Full Comment - June 16, 2025


What cops ‘covered up’ about the Nova Scotia massacre

Topics
financial records Banfield
Hosted by
Brian Lilley Anthony Furey Tristin Hopper
Mentioned
Gabriel Wartman Lisa Banfield Paul Palango Frank Magazine Andrew Douglas Mark Elias Rod Stamler Diefenbaker Patrick Curran Brenda Luckey Dean Dillman Winners Trudeau New Brunswick Joel Webber Superintendent Chris Leather Constable Hubley Darren Campbell David Westlake Tristan Hopper and 15 more
Canada’s on the brink of trade peace with Trump How Canada got on the wrong side in the war against Iran

Episode Stats


Length

49 minutes

Words per minute

157.34

Word count

7,834

Sentence count

507

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On April 18th and 19th, 2020, a man dressed as a Mountie gunned down 22 people in the streets of Nova Scotia, Canada. The police initially reported that the suspect was Gabriel Wortman, an armed and dangerous criminal. But as new evidence emerged over five years later, it became clear that this was not what happened at all. Did the police have an informant or was this a cover-up?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners,
00:00:03.760 I started wondering,
00:00:05.460 is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
00:00:08.520 Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. 1.00
00:00:11.240 Are those from Winners?
00:00:12.760 Ooh, or those beautiful gold earrings.
00:00:15.220 Did she pay full price?
00:00:16.560 Or that leather tote?
00:00:17.580 Or that cashmere sweater?
00:00:18.820 Or those knee-high boots?
00:00:20.260 That dress?
00:00:21.040 That jacket?
00:00:21.720 Those shoes?
00:00:22.380 Is anyone paying full price for anything?
00:00:25.800 Stop wondering.
00:00:26.980 Start winning.
00:00:27.900 Winners.
00:00:28.480 Find fabulous for less.
00:00:30.000 The events of April 18th and 19th, 2020 shocked the country.
00:00:36.940 Those were the two days when Gabriel Wortman, a denturist from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,
00:00:40.760 killed 22 people in a massacre in what officials eventually dubbed the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty
00:00:46.620 Event.
00:00:47.340 Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.
00:00:49.320 I'm Brian Lilly, your host.
00:00:50.480 And today we're going to look at what happened on those days and the days that followed,
00:00:54.400 but from a different angle.
00:00:56.100 There has been an official police investigation.
00:00:58.320 There has been a commission of inquiry.
00:01:00.700 But do we know the real story?
00:01:02.900 Paul Palango says no.
00:01:05.000 Palango is a veteran journalist who worked for the Hamilton Spectator, was a top editor
00:01:09.060 at the Globe and Mail, worked on CTV's W5.
00:01:12.440 He left daily journalism years ago for a new life in Nova Scotia.
00:01:16.280 And then this event happened and Palango realized we weren't being told the truth, not through
00:01:21.240 the official story.
00:01:22.060 He's one of the writers that I've relied on and corresponded with since those days when
00:01:26.900 I've been writing about these issues over the past five years.
00:01:29.980 In 2022, he published the book 22 Murders.
00:01:32.840 This past week, a new book was published by Random House called Anatomy of a Cover-Up,
00:01:37.920 the truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia massacres.
00:01:41.500 One of his big theories, Gabriel Wortman, was an insider, an agent for the RCMP.
00:01:47.920 Here is my conversation with Paul Palango.
00:01:50.840 Paul, what was it about the whole situation surrounding Gabriel Wortman, the RCMP, the mass
00:01:57.240 casualty event, as they bizarrely and euphemistically call it, that made you say something isn't right
00:02:04.700 here?
00:02:04.940 Because you were the first journalist that I was reading at the time saying something's
00:02:11.480 not right here.
00:02:12.200 Well, Brian, it struck me on day one when my wife alerted to me what was going on that
00:02:20.220 Sunday, April 19th, 2020, that something wasn't right.
00:02:24.600 There was a man dressed up as a Mountie going around killing people.
00:02:29.460 No one was stopping him, and he seemed to be everywhere in the province.
00:02:33.420 The police never got in front of him.
00:02:37.780 The way they handled everything, they said, Gabriel Wortman is in custody.
00:02:44.940 Then three hours later, reported, well, actually, he was shot dead.
00:02:49.220 I said, none of this is the way, none of this has unfolded as I can see the way a normal police
00:02:54.660 response would go.
00:02:56.040 And that told me, based on my experience, you know, I was told a long time ago by a bunch
00:03:04.240 of senior cops, when you see something strange going on that's absolutely inexplicable, think
00:03:10.280 blown undercover operation.
00:03:12.860 The police were doing something, and it got out of hand.
00:03:16.500 And I thought, this sort of looks like, I'm going to go work on that theory.
00:03:21.180 And it's sort of, that was always in the back of my mind.
00:03:24.140 And then I tried to help mainstream journalists with what I knew and what I suspected was going
00:03:31.180 on.
00:03:31.560 And they all said, well, go away, old man.
00:03:33.640 We don't know who you are.
00:03:35.280 We can do this ourselves.
00:03:37.140 And I knew that within about two or three weeks, they'd be off covering flower shows
00:03:42.140 and the real story wouldn't be covered.
00:03:44.260 And I'll just stick to it and not cover it.
00:03:48.500 So, you know, you were uncovering things, writing for Frank Magazine, and I know it's
00:03:56.200 a different one in Nova Scotia than the one in Ottawa, but you don't think of Frank Magazine
00:04:02.160 as the place for breaking hard-hitting news.
