of parliamentary dynamic. But Singh has so far said that he’s interested in getting to the bottom of this. And I suspect that New Democrats will not stand in the way of efforts by the committee to find out what happened because they would look bad. These committees are Democratic affairs, and in a minority parliament, the Liberals need the NDP or Bloc in order to control the direction of committee goes. And I don’t think they’re likely to get that support from the NDP in this instance.

Jordan To bring it back to the inquiry for a second. You’re a Nova Scotian. We’ve talked about this before. I know this story is close to your heart. Are you at all concerned that the urgent business of this inquiry could get derailed by what people could call like a political sideshow?

Stephen Maher I am. I think it’s unfortunate, and the politicians and Lucki should proceed with dispatch to sort this out. This tragedy happened during COVID in part of rural Nova Scotia, far from the view of the national media. It’s hard to get people in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, where political and media power are focused, to pay much attention to the serious failures of the RCMP, because most of those failures take place out in the boonies, right. In rural areas, in small towns, in small cities, in Monckton and Mayerthorpe and Portapique. And I have come to believe, after years of working on stories about the RCMP, that there are serious structural problems with the RCMP that allows it to continue to fail its members and the public. And that that’s evident in Portapique, and that’s what the focus should be on.

It’s hard to get politicians to pay attention to this and to do anything about it because it’s a political minefield. Trying to reform the RCMP is very difficult and there’s not a lot of votes in it. So this inquiry into this horrible, horrible thing which has destroyed so many lives, offers the best chance that we’ve had in a generation, I think, of making the kinds of changes that the RCMP needs. And the idea that we’re instead getting distracted by a kind of partisan bunfight is unfortunate. Lucki and the Liberals, I think, are duty bound to make this go away, to explain themselves.

Jordan Do you think that’s coming anytime soon? Like, is this at a point where Lucki or somebody else could own up to this, take it, resign, and walk away, and we could get back to focusing on the actual massacre in Portapique and how it happened?

Stephen Maher I don’t know. We’re talking about a human being here and a dedicated servant of the people of Canada. So I don’t like to feel sort of uncomfortable to say that she might have to go. I am sure that RCMP officers across the country are finding this troubling. She has previously demonstrated a lack of political subtlety. Right, if you’re going to hold a job like that, you have to make judgment calls that are fairly difficult. In a committee hearing, I think, in 2020 about systemic discrimination and racism, she gave answers that she later had to correct. She seemed to be struggling to understand the idea. RCMP officers who I’ve spoken to watch that and thought, well, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about, so I have to wonder if she’s the right person to be leading this organization. I am aware, though, that feminists find there’s a troubling pattern here where you seem to have a boys club finding a way to stick the knife in a woman running an unimportant organization. And I’m not blind to the reality of that either.

Jordan I think part of the problem is that it’s so hard to give this government the benefit of the doubt about this kind of stuff, that people end up taking the narrative that presents itself so easily. And that’s why we’re going to be talking about this until whenever, my God, I hope the next election is a long way away still, because I’m still hurting from the last one. But you know what I mean, it fits into the narrative of these Liberals so well that, whether it’s true or not, it’s going to be an issue.

Stephen Maher I was thinking about this the last couple of days in a big picture way here. What we have with this scandal and the SNC Lavalin scandal is an attempt to exert influence that was unsuccessful. And I’ve covered scandals from Airbus to sponsorship to robocalls. In the great ranking of scandals, this is gravely important and it does suggest a disturbing pattern where the Liberals are seeking to exert influence where they should not. But it doesn’t look to me like a government killer. But partly we’ll see if they’ve grown so arrogant that they can’t respond appropriately. Right. We saw in SNC Lavalin, the Prime Minister at first was arrogant, said the story in The Globe Mail is false, which it was not false. And it was members of his own cabinet who essentially, through resigning, forced the government to back away from that kind of arrogant denial of responsibility. Have they learned any lessons from that? This looks to me like the kind of thing that if they account for themselves and explain what happened, they might be able to put this behind them and continue to go on and make other messes.

Jordan And we could continue to pay attention to the actual content of the inquiry. Stephen, thank you so much for this.

Stephen Maher My pleasure. Thank you.

Jordan Stephen Maher writing in The Line. That was The Big Story. For more you can head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can write to us. The address is [click here!]. And of course, call us, talk to us, rant, rave, joke, whatever. Phone number is 416-935-5935.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

Back to top of page