Source and Reliability of Pre-Inquiry Information related to the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission

I want to talk to you about how we know what we already know, and how that may change (and perhaps dramatically change) as we approach the start of the Mass Casualty Commission hearings.

We learned some information thanks to media efforts to have our courts order that the RCMP produce documents. I am going to do a separate podcast on the process involved in unsealing these police documents, called Informations To Obtain, or ITO’s. These ITO’s allow the police to get a search warrant on a property. When such a warrant is requested, to justify it, the police need to tell the justice of the peace all they know about the case, and so often, too often I will say, they also request that the ITO be sealed so that the public cannot see it.

Media organizations have been chipping away at this sealed ITO through successful court applications, and so some information has been coming out through that process.

Another way has been the class action lawsuit filed by the families. This is where we learned, for example, that the only RCMP helicopter in the area was out on routine maintenance the weekend of the shootings. Technically speaking, the lawsuit is only a source of unproven allegations at this stage, but when drafting a statement of claim, a lawyer is incentivized to allege only what you can plausibly prove. Otherwise, you risk your client being hit with a costs award at the end of the trial.

The rest of the information we have so far comes from the Serious Incident Response Team reports on the RCMP use of firearms at the Onslow Fire Hall and the Big Stop, though questions are being raised about those reports, and I will talk about them on a future video as well.

The last source of information has been through sources within the police who have been leaking information to a gentleman named Paul Palango, who is an author of several books on the RCMP, and who has been doing an excellent job covering the story since the beginning.

In my view, having all of this information being released prior to the start of the Inquiry proceedings is a good thing from our perspective as members of the public. The last thing we want is for this process to be tightly controlled and have a narrow focus. Every time some plausible new story comes out, or some fresh allegation is made that looks like it might have some merit, it forces the Inquiry to add that to the spectrum of topics it will cover.