00:04:05.680 It's a different type of publication.
00:04:07.740 And you were putting out more information, serious information, than anybody else.
00:04:15.080 Now, your first book on what happened on that horrible weekend in April 2020 was about the
00:04:24.560 actual killings.
00:04:25.840 And at the end of it, you posit that this idea that you were talking about that said Wartman
00:04:32.680 was an undercover agent.
00:04:36.000 Did that ever come up at the commission?
00:04:39.260 Did anyone talk about that?
00:04:40.880 Was it reported, uncovered, discussed?
00:04:46.060 What they did was they sort of raised it and dismissed it and said, we could find no evidence
00:04:51.440 that Gabriel Wartman was an undercover confidential informant or agent for the RCMP in Nova Scotia.
00:05:00.180 And that's the thing, in Nova Scotia.
00:05:03.640 I had always posited that Wartman, if anything, was working for the RCMP in New Brunswick, next door.
00:05:14.320 May well have been working in Nova Scotia as well, but they did this little sidestep.
00:05:20.000 And then in the evidence...
00:05:21.320 It's always important to look at language.
00:05:24.100 Like, you know, it's not something I remember them teaching me in journalism school,
00:05:28.680 but it's something you learn working as a journalist.
00:05:31.700 When the language is precise like that, it leads to more questions, right?
00:05:35.900 In Nova Scotia.
00:05:37.840 Absolutely.
00:05:38.700 And most journalists, almost all the journalists covering this, don't understand the distinctions,
00:05:44.640 don't understand how the RCMP operates, don't understand or appreciate the history of the RCMP.
00:05:51.060 You know, in one of my books, Dispersing the Fog in 2008, I have a whole chapter and much more in the book.
00:05:59.240 The chapter is described shades of truth, that the RCMP speaks in shades of truth.
00:06:05.740 And that one of its sort of internal sort of mottos among members is, lie until you die.
00:06:12.420 Um, and I know that, and so I don't trust what they say, because I know they lie, I know they speak in shades of truth,
00:06:21.940 and I'm there to dissect it.
00:06:24.500 And then the last point on this, Brian, you get back to the Mass Casualty Commission.
00:06:28.740 What I show in the book is all these things that people talking about, Wordman, documents I find,
00:06:37.100 that suggest he's a confidential informant and had a relationship with the police,
00:06:42.360 that I found in the millions of pages.
00:06:44.980 If he wasn't, it's sort of the negative proof.
00:06:47.840 If he wasn't an RCMP, confidential informant, or agent, none of this should have been in the record.
00:06:55.920 None, whatsoever.
00:06:57.660 But there are indications there that he was.
00:07:01.500 Before we dive into the book, what is it about the RCMP that fascinates you?
00:07:06.600 Because you seem to love the organization, and yet you're highly critical of it at the same time,
00:07:14.900 which I can understand, but what is it that drives your desire to say, fix this broken thing?
00:07:22.340 I got involved in this back in 1993 when I was, 1992, when I was doing a, uh, I was working briefly for W5,
00:07:31.860 and I did an interview with an assist, former assistant commissioner, Rod Stamler,
00:07:35.540 who had a connection to where we come from, Hamilton.
00:07:39.020 So Rod Stamler was the, uh, investigator, uh, for the RCMP during the dredging scandal
00:07:45.680 on the Hamilton Harbor affair, which broke in my first week when I worked at the Hamilton Spectator.
00:07:52.860 And I always followed what the federal police were doing in the 70s.
00:07:58.220 And when I sat down with Stamler to do the pre-interview, when it was all over, I said,
00:08:03.960 I have a question for you.
00:08:05.180 And he goes, what's that?
00:08:06.640 And I said, the RCMP was a serious federal police force and successful in the 60s and 70s,
00:08:12.600 but failed, was failing in the 80s and 90s.
00:08:15.900 And Stamler basically took off his glasses and said to me, that is a very good question.
00:08:21.920 And now I'm like going on my sixth book, answering that question, because federal policing is very
00:08:29.600 important and it's not being done in Canada.
00:08:32.420 As we've discussed on past episodes of Full Comment, I mean, this is a, a police force that
00:08:38.840 is neither fish nor fowl.
00:08:40.460 Um, it really should be broken up into local policing and, or divested from local policing
00:08:47.020 and have a, a real federal police force.
00:08:49.380 Instead, it's handing out traffic tickets in rural Nova Scotia or, you know, on the highways
00:08:55.260 of Alberta.
00:08:56.100 And at the same time, trying to investigate serious federal matters that it doesn't appear
00:09:02.300 to be equipped for.
00:09:04.120 No, it definitely.
00:09:05.260 In fact, one of the things you should look at when you don't have federal, what you do
00:09:09.840 at the federal level, when you have federal police not doing their job, that's what, you
00:09:14.740 know, I've had policing experts tell me that if you look at all the problems with, uh, drug
00:09:20.480 problems in small towns in Canada, fraud, cyber fraud, all those things going on, some of these
00:09:26.980 social issues is the result of the lack of federal policing in Canada.
00:09:31.480 And then, so the RCMP concentrates itself on selling itself as a contract police force
00:09:37.280 to provinces and municipalities outside of Ontario and Quebec.
00:09:41.660 They're short-staffed.
00:09:43.080 They're not trained properly.
00:09:45.040 They're not trained to the level of the municipal police.
00:09:48.280 And finally, they're not accountable.
