Ten years ago, on August 9, 2016, Colten Boushie, a twenty-two-year-old Cree man, was killed by Gerald Stanley, a white farmer, in rural Saskatchewan. It was a case that revealed a great deal about contract policing by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in rural Canada.
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The all-white jury acquitted Stanley of both murder and manslaughter after the defence argued that the “Stanleys were on their own” and did not have the urban luxury of fast 911 responses. The acquittal led to reforms in how juries were selected but not to rural or Indigenous policing reforms.
Stanley’s farm was forty-four kilometres from the nearest RCMP detachment in Biggar and sixty-eight kilometres from the larger North Battleford detachment. A 911 call was made at 5:27 p.m., and the first RCMP officer arrived at 6:10 p.m. after having trouble finding the Stanleys’ farm. The RCMP complaints body subsequently found that the RCMP had not properly maintained the scene or conducted full forensic investigations. They had unreasonably interviewed Boushie’s Indigenous companions while allowing Stanley’s wife and son to drive together to the RCMP detachment for their police interviews without telling them not to discuss the incident with each other. At the same time, the commission dismissed claims of discrimination in relation to the flaws in its investigations and the RCMP’s different treatment of the Indigenous and white witnesses.
The commission did find that an RCMP officer had acted in a discriminatory manner when he asked Boushie’s mother whether she was sober while informing her of her son’s death. In a display of the blue wall of silence, the commission was unable to determine which of the seven RCMP officers, armed with carbines, who came to Boushie’s mother’s house to inform her of her son’s death asked this question rooted in vile stereotypes of Indigenous people as chronically intoxicated.
Soon, the issues around the RCMP’s rural policing would be impossible to ignore or downplay.
At 10:01 p.m. on April 18, 2020, the first 911 call came from Portapique, a small community of about 100 permanent residents in rural Nova Scotia. The caller told the 911 operator that the man who had fatally shot her husband was driving a car “decked and labelled RCMP,” but that he was a denturist and not an RCMP officer. She was killed by the perpetrator, Gabriel Wortman, shortly after making the call.
The RCMP was dispatched at 10:04 p.m. The first RCMP officer drove at speeds of up to 160 kilometres per hour. It took him twenty-one minutes to arrive at Portapique. During that time, Wortman, using illegal firearms, had shot and killed six more people. Two more RCMP officers arrived twenty-three minutes after being dispatched, and the fourth arrived twenty-seven minutes after being dispatched.
Three of the RCMP officers walked toward multiple gunshots in an unlit and smoky area while the fourth guarded the intersection of the highway and the gravel road leading to the small community. An Emergency Response Team from Halifax would not arrive until one hour and forty-five minutes after it was called.
Wortman shot and murdered thirteen people in Portapique with unlicensed firearms in less than an hour. The RCMP officers who responded all “had limited knowledge of the community.” They kept track of each other using their own cellphones because their RCMP radios, purchased through federal procurement, did not work well.
Portapique residents told the RCMP that the gravel road leading to the highway was not the only exit. There was also a dirt back road near a blueberry field. The responding officers told other RCMP officers who were responding from another detachment about this road, but that message was apparently not received. The RCMP called for air support that night from New Brunswick, but the RCMP helicopter, with its heat-detecting technology, was down for maintenance.
One of the responding officers inquired about the possibility of an emergency broadcast to ensure that those nearby would shelter in place. The RCMP had not, however, joined the provincial program that had a week earlier successfully sent alerts to people’s cellphones, radios, and televisions. The only message sent to the public that night was via the RCMP’s Twitter account. It seriously understated the danger by simply referring to a “firearms complaint.” RCMP tweets early the next morning would not mention that the perpetrator was disguised as RCMP, limited the threat to Portapique, and unhelpfully stated, “You may not see the police but we are with you.”
The RCMP discounted consistent reports from the residents that the perpetrator was driving a replica RCMP car. They did not have technology to track their cars to distinguish them from Wortman’s fake but real-looking RCMP cruiser. They did not share with community members, other first responders, and the neighbouring Truro Police Service information that would have allowed those people to better protect themselves. They did not interview potential witnesses. They missed some evidence at crime scenes that was only subsequently discovered by family members who were not promptly and fully informed of what happened to their loved ones.
Wortman was able to avoid detection in Portapique likely by exiting through the back dirt road near the blueberry field, which was not, as the main gravel road was, guarded by the RCMP. He went on to murder nine more people before he was killed by police around 11 a.m. on April 19, 2020, while simultaneously shooting himself in the head.
A Mass Casualty Commission inquiry concluded that the RCMP lacked a “coherent and coordinated strategy” and pursued a “reactive” approach that chased Wortman, often missing him by minutes. The command structure during the incident was flawed. An RCMP officer unsuccessfully asked her supervisors to release to the public information about the fake RCMP car on the morning of April 19 before she was killed by Wortman. The RCMP eventually shared that information that morning but had been reluctant to do so for fear that some of the rural residents might shoot real RCMP officers.