About 10 years ago, a mentally disturbed man with a rifle killed three RCMP officers. Moncton,NB, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Key recommendations from the 2014 review aimed at preventing such deadly clashes have not yet been fully implemented.
On the night of June 4, 2014, Justin Bourque left his mobile home carrying a semi-automatic rifle and a shotgun, saying he was going to kill police officers. Driven by paranoia and hatred of the government, the 24-year-old worker shot and killed police officers Fabrice Gevaudan, 45, David Ross, 32, and Douglas Larche, 40.
Two other officers, Darlene Goguen and Eric Dubois, were injured during the 20-minute pursuit in Bourque shooting He then fled into the woods on the edge of a residential area.
For more than 29 hours, the city of 69,000 residents remained under siege until the evening of June 5, 2014, when the crew of a reconnaissance plane using an infrared camera detected the gunman's heat signature.
Bourque was sentenced to an unprecedented 75 years in prison, but the New Brunswick Court of Appeal reduced his parole term to 25 years after the Supreme Court of Canada overturned a law allowing such a long sentence.
Six months after the shooting, retired RCMP Assistant Commissioner Alphonse McNeill released a report with 64 recommendations. Among them was a call for police to “examine how frontline supervisors are trained to exercise command and control during critical incidents.”
In his report, McNeill found that on the night of June 4, 2014, RCMP supervisors “were faced with a situation that in many ways exceeded what the supervisors were trained to handle,” adding that when the shots were fired, “the scene was a chaotic mess.”
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“During this period, no one established a command structure. Members acted independently and there was no unified tactical plan… At the supervisory level, no one had an overall understanding of the deployment of resources, and this situation continued for more than an hour.”
In response to this recommendation, the RCMP developed two Critical Incident Response Management courses: a 90-minute online introductory course and a 16-hour advanced course. In 2018, the courses became mandatory for all frontline supervisors.
But in the years that followed, few RCMP officers signed up for the courses. The problem was exposed during a public inquiry into the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia, where another gunman killed 22 people, including an RCMP officer, during a 13-hour rampage on April 18 and 19, 2020.
The final report of the Mass Casualty Commission, released more than a year ago, confirmed that none of the RCMP commanders who initially responded to the mass shooting in Nova Scotia had attended the advanced course and only one had completed the introductory course.
“We found that many of the supervisors involved in the initial critical incident response in Portapique, Nova Scotia, had not received the training recommended by McNeill,” the report said. The supervisors who coordinated the RCMP response that night “were in no better position than their colleagues in Moncton in June 2014.”
The commission also questioned the RCMP's claims to investigators in 2022 that they had implemented McNeill's recommendations.
The committee's final report states: “If training … is not completed by all or most of the people targeted by the recommendation, then the recommendation cannot properly be described as 'implemented'.”
As a result, the committee recommended that the RCMP arrange for an external review of critical incident response training for front-line supervisors, specifically citing the two problematic courses.
The announcement comes two months after RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme outlined the RCMP's progress in implementing the public inquiry's recommendations and released a required external review, which found improvements were needed in the advanced courses but also confirmed compliance rates with the training remain low.
Only 14 per cent of officers will have taken the advanced course by March 31, 2023. The RCMP's goal is to reach 55 per cent by then.
Among senior officers, 44% of corporals had completed the course as of that day. The police force aims to have 70% of training completed by March 2024, but updated statistics are not yet available.
As for sergeants, only 43% had attended the course as of March 31, 2023, well below the 85% required by March 2025.
The RCMP acknowledged The Canadian Press' request for comment but did not respond.
Christian Leuprecht, a political science professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., said the RCMP is a slow-moving organization that has long been short of resources.
“Financial and human resources are never enough because the demand always exceeds the resources,” said Leuprecht, who also teaches in the political science department at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston.
Leprecht said the RCMP is starved of resources and the federal Liberal government's seeming lack of interest in reforming the police force has exacerbated the problem. “If it's taken 10 years, then you can infer that no one at the political level really cares about it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Mass Casualty Commission's final report was heavily critical of the RCMP's response to the McNeill report, particularly in relation to critical incident management.
The final report states: “While some helpful work was done in the immediate aftermath of the Moncton shooting … it was not sustained institutionally and did not produce lasting improvements in preparedness and supervisor training.”
As the anniversary of the Moncton shooting approaches, the RCMP says the city will mark the day with a private gathering of relatives of the three officers killed. A memorial service will be held Tuesday at the Garden of Honor in Riverside Park, where a memorial features life-size statues of Gevaudan, Ross and Larche.