00:09:50.320 And what we see in the Mass Casualty Commission and what happened in Nova Scotia is the RCMP is
00:09:56.180 an unaccountable police force that is oddly protected by the federal government who will
00:10:01.880 do anything to save the force because it appears that federal politicians like the force the way
00:10:07.760 it is, ineffective, um, just a symbol rather than an actual police force, effective police force.
00:10:16.340 Well, and we, we saw the, uh, the degree to which the RCMP will help with cover-ups when
00:10:22.600 it came to Brenda Luckey and trying to help the Trudeau government, um, with information
00:10:28.200 they needed for their, their bogus decision to, uh, to ban firearms based on, on this event.
00:10:34.320 I mean, that was incredibly political on her end and, and Bill Blair's and all of that.
00:10:40.240 But you have to look at that.
00:10:41.840 It's interesting.
00:10:42.620 You picked on that one incident.
00:10:45.920 People missed the point of what that really was about.
00:10:49.400 It's partly about the guns, but at the time that was going on, Frank, Andrew Douglas from Frank
00:10:58.060 Magazine made the decision that the RCMP and the Mass Casualty Commission were covering up
00:11:04.020 how Wirtman was shot.
00:11:05.940 Gabriel Wirtman, the mass killer, was shot.
00:11:08.180 The RCMP had concocted a story that the Mass Casualty Commission and CERT, the police watchdog,
00:11:14.600 went along with, that became sort of the, uh, the, the, the official narrative that two Mounties
00:11:21.180 stumbled upon him while they're getting gas, got out of their car, saw a bruise on his head,
00:11:26.720 identified him, recognized he had Heidi Stevenson's gun, eventually shot him in a gunfight.
00:11:33.360 That's their story.
00:11:35.060 That's not what happened.
00:11:36.540 Part of that happened at another gas station that they covered up and didn't discuss.
00:11:42.980 In the actual shooting at Enfield, we fought to get all the videotapes out,
00:11:49.240 which showed that from the time the policeman pulled up, Constable Hubley pulled up,
00:11:55.580 to the time, to getting out of his car and firing the first shot.
00:11:59.120 Just imagine this.
00:11:59.980 The car tilts to a stop.
00:12:01.680 From that moment, five and a half seconds to the first shot is fired.
00:12:06.880 They knew it was Wirtman.
00:12:08.880 They denied they knew that.
00:12:10.660 And we wanted to show that.
00:12:12.280 So those tapes were coming out.
00:12:14.100 And as the tapes came out, Brenda Luckey story breaks. 0.98
00:12:19.020 All the media attention gets diverted away.
00:12:21.700 Brenda Luckey was toast anyway.
00:12:23.340 She was at the end of her term.
00:12:24.980 Yeah.
00:12:25.100 And so they made this big kerfuffle to deflect attention away from the Mounties had executed
00:12:31.800 Wirtman and did nothing to try to arrest him.
00:12:36.460 There's so many stories and you document them and I encourage people to read the book,
00:12:42.020 but you, um, even the idea of him escaping and how he allegedly escaped, uh, was it a blueberry
00:12:52.920 field, uh, you know, and he snuck away.
00:12:57.800 You, you document that he drove right past the Mounties.
00:13:01.260 Well, it's, it's even more, more distressing than that.
00:13:04.800 They made this story up that see what, what are the problems of the entire Nova Scotia massacres
00:13:11.860 is the RCMP constantly speculates and builds a narrative that the media gobbles up.
00:13:19.800 And most of that narrative is not true.
00:13:22.900 In fact, you know, one of my citizen investigators, Ryan Potter put it the other way the other day.
00:13:28.100 He says, imagine that there's a, a train trip that sort of begins before, you know, before
00:13:35.100 the, uh, massacres during the massacres and after, and it's a train train ride and there's
00:13:39.920 stations along the way.
00:13:41.380 He says, every station, the story is screwed up, manipulated and tweaked to, to fit the official
00:13:48.380 narrative.
00:13:48.820 And one of the first things was the way Wirtman escaped.
00:13:52.880 He went down a road through a blueberry field, a road in a blueberry field that no one knew
00:13:58.460 about and got around the, the police and got away and then lived to tell another day, then
00:14:04.080 killed nine more people the next day.
00:14:06.800 I show with multiple pieces of evidence, not only that, how they, how they covered it up,
00:14:14.140 manipulated a map, uh, made evidence disappear, um, ignored evidence that was before them to make
00:14:22.380 the case that Wirtman went through the blueberry field road.
00:14:25.520 In fact, he drove right past the Mounties.
00:14:28.180 But the real story there is that the story was concocted before all the evidence was in
00:14:36.120 and the media took that evidence, made a gospel.
00:14:40.720 And the real story was he, they said he escaped at 10 45.
00:14:46.260 But what happened was once that got out, a fellow stepped forward named Dean Dillman and
00:14:51.360 said, well, I want to tell you that I was there at the road and, uh, I don't want to
00:14:57.520 get caught up in the investigation.
00:14:58.900 He was trying to be helpful, but Dillman's testimony eventually shows it was impossible,
00:15:05.080 impossible for Wirtman to have gone that way.
00:15:07.120 It was totally ignored.
00:15:08.000 Why is that important?
00:15:10.140 Because one of the victims, Corey Ellison, who was visiting his father, walked up the
00:15:16.080 road when he saw the fires in Portapique and ended up being murdered.
00:15:20.900 The RCMP discovered that, left that body outside on the road for probably 12 to 14 hours.
00:15:29.820 They discovered it three times during the night.
