On April 18, 2020, Gabriel Wortman went on a violent 12-hour rampage leaving 22 people dead and three injured in Nova Scotia. The incident was marked with panic, miscommunication, and signs of outright incompetence from the RCMP as they tried to get the situation under control.
An inquiry into what happened was needed, and we got one.
Unfortunately, the terms of the inquiry must have been too broad because the resulting report spans more than 3,000 pages, much of which is packed with woke pap unrelated to the Nova Scotia incident. Much of the report is dedicated to how white privilege was behind the incident, though evidence of this was scarce.
When working to try to support this claim, however, the report descends into what amounts to little more than a long rambling of loaded terms while failing to make the case that race had anything to do with the incident.
The report details how Wortman had a reputation for exchanging dental work for sex. It noted that some of the women he invited to his clinic were of African American origin. There is no indication he targeted any particular race, however. While it appears Wortman was a pervert who used dental services as a means to coerce sexual favours, the race of his victims had no part in it. The report had to go well out of its way to try and shoehorn the implication into it.
From all accounts, Wortman’s rampage was indiscriminate. He went out with the intent to kill as many people as he possibly could before being stopped. Every single one of his 22 victims was white, and nearly half of them were male. In the case of the mass murder by Marc Lepine in Montreal in 1989, he targeted women with his horrific crime. In Buffalo, New York, in 2022, 10 black people were murdered in a racially motivated slaughter. Hatred toward women and other races has played a part in mass murders before.
It’s worth examining to see if race or gender were behind the Nova Scotia shootings. With the absence of evidence of such, though, the report should have been honest and said as much.
The report drifts off into rambling with statements such as “Dr. Perry emphasized the importance of recognizing the intersectionality of far-right extremism in Canada, including an anti-Muslim segment, a white supremacist segment, and a misogynistic or “gender defender element.”
It’s as if the authors are eager to create an impression of widespread white nationalism throughout Canada where it doesn’t exist, and they are using the Nova Scotia shooting as a springboard to do so. Repugnant to say the least.
Much of the report goes into indigenous issues, though there was no element of indigenous involvement in the case.
Beyond the racial fixation in the report, the ideological bias regarding firearms is on display as the report recommends banning all semi-automatic rifles in Canada. The report notes Wortman was not a licensed firearms owner and that he had illegally smuggled his firearms into the country. Undeterred by their own facts, the authors offered a recommendation that clearly would have had no impact on the shooting.
Considering the controversy over former RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s alleged interference in the investigation when she pressured investigators on behalf of the Prime Minister’s Office, it is surprising the drafters of the report still went there.
Many questions needed to be answered after the shooting.
Why did Wortman choose to go on a murderous rampage?
How did he slide under the radar for so long?
Why was the RCMP’s communication to the public during the crisis so terrible and why were their actions so confused?
The report answers some of those questions. However, the conclusions were diluted when the commission insisted on taking a path down woke politics rather than sticking with their own facts. We need to learn from tragedies to prevent them. We won’t learn much if we insist on modelling conclusions to meet ideological expectations rather than reality.
