Commission Concluded

The tiny seaside community of Portapique, Nova Scotia, now bears an infamous name. In April 2020, amid the initial COVID‑19 lockdown, a rage-filled, crazed gunman killed twenty-two people, starting in that village and expanding his scope to surrounding communities over some thirteen hours. The deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history attracted fleeting national media attention, before the cameras moved on to other events. But the nightmare prompted an independent public inquiry, examining mostly why the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment failed to stop the carnage, kept the public more or less in the dark, and resisted full transparency.

Several renowned critics of the agency jumped on the mass murder as yet another example of its crumbling reputation and sheer incompetence. One of the country’s most tenacious investigative reporters, Paul Palango, came out of retirement with a mission to expose the latest episode in an ongoing miscarriage of justice...