00:15:31.880 And only after they put their narrative out that they discovered that were, that Corey
00:15:37.780 Ellison was killed at 10 40, 12 PM that night.
00:15:42.840 That made it impossible for him to go up the blueberry field road because Dean Dillman was
00:15:48.700 already there.
00:15:49.820 But secondly, it seems in my mind, based on the evidence to eliminate Wirtman as the shooter,
00:15:56.820 because it didn't make sense for him to be there.
00:16:00.380 Cause that's where the first three 9-1-1 calls come from right in that area.
00:16:04.660 The RCMP said.
00:16:06.280 So if he had gone up the blueberry road, he couldn't have shot Corey Ellison.
00:16:10.320 No, he couldn't get to the blueberry field road.
00:16:13.080 Cause there's a number of obstacles that I described.
00:16:15.500 It didn't happen, but the MCC.
00:16:18.660 So what this shows, the blueberry field story shows how the federal government, department
00:16:23.300 of justice, the mass casualty commission and the RCMP all sort of colluded to massage
00:16:28.180 the story because what they're protecting is the likelihood that a Mountie accidentally
00:16:34.260 shot Corey Ellison.
00:16:37.180 So that's one thing that's going on.
00:16:40.180 And then the evidence for that, Brian, there's, there's three things.
00:16:44.600 One, in the first press conference, this horrible debacle of a press conference, in response to
00:16:54.180 a question, Chief Superintendent Chris Leather said, we're making three references to the
00:16:59.800 police watchdog cert about shootings.
00:17:02.640 One was the shooting of Wirtman.
00:17:04.300 One is the, the crazy shootup of the Oslo Belmont fire hall by two Mounties who were pursuing
00:17:10.520 Wirtman.
00:17:11.400 And the third, he said is quote, an exchange of gunfire between the gunman and the RCMP
00:17:18.860 the previous night.
00:17:22.220 That eventually disappears.
00:17:25.020 That complaint is never made.
00:17:27.120 And there is no, that there was never an exchange between the RCMP and Wirtman that night.
00:17:33.120 So what really happened?
00:17:35.720 And secondly, second piece of evidence, there's an obscure thing in one of the original statements
00:17:40.720 by Lisa Banfield, Wirtman's girlfriend who was hiding in the woods, apparently, who said,
00:17:48.460 I heard someone say, how's it, how's it going boys?
00:17:52.340 And then bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
00:17:55.280 And then that is not explored or just it, that disappears.
00:17:59.720 And there's other stuff.
00:18:00.980 There's lots of evidence.
00:18:03.120 So two questions come to mind as we're talking.
00:18:06.660 On the one hand, in the early days or early hours, having covered a number of these breaking
00:18:16.360 news events, you know, the shooter on Parliament Hill, you know, and on and on, you get a lot
00:18:24.520 of misinformation.
00:18:25.080 As a reporter, you get a lot of misinformation.
00:18:27.300 And I've often been doing broadcast news when that's happening, radio or television.
00:18:33.840 And so you always have to warn people, look, we're bringing you the best information that
00:18:37.340 we have at the moment.
00:18:39.700 But this can change.
00:18:41.240 And so I remember when the attack on Parliament Hill happened, Corporal Nathan Cirillo was shot.
00:18:51.220 There were, you know, reports of the police looking for multiple gunmen.
00:18:56.300 Well, it was only one guy and he was dead, shot by Kevin Vickers in the Hall of Honor in
00:19:02.400 CenterBlock.
00:19:03.560 So I can understand the media making mistakes.
00:19:08.440 But part of your contention is they didn't correct them and they weren't curious.
00:19:15.120 Well, time and time again, when I broke stories, you know, I broke stories early on because
00:19:23.480 I, one of the things I had to do to make them produce documents, which demonstrate I could
00:19:30.600 penetrate the walls of the RCMP, the Department of Justice, the government, the Mass Casualty 0.97
00:19:37.160 Commission, CERT, and get information and publish it.
00:19:41.920 You know, we'd publish things like the RCMP had a moratorium on the destruction of evidence
00:19:47.140 in the Gabriel Wirtman case three months into the investigation.
00:19:50.880 They were destroying evidence and the media didn't respond.
00:19:54.940 And you know why they didn't respond?
00:19:56.180 Like they didn't do in any of the other things we broke?
00:19:58.780 Well, that's not what the RCMP is saying.
00:20:01.580 You know, I had this famous call from, I reported in 22 murders that, uh, when I started to sort
00:20:08.440 of explore the notion that Wirtman was a confidential informant, uh, the CBC reporter went to Darren
00:20:15.380 Campbell of the RCMP who said, oh, that's Blango just writing another fairy tale.
00:20:21.300 And the CBC reported, oh, here's another fairy tale from Paul Blango.
00:20:25.980 And I said, no, this is based on my knowledge, my sources, that there's something going on here,
00:20:32.280 but they will not, the reporters and their editors will not deviate from the official narrative of the story.
00:20:39.320 If someone in the power is not saying it, it's not news.
00:20:44.300 So people could just sit here and say, well, who's Paul Blango?
00:20:49.280 What does he know? 0.65
00:20:50.200 Uh, this is just a crazy old man in Nova Scotia writing stuff that isn't true, but this is
00:20:56.080 a book published by Random House.
00:20:58.020 You, you, you have obviously documented it well enough that one of the major publishers
00:21:05.040 in Canada, in the world, really in the English speaking world has said, yes, there's enough
00:21:10.580 here to warrant putting out a book and we will stand behind it because if, um, if you're
00:21:17.760 publishing false information, they're liable, uh, for the, uh, the consequences.
