Will the mass casualty commission report even matter?

So… is it already too late for the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report to matter?

由于其不必要的逐个诞生的情况，它的信誉甚至在开始之前就无法拆除吗？通过其不断提高的成本？通过其授权的百科全书？在开始公开听证会上的迟钝？通过其过于创伤的解释，它应该如何进行业务？围绕着质疑重要证人的看似限制性规则？无休止的，认真的研究报告，专家意见，圆桌讨论和小组讨论，探讨了更广泛的社会问题，例如很少有人关注的家庭暴力，甚至更少，甚至更少相信委员会的考虑会有所改善？通过现在，不可避免的掩盖阴谋理论，欺骗了它的每一个决定？通过一个不现实，太紧迫的截止日期，无法完成其工作。

My own answer to my first question is that we don’t simply know. Not yet.

Let’s circle back to those other issues.

The public inquiry into the horrific mass murders of April 2020 did not get off to an auspicious start. Neither Ottawa nor the provincial government wanted one. Instead, they announced a review they could limit and control.

The families of the victims rightly pushed back, the governments eventually backed down and created a public inquiry with a broad mandate and a restricted timeline.

The families’ success in forcing governments to change their minds gave some among them a sense of empowerment and entitlement. They felt they now had the right to direct the process.

但是，调查的广泛授权（“原因，背景和环境”）意味着这绝不是关于他们或亲人的死亡的。Intimate partner violence, family violence, gun regulations, police responses, public alert systems…

At the same time, the inquiry’s restricted timeline — its work is supposed to be done and dusted by November 1, less than two years after it began — created an impossible burden for the commission.

Oh, and then there was COVID. The mass shooting happened early in the pandemic and the inquiry’s work was inevitably slowed and hampered by its ongoing impact.

Oh, and then there was its trauma-informed mandate. That’s a reflection — for good and ill — of the times in which we live. But the commissioners’ understandable desire not to retraumatize families already traumatized by the events of April 2020 quickly smacked up against the reality that many of those same families felt they were being more re-traumatized by the commissioners’ attempts to protect them.

取而代之的是，该委员会受创伤的方法的主要受益人似乎是一些加拿大皇家骑警官员，他们的工会和律师要求对他们进行特殊待遇。

It’s worth noting that only六名目击者要求住宿作证。一个被拒绝了，有两个被允许作为一个小组作证，三个被授予其他各种住宿。

So far as we know, none of the Mounties’ most senior officers — the ultimate decision-makers — have been excused or will be accommodated. Darren Campbell and C/Supt. Chris Leather will testify for two days each this week. In late August, Lee Bergerman and Brenda Lucki are scheduled to appear

That said, the inquiry’s timeline means not every question will ultimately be resolved by testimony and/or cross-examination.

Let’s consider two examples.

Two on-the-ground RCMP officers provided investigators with different accounts of what they did in the first seven minutes after他们到达了希瑟·奥布赖恩（Heather O’Brien）刚刚被杀手射击的现场。

他们的记忆是在那些混乱的分钟内做的事情。每个人都记得是打开奥布莱恩的车门，检查她的脉搏并简短地相信她可能还活着的人。

What appeared to make that discrepancy significant was the fact that O’Brien’s family later said they had data indicating her FitBit continued to show a pulse hours later.

警察让她死了吗？

The commission didn’t call either officer to provide public testimony. Why not?

Well, consider their full statements to investigators and then fast forward to how those first six minutes ended.

One officer, a trained medic, who initially said he’d thought he’d detected a pulse with his thumb had called for a LifeFlight air ambulance.

His partner, also a trained medic, wasn’t so sure. Given the gravity of her injuries, he wondered if what his partner had felt was the result of his own adrenaline, or perhaps the result of hopeful tunnel vision.

He suggested they perform “a systematic parallel check of the pulse at her carotid, brachial, and femoral arteries for 10 to 15 seconds each. They did not detect a pulse. Cpl. Ivany then conducted a pupil check with his flashlight and found them unresponsive. Due to these findings, and the severity of her injuries, he determined that Ms. O’Brien was deceased.”

The commission did call the chief medical examiner, who ultimately conducted the autopsy on O’Brien, as a witness. His expert testimony — based on 16 years’ experience — was that her death had been instantaneous or had occurred within minutes.

不科学的FITBIT数据并没有改变他的看法。

He was, it should be noted, cross-examined.

The other exampleinvolves retired RCMP constable Troy Maxwell, who responded to a 2013 complaint from Brenda Forbes about GW, the man who would become the mass killer.

We have testimony from Forbes, that the complaint involved an alleged domestic assault by the killer on Lisa Banfield, his common-law spouse.

麦克斯韦否认了调查人员。他声称，投诉是关于杀手在复制山车上的当地道路上危险驾驶的。

In her own testimony, Banfield not only confirmed the assault happened as Forbes had described but also testified that the killer didn’t own a replica RCMP car until six years later.

