RCMP approve 32 awards for officers, staff involved in Nova Scotia mass shooting case

Four years after a mass shooting in Nova Scotia claimed 22 lives, the RCMP have presented 32 awards to officers and staff for their roles in the manhunt and the public inquiry that followed.

The awards, approved by RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme in May, are described in documents obtained under the federal access to information law by author and journalist Dean Beeby.

The documents say a committee within the RCMP’s Honours and Recognition Unit assessed 316 nominations and approved 23 commendations from the commissioner, eight merit awards and one unit commendation.

The heavily redacted files do not name any of the award recipients.

But the documents confirm the unit commendation was for the RCMP’s litigation team, which compiled thousands of pages of evidence and other documents for the two-year inquiry led by the Mass Casualty Commission.

The inquiry heard that on April 18-19, 2020, a Halifax-area denture-maker disguised as a Mountie and driving a replica RCMP cruiser managed to elude police for 13 hours as he continued a killing rampage across northern and central Nova Scotia before he was shot dead by police.

The inquiry found widespread failures in the Mounties’ response to the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history, saying the RCMP were poorly organized and failed to promptly send alerts to the public until it was too late for some victims.

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The inquiry’s seven-volume report went so far as to suggest Ottawa should rethink the RCMP’s central role in Canadian policing.