00:21:24.420 I didn't really bet it.
00:21:25.820 It's all based, the thing is, it's not speculation.
00:21:29.260 And the, and the other thing, Brian is, I wrote two books about this.
00:21:33.720 I wrote one book to set up the story.
00:21:36.400 The last line in the first book is what's the big secret?
00:21:41.140 The second, which was forcing the mass casualty commission to address all the things I raised
00:21:47.040 that I knew they would hide the documents.
00:21:49.780 And then they tried to hide the documents and me and a group of citizen investigators
00:21:54.300 uncovered them all as much as we could, a lot of smoking guns in there and published a
00:22:00.300 second book.
00:22:00.940 Now the second book is based on documents.
00:22:04.080 It's not me.
00:22:05.540 It's not me sitting in my armchair saying, this is what the police should do.
00:22:09.960 This is what the documents say happened.
00:22:13.300 And they hid a lot of these documents or, or massage them in such a way that people didn't
00:22:18.420 recognize what they were really saying.
00:22:22.260 Tell me what you learned about the Keystone cop incident of the two Mounties shooting at
00:22:28.320 each other, thinking they had Wartman at the, the fire hall.
00:22:32.220 Um, utterly bizarre that this could happen in what's supposed to be a very professional
00:22:40.020 federal police force.
00:22:42.820 Well, at this point, it's not a federal police force there.
00:22:45.660 There's operating under the laws of Nova Scotia as a provincial or municipal.
00:22:49.560 Yeah.
00:22:50.740 What was going on there and never really understood by the mass media was that an incident earlier
00:22:58.460 at the Fisher house in Glencombe where Wartman apparently knocked on their, would knock on
00:23:02.920 their door and they called the, called the, the Mounties, the Mounties.
00:23:06.380 As the Mounties approached there, an order was given that they had compromised authority.
00:23:14.500 Compromised authority meant if they saw him, they could shoot him without getting approval
00:23:19.800 from anyone.
00:23:20.460 So the cops went from that scene down to DeBert where two VON nurses were shot, horrible situation.
00:23:31.180 There was a story in itself in the book.
00:23:33.520 And then the next stop was the Oslo Belmont fire hall.
00:23:38.240 They were chasing Wartman, trying to find him, didn't know where he was, but they were not
00:23:44.740 putting up roadblocks in front of him to stop him because they're afraid to have a confrontation.
00:23:49.340 So he drove for almost 200 kilometers.
00:23:53.440 Nobody got in front of him, but they were following behind.
00:23:57.400 And I think that the Oslo Belmont fire hall.
00:24:00.300 And was he in the cruiser at this point?
00:24:03.380 Yeah.
00:24:03.820 At this point he was in the cruiser.
00:24:04.960 He drive, there's a Mounties sitting in the Oslo Belmont fire hall, protecting some of
00:24:09.780 the victims from Portapic who are being kept there.
00:24:13.300 Wartman drives by.
00:24:14.940 It's shown on the camera.
00:24:16.520 I believe that Wartman, and this is never disclosed, but this is one of the six incidents
00:24:22.660 I point out where I believe Wartman used a phone or a radio connected to the RCMP system
00:24:28.760 and said, he's at the fire hall.
00:24:31.560 And the fire, the two Mounties show up and in their version of the story, which is accepted
00:24:37.660 by CERT and by the MCC.
00:24:40.700 Oh, we showed up.
00:24:41.800 We saw him standing out there.
00:24:44.120 It wasn't him.
00:24:44.940 It was an emergency measures organization, a guy named David Westlake.
00:24:48.880 Uh, we gave him orders.
00:24:51.200 He didn't comply.
00:24:52.080 And we, and we shot and they ended up missing everyone, uh, bullets going through the wall,
00:24:57.840 narrowly missing people inside.
00:24:59.940 Then they went in and saw nobody was like, got in the car and drove off and didn't report
00:25:04.980 it until the 9-1-1 call came in from the fire hall.
00:25:09.200 They said, oh yeah, yeah, that was us.
00:25:10.700 But when the Mass Casualty Commission addressed this, this is how they addressed it.
00:25:19.620 They interviewed, they brought out into the public forum, the people who were inside the
00:25:24.580 fire hall, not any of the multitude of witnesses on the outside who saw what happened.
00:25:30.760 And what happened was the Mounties in an unmarked, uh, Nissan Altima pulled up and stopped short
00:25:39.400 of the fire hall where they could, they couldn't possibly have known or seen him and made an
00:25:45.900 estimation.
00:25:46.620 Their story, their story.
00:25:47.740 They're shooting from far away.
00:25:49.300 Well, they started shooting from far away, so far away that they put a bullet through the
00:25:53.760 neon sign or the electronic sign on the Western edge of the property where there's a giant
00:25:59.860 hedge.
00:26:00.680 So they were far away trying to sneak up on them.
00:26:04.000 So that tells me they had advanced knowledge, but the MCC said, uh, we don't know what the
00:26:09.380 don't want to interview.
00:26:10.120 They didn't, but they exposed none of the witnesses on the outside who saw this, including
00:26:14.660 one guy who was right in the middle of it, a guy named Jerome Bro, who I wrote about in
00:26:18.540 Frank magazine.
00:26:20.240 And in fact, the mass guy or the cert, the police watchdog said, well, he couldn't hear
00:26:26.040 what was really being said because his car engine was on.
00:26:29.560 He had an electric car.
00:26:31.260 You know, they did.
00:26:35.500 That's how far they went to cover up the story, that story.