这是一个明显不同版本的事件。And it’s important because it raises questions about how seriously the Mounties took allegations of domestic abuss, including, in particular, by GW himself.

麦克斯韦叫作证。他坚持让ginal story, but during cross-examination by one of the lawyers for the families — yes, they were able to ask questions — he offered a telling explanation of why he hadn’t bothered to seek statements from those whose names he wrote down, including Banfield’s, before closing the file.

“We don’t have the ability to sit around and say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to spend an hour on this,’” he testified.

We don’t know what the commissioners will make of Maxwell’s testimony — or, really, anything else they’ve heard. Other than emphasizing that the inquiry is trauma-informed, they haven’t said much.

They will have plenty to consider. There are now more than 60 so-called foundational documents, supplementary reports and policy documents, deep dives into everything from minute-by-minute accounts of what happened when during the killer’s rampage, to his family and personal history of violence, to his financial misdealings. Those documents include cross-referenced investigator interviews, statements, audio recordings, photos, transcripts of police calls, etc.

所有人都可以单击几个鼠标。他们值得一读。

Despite suggestions from some critics that the commission was created to exonerate the RCMP, those documents paint a damning picture of police incompetence and failure at every level.

The commissioners will have all of that to consider.

Plus, there are close to 20 more research and technical reports on everything from “Communications Interoperability and the Alert Ready System,” to “Crime Prevention and Community Safety in Rural Communities,” to “Police and First Responder Decision-making During Mass Casualty Events.”

Not to forget the transcripts of all the roundtables and panels that have occupied the commissioners’ attention during the public hearings.

有什么关系吗？

InThursday’s Morning File，，，，my colleague, a frustrated Tim Bousquet, who has probably spent more time and energy covering this story than almost any other journalist, asked “What’s the point?”

For sure, the inquiry has helped us understand what happened before and during the murders of April 18 and 19, 2020. There is a veritable treasure trove of documentation released, the likes of which I’ve never seen publicly available before.

询问至少是提出有关“为什么？”的重要问题。在这一切中，质疑关注警务问题，紧急响应，对急救人员的照顾，临时通知如何工作，亲密的伴侣暴力，政治和官僚主义对警察行动的干预等等。

11月，三名专员将发布最终报告，其中包括一长串建议。毫无疑问，这些建议将是周到的，而且它们大多会被忽略。

他可能是对的。

But he may not be.

Many people, including some critics of the current commission, consider the 1990Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecutionto be the “gold standard” for such inquiries.

We tend to remember its key factual finding — that Marshall, who’d spent more than a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, was failed by the criminal justice system…

at virtually every turn, from his arrest and wrongful conviction for murder in 1971 up to, and even beyond, his acquittal by the Court of Appeal in 1983. The tragedy of the failure is compounded by evidence that this miscarriage of justice could — and should — have been prevented, or at least corrected quickly, if those involved in the system had carried out their duties in a professional and/or competent manner. That they did not is due, in part at least, to the fact that Donald Marshall, Jr. is a Native.

But, as the commission itself pointed out a few paragraphs later, its role was not…

just to determine whether one individual was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, or even to get to the bottom of how and why that miscarriage occurred. The Nova Scotia Government, which appointed this Royal Commission on October 28, 1986, also asked us to “make recommendations” to help prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.

The commission’s final report, which ran to七卷，，，，included research studies that — like the various research reports and roundtables of the current mass casualty commission — were largely ignored by the media and the public as they unfolded. But they helped shape the most far-reaching of thereport’s 82 recommendations.

这些涵盖了纠正不法定罪的法律程序，以及有关可见少数民族和警察的新刑事司法系统政策。例如，他们建议官方对所有相关信息的辩护进行全面及时的披露。委员会还建议公共省检察官完全独立于任何政治干预。委员会认为，这些检察官应仅对省的立法机关而不是总检察长负责。就联邦检察官而言，他们对加拿大议会负责……

The Marshall Inquiry’s recommendations led to the creation of the first independent public prosecution service in Canada. As well, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society established its first race relations committee. The inquiry and its recommendations helped bring more inclusion and diversity to Nova Scotia’s and Canada’s law schools and public service.

没有人会假装马歇尔报告在新斯科舍省的刑事司法系统中结束了种族主义，或者实施了所有建议。

As Michelle Williams, the then-chair of the Dal Law School’s Indigenous Blacks a& Mi’kmaq program — itself a result of the report — tolda 2018 panel on the report’s impact：“马歇尔委员会的许多建议尚未实施……没有具体的恢复性司法计划。在刑事司法系统中，黑人和土著人民仍然过分代表。”

Still… I think it’s fair to say the Marshall commission not only led to some significant positive changes but also changed the conversation around race in Nova Scotia.

Can the Mass Casualty Commission do the same for issues around gun violence and gender-based violence?

I don’t know.

It will depend.

On the report that the commissioners write.

On the willingness of governments to address the recommendations.

并以我们自己的个人和集体承诺作为公民推动变革。

I live in hope.

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