Following last year’s mass shooting, Nova Scotia changes course on public emergency alerts

Corporal Troy Gill holds roses with the names of 23 victims after family members handed over the flowers at the RCMP detachment in Bible Hill, N.S., on April 18, 2021, the first anniversary of last April's mass shooting.

No such warnings were circulated anywhere in Canada prior to last April, when the system stayed silent over the course of the gunman’s 13-hour overnight rampage in rural Nova Scotia. During the attack, RCMP officers issued late-stage advisories to the public only on social media. The Mounties’ attempts to work with provincial officials to craft the country’s first localized cellphone warnings about an active shooter broke down, leaving that more direct alert unsent.

The communications breakdowns by police and government officials in Nova Scotia will be explored in a coming commission of inquiry. But the families of the victims have already launched a lawsuit. The statistics show that Nova Scotia officials have dramatically shifted their understanding of what constitutes a civil emergency. Less than a week after the massacre, residents of a Halifax neighbourhood received a “shelter in place” warning, saying shots had been fired in the area. In the months that followed, alarms about potential gunmen and escapees from jail and police custody rang out in or near Bridgewater, Trenton, Amherst, Pictou County, New Glasgow and Meat Cove.

“We don’t have the ability to send an alert in any other province other than New Brunswick, so we provide those [neighbouring jurisdictions] with all of the information that we have,” said Inspector Andrea Gallant, who manages the RCMP’s public communication systems in New Brunswick. “There is currently no system in place to warn the public of an active deadly threat,” Vancouver Police Department spokesperson Constable Tania Visintin said.

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