“I do not expect senior management to fight us and mistreat us … to treat us the way they treated us after I gave the best I could,” Tim Mills said in a September 2021 interview with lawyers and staff. of the Mass Casualty Commission. . On 18-19 April 2020, Mills was the leader of the 13-person Emergency Response Team (ERT) responding to high-risk situations throughout Nova Scotia, except for the Halifax Metro and Sydney area. The play usually involved street racing in crime scenes in the middle of the night. Although they were trained to deal with active gunmen, such as the one in 2014 who killed three Mountains and wounded two others in Moncton, Mills said they were more likely to deal with gunmen who needed to be restrained and convicted. In Portapique and then in Glenholme, Debert, Shubenacadie and Enfield encountered an unusual situation – a massacre spread over a large area and an armed free man running at high speed between communities killing people accidentally. As he pursued the shooter in the direction of Halifax, Mills came across the body of his slain colleague Const. Heidi Stevenson learned from a witness that the gunman had just fled in another victim’s SUV. Within half an hour, one of the regular officers and a dog handler he was traveling with shot and killed the gunman after identifying him at a gas station. The gunman was shot and killed by an RCMP dog handler and a regular officer at a gas station in Enfield, NS, around 11:25 a.m. on April 19, 2020. (Tim Krochak / The Canadian Press)
“Moncton was bad, very bad. That was ten times worse than Moncton … It was a war zone,” he said. said in his interview the former dean.
Mills said he was proud of the way his team responded with the tools and resources at his disposal. But he also highlighted challenges such as a lack of personnel, a lack of air support overnight and a lack of technology to locate members of the tactical team in the dark subdivision where the violence began. He said the RCMP’s management never checked in personally in the following days and did not support promises to support his team’s mental health, refusing to give regular part-time employees more than a few days off their normal decompression shifts. .

Team with short-term staff

When the call came to rush to Portapique that Saturday night in April, Mills said his team was handling five people less than ideal or recommended – with just five full-time members and eight part-time officers. in addition to doing their general shifts. Because of this, Mills said he decided to stay with the team as an extra body on the ground instead of doing regular operations and working with the crisis commander who oversees the response from command, as team leaders usually did. “I will not be able to see where everyone is, I will not have a good idea of ​​what is happening, I will remain integrated with the team,” he explained about the decision to the research staff. Mills said that because his team only had 13 officers, he stayed with them and was in the regular armored vehicle (TAV) at night as he responded to possible sightings of the gunman in Portapique, NS. The TAV is pictured in Debert, NS the next morning. , Sunday, April 19, 2020. (Andrew Vaughan / The Canadian Press)
Technology was another factor, he said, because the ERT team could not locate each other’s locations. In the past, Mills said they had access to software that could be opened on their phones or at a command center and would map icons showing where their members and vehicles were located. They could enter an address so people could see where they were in relation to their location. “If you had a house, here are your snipers, here they are all and it was great,” Mills said. He said his team started using an app sometime after the Moncton shootings, but “the app just went to the end and was not updated” and although they used another version for a while, they lost the technical ability to do so in a few weeks or so. months before Portapique. They still had the devices, but they were no better than “paper weights,” Mills said. “For the common man, it sounds like a pretty basic piece of information for an Emergency Team to know and have access to proper mapping,” commission adviser Roger Burrill said in an interview. “Bingo, one hundred percent. We declared it and it fell on deaf ears,” Mills replied. “It caused delays in locating the addresses and … getting the plot of land for sure.” That April night, they “definitely cursed” their inability to map and monitor, he said, and then set up a mobile GPS workstation on one of ERT’s vehicles.

Without eyes in the sky

Among their issues was the fact that they could not access an aircraft overnight. The RCMP helicopter in Moncton had crashed for maintenance, a scenario that was more common than not, Mills said in the investigation. “The sad thing is, no, I did not expect anything because it seems that 80 percent of the time you call the airline, ‘Oh, well, it’s down’ or ‘We have too many hours in’ or this or that,” he said. “You can just say that they are overburdened … They do not have the human resources to meet the requirements.” He said the ability to detect thermal signatures from above would help locate Clinton Ellison, who called 911 while hiding in the woods after discovering his brother’s body. He could also help locate the gunman’s wife, Lisa Banfield, who had been hiding in the woods for hours after escaping her partner’s violence. Twenty-two people died on April 18 and 19. Top row from left: Gina Gulett, Down Gulencin, Joulen Oliver, Frank Gulencin, Sean McLeod, Alana Jenkins. Second row: John Zahl, Lisa McCully, Joey Webber, Heidi Stevenson, Heather O’Brien and Jamie Blair. Third row from the top: Kristen Beaton, Lillian Campbell, Joanne Thomas, Peter Bond, Tom Bagley and Greg Blair. Bottom row: Emily Tuck, Joy Bond, Corrie Ellison and Aaron Tuck. (CBC)
The importance of air support is not a new idea. He was confronted with a number of recommendations arising from the Moncton shootings, including ERT’s night training exercises with RCMP Air Services, and that during large-scale events, the air services will be used by trained personnel stationed in command positions. “It is invaluable and has been recognized as invaluable before,” Mills said in an interview. He said a helicopter made a huge difference later in 2020 when his team was called in to look for a fugitive in Bridgewater and helped locate a missing teenager in Cape Breton.

No relief for ERT members part-time

Looking back, Mills said he was very disappointed with the way the RCMP handled his team in the weeks and months following the massive attack. He said that the ERT team from New Brunswick, which he had originally called at 6 in the morning of April 19, so that his team would not be burned by a 24-hour shift, covered their calls for a few days after the shootings. But until next weekend, the members of ERT’s part-time team were expected to return to their regular general shifts in various excerpts. Some of them came to him and explained that they needed more time. Meanwhile, he said none of the top executives approached in the early days.
“Not a single person from the administration came down to check on us, thank you, you know, are you okay? Nothing. We are in the same building,” he said. Concerned about his team’s mental health, Mills said he asked his team to post a psychological briefing on April 24, 2020, saying he approached it as an opportunity to assign them ERT-related office work that needed to be done. or otherwise in contrast to sending them to engage with the public and scenarios such as drafting COVID breach reports. “We have been through a war. They are looking for two weeks to decompress,” he said in an interview with the commission. The calls did not stop either. The entire RCMP regular team was was summoned to a weapons complaint which led to the province’s first emergency alert to police a few hours after the briefing.

Many in the team felt “defeats”

Despite the request, Mills learned that part-time officers were still expected to show up for their regular shifts the next day – a week after the shootings – and said he had not received any support from people who told him I would help. “I say, are you serious? You know, they’re actually fighting us for something so simple,” he said.
As a result, he said, five ERT members fell ill because they felt “defeated.” This caused tension in his close-knit group, as some members felt they would face repercussions if they did so. Mills told the committee he had filed an internal complaint about his team’s treatment, which had not been followed for months. He felt his integrity was questioned when he cited assurances initially given by people, including psychologists. The CBC has contacted the RCMP about the status of this complaint and responded to its concerns.
Throughout 2020, the ERT team was called up to 70 incidents, about twice as many as in previous years, which Mills attributed in part to particular attention and concern after Portapike. But he said it was not the job that caught him. He said in the midst of the inner turmoil, he began to struggle with not being able to sleep. Considering it “mentally exhausting”, he decided to retire. A memorial service in front of the RCMP Excerpt on April 20, 2020 in Enfield, NS, honors the RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, who was one of 22 people killed during the shooting. The gunman disguised himself in rural Nova …