Nova Scotia’s tragedy is Canada’s pain
In a Canada that has already shed too many tears this year, even more flowed freely this week after a gunman’s rampage shook Nova Scotia to its very core.
It was an unspeakable act of evil, a 12-hour crime spree that left houses burned to the ground, cars torched and 22 innocent lives stolen from us all.
The sheer scale of this atrocity — it’s the worst mass-shooting in Canadian history — is mind-boggling. But that it happened as the nation reels from the COVID-19 pandemic and most of us are pulling together to survive it is even more unfathomable.
Why and why now? How could it be that at the very moment when millions of Canadians are trying to protect each other in a global emergency, one hatefilled and thoroughly despicable individual could commit such meticulously premeditated acts of brutality across a province before being shot dead by police?
It’s one thing for us to confront the mindless but naturally occurring coronavirus at the heart of the pandemic that has claimed more than 2,100 lives in this country. Now, we must grope to explain and deal with the decision made by a supposedly thinking human being to deliberately cause death and suffering on such a massive scale.
If there’s any way Canadians in other provinces can show support and sympathy for the people of Nova Scotia they should do so — whether through social media, letters to newspapers or charitable donations.
A province renowned for its natural beauty, its citizens’ warmth and their unique, often laid-back approach to life has been forever scarred. Nova Scotians need to know they don’t stand alone.
At the same time, we should all be asking questions about what just happened last Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Some of these questions will sadly, but of necessity, be directed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Nova Scotia.
To be sure, they courageously faced a difficult, dangerous and chaotic situation that occurred in 16 different crime sites and involved a shooter dressed as a Mountie and driving a mock-RCMP cruiser. And they’re grieving the loss of one of their own — Const. Heidi Stevenson who was gunned down by the shooter.
Members of the general public cannot fully appreciate the challenges the RCMP faced last weekend. Yet the police are the people trained to handle such crises and responsible for doing so.
So it seems inconceivable that with all the 21stcentury technology available to them, the RCMP failed to request that a public alert about the shooter be sent out to cellphones.
Such an alert would have put hundreds of thousands of Nova Scotians on their guard and likely saved lives.
One of the shooter’s victims was Kristen Beaton, who erroneously believed the gunman had been arrested. She left home to begin her shift as a care worker, only to encounter him.
Other RCMP actions deserve similar scrutiny. Two Mounties shot bullets into a firehall being used to register evacuees, four of whom were inside. And a man who had gone to offer help at the first shooting scene in Portapique was treated in hospital after police fired on his vehicle. What were the police doing?
The value of such inquiries is not to lay blame. The purpose is to be better prepared in the future. And as 2020 has painfully taught us all, we never know what trials the future will throw our way.
This is a year of sorrow piled on sorrow. But Canada, including Nova Scotia, will prevail.