RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki “made a promise” to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office to leverage the mass murders of April 18/19, 2020 to get a gun control law passed.
A week after the murders, Lucki pressured RCMP in Nova Scotia to release details of the weapons used by the killer. But RCMP commanders in Nova Scotia refused to release such details, saying doing so would threaten their investigation into the murders.
The Trudeau government’s gun control objectives were spelled out in an order in council issued in May 2020, and were encapsulated in Bill C-21, which was tabled last month, but the concern in April 2020 was the extent to which politics threatened to interfere with a cross-border police investigation into how the killer managed to obtain and smuggle into Canada four illegal guns used to commit many of the 22 murders.
The evidence, includs interviews with senior RCMP officers and officials, including handwritten notes. The report, released Tuesday by the public inquiry into the mass shooting that took place in Nova Scotia on April 18-19, 2020.
“The commissioner said she had promised the minister of public safety and the Prime Minister’s Office that the RCMP (we) would release this information,” read the handwritten notes of Supt. Darren Campbell.
“I tried to explain there was no intent to disrespect anyone, however we could not release this information at this time,” Campbell wrote. “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.”
Campbell’s notes, now released as part of the official evidence of the Mass Casualty Commission, also show that Lucki expressed her dissatisfaction with Campbell and others for not releasing this information. His claim of political interference is also backed up by the words of Lia Scanlan, then the director of communications for the RCMP in Nova Scotia.