00:26:38.960 All right.
00:26:39.380 We need to take a quick break, Paul.
00:26:41.120 Uh, when we come back, I do want to ask you more questions about the, uh, just ridiculous
00:26:45.780 way the RCMP investigated this, but the ongoing coverup that you detail more in moments.
00:26:51.060 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada did what, where we unpack the biggest, weirdest
00:26:56.340 and wildest political moments in Canadian history.
00:26:59.060 You thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:27:02.520 Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.
00:27:07.220 If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada did what everywhere 0.69
00:27:11.760 you get podcasts.
00:27:12.860 So Paul, when this was still a breaking news story, it was Frank magazine out of Halifax
00:27:19.600 that published, um, a story.
00:27:22.400 It wasn't your story as you corrected me.
00:27:25.000 It was, uh, someone else, but they had, they had tracked down Gabriel Wartman's father who
00:27:31.380 told them that, yeah, this guy had illegal guns.
00:27:34.060 Yeah.
00:27:34.200 We'd reported him for violence before RCMP never did anything.
00:27:37.500 And perhaps that, uh, you know, points to your theory that Wartman was, uh, uh, a, a police
00:27:44.180 informant, that that's why they were allowing things to go on, even as people were reporting
00:27:49.100 on them.
00:27:50.420 How did you end up at Frank and how did Frank become the place that was publishing this
00:27:55.720 material that, uh, you know, fairly explosive?
00:27:58.840 Well, I started doing stuff for McLean's, uh, because I got hooked up with Stephen Marr who
00:28:06.560 asked me some questions and I gave him some, I told him, this is what I would do.
00:28:11.580 And then next, uh, you know, I, I found a Wartman's money that he got 475,000 from Brinks
00:28:19.620 and I used a talk radio as a medium to get the story out.
00:28:23.700 The Halifax newspapers wouldn't cover the story properly.
00:28:28.080 It wouldn't go near me because I was too controversial.
00:28:32.300 Um, the CBC and all the TV stations, uh, they don't know how to do this.
00:28:38.360 Um, I went to the net after McLean's got itchy and said, well, you know, something, there
00:28:44.040 was some, uh, pushback from the government about the confidential, uh, informant theory
00:28:48.740 and they got all jittery about it.
00:28:50.960 And so then I went and did a couple of stories in the national post and then I wanted to do
00:28:55.960 a story on Lisa Banfield and Frank magazine was the only one who named Lisa Banfield and
00:29:02.400 they clever, Andrew Douglas did a clever job.
00:29:04.640 He says in Lisa Banfield being the Wartman's girlfriend, his, his girl, his abused girlfriend,
00:29:10.780 his, his abused girlfriend.
00:29:12.320 Yes.
00:29:13.240 And Andrew cleverly, uh, did a cover photo of her and says the hero of Portapic.
00:29:19.600 He says, who's going to complain about that?
00:29:21.960 You know?
00:29:22.580 And so he, he got her name up and, but nobody six, seven months after the massacres, she
00:29:29.980 was still unnamed.
00:29:32.040 Wartman was unnamed because the, all the newspapers took it, taking their cue from, uh, prime minister
00:29:37.600 Trudeau who said, we should not glorify this infamy and not name him.
00:29:42.600 Yeah.
00:29:42.800 I don't agree with that.
00:29:43.900 There's a lot of media that do that now after, um, uh, any sort of mass shooting or mass
00:29:49.120 killing, uh, I don't know what purpose it serves.
00:29:52.440 I, I, I know that the theory is that these guys crave fame.
00:29:56.180 Well, most of the time they're dead and we need to know who we're talking about.
00:30:00.660 Yeah.
00:30:01.120 Because other people know them and it sort of awakens things in them and, and more information
00:30:05.900 may come forward.
00:30:06.860 And so seven, eight months go by and they haven't named, they haven't named her and
00:30:12.480 they haven't named him.
00:30:13.280 They said, the girlfriend, the perpetrator, uh, they call them GW and, and things like
00:30:18.380 that.
00:30:18.820 And the poor, innocent person who escaped from handcuffs and did all this stuff and then
00:30:24.340 hid outside all night on a night where it was snowing in Halifax with no shoes, no socks,
00:30:29.860 a pair of yoga pants on and a, and a spandex top.
00:30:33.060 So I didn't believe her story, you know, that, you know, my expert was nature, you know, it's
00:30:38.680 like the story doesn't make sense.
00:30:40.920 And so I wanted to write, I was gathering more and more information about Lisa Banfield.
00:30:46.180 I wanted to write about her, but I finally got, you know, I, I tried one outlet.
00:30:51.860 I tried another outlet.
00:30:53.160 I got a note back saying, oh, well, you know, the editor thinks, uh, you know, the women's 0.91
00:30:59.340 groups will be really upset about this.
00:31:01.380 And this is a national newspaper.
00:31:03.420 And I go, it's the truth.
00:31:06.140 These are reasonable questions.
00:31:08.700 And if they're going to march, you know, as one reporter says, if you write that story,
00:31:12.540 reporters are going to march on your store because we had a business in Chester, Nova
00:31:16.160 Scotia.
00:31:17.140 And I says, March, I don't care.
00:31:20.280 I'm going to, I'm telling the truth.
00:31:21.880 These are reasonable questions.
00:31:23.980 I don't believe her story.
00:31:25.880 I need more evidence.
00:31:26.980 She's never given an interview.
00:31:28.160 And so when no one would run it, I phoned, uh, Andrew up and I says, okay, here's the
00:31:33.640 deal.
