Retired top N.S. Mountie outlines 'failures' in mass shooting response

The former top Mountie in Nova Scotia has highlighted what she thinks went wrong during the 2020 mass shooting response, including a "failure" to properly search the small rural community where the massacre began.

Lee Bergerman, a retired assistant commissioner and commanding officer of the Nova Scotia RCMP, testified Monday in Halifax before the Mass Casualty Commission leading the inquiry into the shootings across April 18-19, 2020, when a gunman killed 22 people across the province.

Bergerman said in her view, there were "failures" and breakdowns in communication during the response, later specifying that included radio communications between officers on the ground and those in command posts.

She also said there were issues communicating with the public, and there could have been better "streamlining" of the messaging coming out from RCMP. Bergerman also saw shortcomings around co-ordinating where officers were placed, and said having community members more involved with the command centre to offer insight into "obscure roads" would have been useful.

"Those are all things that I think we can learn from, and I'm hoping that a lot of this comes out of this commission," said Bergerman, who retired from the RCMP in October 2021.

She was also asked about her thoughts on how RCMP did not fully clear all crime scenes in Portapique, N.S., until 19 hours after the shootings began, meaning some victims on Cobequid Court — a small road at the southern end of the community — were not discovered until the late afternoon of April 19.

Bergerman said she doesn't know why that happened and wasn't involved in those decisions on the ground, but it was an "extraordinary event" where people tried their best.

"Obviously, if it takes 19 hours to find a crime scene, that's a failure to have the appropriate resources in place to do it," Bergerman said.

When asked about whether it would have been helpful to bring in nearby municipal forces to assist in searching Portapique, Bergerman said that could definitely be a "lesson learned."

She also highlighted that certain things were done very well, calling the efforts from the first RCMP officers on the ground in Portapique and the emergency response team "heroic."

A commission lawyer, counsel for the victims' families, police union and federal justice department asked Bergerman about various topics, including what the morale was like in the higher ranks in the year following the tragedy.

"There was a lot of burnout … we had a number of our key, senior people who were off duty sick and a lot of our commissioned officers were doing three jobs," Bergerman said.

Bergerman said officers were coming to her about getting succession plans in place for their roles so they could transfer out of the province, so she turned to national RCMP headquarters in Ottawa for help.

She said she spoke with Deputy Commissioner Brian Brennan about the senior officers' mental health concerns, and asked for strategies to better support their needs.