Ontario police watchdog to reopen investigation of Nova Scotia’s 2020 Onslow fire hall shooting

The emotionally charged April 2020 shooting at the Onslow Fire Hall is to be the subject of further investigation.

“It was a long time coming,” Darrell Currie, deputy chief of the volunteer Onslow Belmont brigade and one of three men inside the fire hall when the shooting took place, said of the Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU) launching an independent review of the event that had two RCMP officers fire five rifle shots into and toward the fire hall on the morning of April 19, 2020, during the manhunt for mass killer Gabriel Wortman.

“It’s a good day, not for everybody,” Currie said of the review that was made public on the Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT) website on Friday.

Union president Brian Sauve and the National Police Federation (NPF) in a statement released Friday questioned the reopening of the investigation after the two RCMP members were cleared of any criminal responsibility in 2021.

“This reopening of a completed, conclusive civilian oversight investigation is questionable and, we believe, politically motivated,” Sauve said, adding that the focus should be on moving forward and community healing rather than reliving past events in the public spotlight.

“As the labour relations representative for RCMP members involved, including about 1,000 members in Nova Scotia, we will be watching this review and its outcome very carefully,” Sauve said.  

The events at the fire hall that morning have been well documented.

Approaching the fire hall at about 10:17 a.m. that day, the two constables — Terry Brown and Dave Melanson — saw David Westlake, the emergency management co-ordinator for Colchester County, wearing a reflective safety vest and standing beside a marked RCMP cruiser in the parking lot. 

RCMP had information that the killer had already gunned down 13 people the night before in the seaside village of Portapique, some 30 kilometres west of the fire hall.

Wortman’s rampage ended with a total of  22 people, including a pregnant woman and an RCMP officer, shot and killed.

Safety vest

Brown and Melanson had information that the killer was wearing an orange safety vest and driving a replica RCMP cruiser and they later reported that they saw Westlake, whom they mistook for the killer, duck behind the RCMP vehicle, driven by Const. Dave Gagnon, who was sitting in the vehicle after backing into the fire hall parking lot earlier to provide security for the comfort centre being set up at the fire hall.

Two of the rifle blasts penetrated the fire hall building, damaging a door and a fire truck inside. Another shot passed through the fire hall’s electronic sign near the highway.

Inside the fire hall, Currie, Fire Chief Greg Muise and Richard Ellison, a Portapique resident evacuated to the fire hall that morning after his son Corey was killed in Portapique the night before, heard the shots, moved to a back room, frantically overturned tables and hid behind them. 

SIRT, the civilian oversight agency that investigates serious matters arising from alleged actions of RCMP and municipal police officers in Nova Scotia, conducted an investigation and found in March 2021 that the two constables had “reasonable grounds” to fire their weapons.

They were not disciplined.

Currie, who was accompanied by Muise at the fire hall when reached by cellphone, said a reopening or review of the shooting is what they have been pushing for and is all they can ask for.

“I would like to think it’s because I kept bugging them,” Currie said of the evolution to Friday from August, when then SIRT director Alonzo Wright said he was having a look at the case to determine what next steps are possible.

“Emails to the minister of justice and the premier, opposition leaders and MLAs as well as SIRT, outlining all of the discrepancies, missing information and false information in the SIRT report,” Currie said. 

“I would like to think that it was perseverance that paid off when we kept hounding them.”

Sauve said the events at the fire hall have been reviewed in an independent criminal investigation by SIRT and in the extensive public inquiry completed by the Mass Casualty Commission. 

‘Unfair’

“Without ignoring the impact of the incident on the members of the Onslow community, their dissatisfaction with the outcomes of these processes does not justify this abuse of the SIRT mandate and the public inquiry process,” Sauve said. 

“Our members have been through enough. After the trauma of responding to the mass casualty event, they voluntarily and openly participated in the public inquiry process, at significant personal expense. To consider evidence collected in the context of a public inquiry as ‘new information’ for the purposes of a criminal investigation is prohibited by law because it is unfair, undermines the purpose of a public inquiry and offends Charter principles.”

Currie said he doesn’t believe the RCMP has any idea “what they’ve done” to the community in which the shooting took place.

“I don’t think they realize how it’s affected the neighbourhood here and the people who were involved here directly,” he said.

Brown and Melanson testified at the inquiry that with what they knew at the time, they would not and should not have done anything differently.

Muise told the inquiry the three men holed up in the fire hall “stood in that room for 57, 58 minutes, still not knowing what was going on outside.”

“It was just like we were hostages,” he said. “Nobody told us anything.”

‘Lost life I had’

Currie testified that he thought he would die that morning.

“Fortunately, I didn’t lose my life that day but I lost the life that I had,” Currie said during testimony, referencing the resulting trauma and the medications he still uses to battle it.

Sauve said the NFP stands by its members and remains confident that their documented and brave response that day will stand up to further review and be deemed appropriate.

“Const. Terry Brown and Const. Dave Melanson are two examples of the heroism demonstrated by the members of the RCMP on April 18 and 19, 2020,” Sauve said. 

“While others sheltered or hid, our members relentlessly pursued and sought out the active threat. They actively faced danger to protect others over themselves, even after a fellow member was tragically killed and another injured. And, ultimately, they eliminated the threat.”

Currie said he simply wants an outcome based on all the facts.

“Anybody that knows the details the way I do, at least, it’s obvious that the SIRT report was not based on all the facts, it was based on a few, certainly one-sided,” Currie said. 
“The outcome is to have a report that is complete, accurate and factual. Whatever that outcome is, that’s what we live with.”
 
The SIRT site says that in April 2023, in the interests of avoiding any perceived conflict of interest, SIRT asked the Ontario unit (SIU) to review information considered by the Mass Casualty Commission and the objective was to assess whether there was any new information that had been reviewed by the commission that had not been considered in SIRT’s investigation of the shooting.  

That  review concluded that new information was uncovered by the commission.

The SIU has agreed to begin its independent review of that new information in the near future, with the goal of completion as soon as reasonably possible.