00:31:34.720 I'll do these stories, but I can't write like Frank.
00:31:37.900 I just write my stories the way I want to write them.
00:31:40.160 And he goes, sold.
00:31:41.540 And so we were getting ready to do our first story and it was public knowledge.
00:31:49.340 This was going to happen on a Monday.
00:31:52.140 And what happened on Friday?
00:31:55.180 The RCMP charged Lisa Banfield with provide, and her brother and brother-in-law with providing
00:32:01.660 ammunition to Wartman.
00:32:02.880 And that's the way they deflect news.
00:32:06.400 And I remember at the time I had, uh, uh, journalists come to me and say, well, what
00:32:11.260 do you think this means? 0.98
00:32:13.500 And I said, they're bullshit charges. 0.94
00:32:16.000 They're like a traffic ticket, but they're going to use this to hide behind that Lisa 0.95
00:32:20.480 Banfield does not have to do interviews and we can't do anything to her because she's 1.00
00:32:24.300 now being charged.
00:32:25.160 And she goes to the Mass Casualty Commission and finally testifies in July 15th, 2022.
00:32:31.980 And right afterwards, two things happen.
00:32:35.020 One, the charges against her are dismissed or in a restorative justice process, which I
00:32:41.460 have no idea how that worked.
00:32:43.860 And two, then they release all the financial records about Lisa Banfield, which show her 1.00
00:32:50.420 story was all bullshit. 0.96
00:32:51.480 And it's the financial records that you say prove not a victim. 1.00
00:32:57.960 Not a victim.
00:32:59.100 Well, the story, the official narrative was that she made $15,000 a year, was a work slave 0.97
00:33:06.100 and a sex slave of, of, uh, Wartman.
00:33:08.620 Well, I show that they have a, they likely had a polyamorous relationship. 0.91
00:33:13.640 They had relationship with other people.
00:33:16.380 Wartman had multitude of relationships.
00:33:18.700 But in the 19 months prior to the massacres, according to the records, which were released
00:33:24.760 and none of the information published about her by any of the media, even though it was
00:33:29.920 there showing that she was spending on her credit cards alone, not her debit, no cash.
00:33:35.720 She was spending about $5,200 a month average for 19 months, $160,000.
00:33:44.780 And the bills were paid for.
00:33:47.340 Uh, she was driving a Mercedes that she paid for.
00:33:51.340 Um, the whole story was she didn't even really live with Wartman.
00:33:55.340 They lived sort of separately and visited each other occasionally.
00:33:59.680 And they seem to be, uh, you know, if you go by the emails and all the evidence, they
00:34:04.160 seem to be, uh, sort of together right to the end.
00:34:07.320 And even the so-called domestic violence case, I take a part in the book and show how sort
00:34:13.140 of flimsy that sort of allegation is.
00:34:15.560 One of the weapons that Wartman used, of course, he had, uh, several illegal firearms smuggled
00:34:22.980 in from the United States.
00:34:24.120 But in the end, he was using a, uh, RCMP issued pistol belonging to Constable Heidi Stevenson.
00:34:35.060 How did he get that?
00:34:36.400 And how did, does the real story differ from the official story?
00:34:41.040 The official story is Heidi Stevenson, um, and Wartman looking like two police cars crashed
00:34:52.440 together in a traffic circle in Shubenacatee.
00:34:55.460 Um, and then there's the epic fire afterwards and Heidi Stevenson is left dead in this as well
00:35:03.000 as an innocent bystander who went to help named Joey Weber.
00:35:07.120 The official story, uh, is very vague.
00:35:11.980 And then a couple of days later, Brian Sovey from the National Police Federation, the police
00:35:16.500 union says, Heidi Stevenson was a hero.
00:35:20.320 She rammed Wartman and took him off the playing field and saved lives and lost her life.
00:35:26.340 She's a hero.
00:35:27.360 A couple of days later, the RCMP comes out and says, no, no, no, that didn't happen.
00:35:33.720 She did not ram him.
00:35:35.180 Um, Wartman rammed her and, but she was involved in a gun battle with Wartman and she fired shots 0.86
00:35:45.460 at him, but there's no real detail on that until about two years later during the Mass Casualty
00:35:51.260 Commission.
00:35:52.240 But this fantastic story comes up that Heidi Stevenson fired 14 shots at Wartman, winged 0.87
00:36:00.280 him in the head and, uh, 12 of those shots were outside the car and two were inside the
00:36:06.320 car.
00:36:08.080 And so right away, everyone's weeping.
00:36:10.560 There's heroes.
00:36:11.500 Monuments are going to be put up that Heidi Stevenson was a hero.
00:36:16.820 And I always had problems with the Heidi Stevenson story.
00:36:21.180 I mean, the one and only interview I did on the CBC, uh, radio three days after the event
00:36:27.240 was the, the host asked me, and what about Heidi Stevenson?
00:36:31.400 She's a hero.
00:36:32.020 And I said, my question is very simple.
00:36:34.520 Why was she there?
00:36:36.740 He said, well, what do you mean?
00:36:37.860 I said, well, 19 people were already dead and she was alone in a car.
00:36:42.040 And why was she alone?
00:36:45.220 Like, I don't understand that.
00:36:47.500 And then as I got into the case and started investigating for the book, I eventually concluded
00:36:53.560 that there were 27 witnesses to what happened at Shubenacatee.
00:37:00.060 No one who was close to the scene saw Heidi Stevenson get out of her car.
00:37:09.000 She was likely disabled by the airbag in her car. 0.88
00:37:12.040 12 bullet casings are outside the car and two are inside the car.
00:37:19.020 They're found days later.
00:37:21.560 The two bullets inside the car are problematic.
00:37:25.740 How did she fire those bullets? 1.00
00:37:28.260 Where did she fire them? 0.96
00:37:29.680 Because where was I, I, what was to her right or behind her or to her back left?
00:37:35.860 There are no holes in the windows because I have photos of the car before the fire.
00:37:40.260 So there's no holes in the windows.
00:37:41.540 In fact, in the MCC report, in the direction Wirtman was coming from, there was one bullet
00:37:46.280 hole going down through the passenger, front passenger door that was likely Wirtman shooting
00:37:52.100 at her and finishing her off a through and through shot. 0.98
00:37:54.680 So I started to wonder, I concluded as I was writing that chapter that Heidi, they faked this story.
00:38:07.560 This is a fake story that she was executed.
00:38:12.160 All the witnesses I talked to said she never got out of the car.
00:38:15.700 So she was executed.
00:38:17.440 But how, I'm just going to say this to go down the line.
00:38:20.120 I think this is what happened.
00:38:21.600 And as I was doing a final proof going, just sort of dotting eyes and crossing T and going
00:38:26.800 through the documents again, I found a section where there are 77 documents.
00:38:33.600 55 of them were pictures of a pair of charred handcuffs that were found near Heidi, near the memorial site
00:38:40.960 for Heidi Stevenson days after the event, which is very curious.
00:38:44.340 And they tried to link these to the so-called handcuffs that Lisa Banfield was supposedly locked up in.
00:38:52.220 And that's a problematic story because the original story is Lisa Banfield escaped the handcuffs.
00:38:57.540 And later it became, well, it was only on one wrist.
00:39:01.420 And then at the MCC said, she said, oh, I sort of scarred my wrist taking off the handcuffs.
00:39:06.860 Well, it was only on one wrist.
00:39:08.520 Why did she take them off?
00:39:10.580 She could run.
00:39:11.780 So why did she take them off?
00:39:13.300 Doesn't make sense.
00:39:15.340 Anyway, I'm going through there and I see another document.
00:39:19.240 I said, what is that?
00:39:20.380 And I look at it and it's a letter from the police watchdog from Patrick Curran,
00:39:25.120 Patrick Curran, former chief justice of the Nova Scotia Provincial and Family Court,
00:39:32.560 who was sitting in as interim chief of CERT.
00:39:37.220 And it was three days after the mass, after Stevenson was killed,
00:39:41.380 the RCMP had asked him to investigate the possibility that in the gunfight they believed happened,
00:39:50.660 Heidi Stevenson accidentally shot Joey Weber. 0.96
00:39:53.600 And therefore, that was a police-involved shooting.
00:39:57.380 And Curran looked at it and said, hit the road, basically.
00:40:01.720 I put most of the letter in the book showing this institution-to-institution missive that was like basically telling the RCMP,
00:40:12.500 you're fabricating this.
00:40:15.380 He says, you already told me on Sunday in your initial investigation she was executed.
00:40:19.300 Now you're coming back two days later and say, no, she was in a gunfight and killed an innocent bystander.
00:40:25.120 No innocent bystanders saw this.
00:40:27.800 Nobody ducked a bullet.
00:40:29.100 There were no holes anywhere.
00:40:30.380 And it raises questions, okay, they fabricated the story to create a hero.
00:40:36.460 You know, poor Heidi Stevenson was, as I show, was not trained very well,
00:40:40.800 could not carry, like three of the female members who were involved in this on the ground,
00:40:45.980 failed all their carbine testing so they could not be in any sort of tactical situation.
00:40:52.720 She was not the person to be there.
00:40:54.460 She had no direction.
00:40:55.240 She didn't know how dangerous it was.
00:40:58.260 She was killed, so they thought, we'll make a hero of her.
00:41:01.820 And I'm sorry, but they made the story up.
00:41:05.720 But the question is, Brian, where did the shell cases come from?
00:41:09.660 If they planted shell cases on the scene to make the hero story, what else did they do?
00:41:15.820 And there's plenty of that as I show in the book.
00:41:18.500 Well, and I think in documenting the story the way you have in the book, you show that the idea is a lack of proper leadership and coordination by RCMP Brass in this investigation.
00:41:38.880 Because this is day two.
00:41:41.100 And, you know, as you just said, she was there with no direction.
00:41:45.960 Well, how do you have people going around with no direction on day two?
00:41:52.440 Because what they clearly were doing, the RCMP in Nova Scotia is divided into, say, county patrols.
00:42:02.260 Portapic and what happened to the north were in different counties.
00:42:06.620 They were trying to control this and keep it in the county and keep it in their own jurisdiction, which is a sign that Wirtman was a confidential informant.
00:42:16.600 They wanted this to stay contained.
00:42:19.720 They didn't tell Truro police what was going on until after Wirtman had passed through Truro.
00:42:25.440 They didn't ask for their engagement because they wanted no other force investigating, creating files that would force them to open up their files.
00:42:36.740 And I had this from the inside.
00:42:38.520 I talk about this.
00:42:39.780 And so the whole movement was not to alert anyone, not even their own members in other counties, how dangerous the situation was.
00:42:48.600 And as I point out in the book, one of the people who was working with Stevenson had to call someone else in like New Brunswick.
00:42:56.740 What's going on in the neighboring county?
00:42:59.340 Because the RCMP was not telling them because they didn't want the story to get out.
00:43:03.900 They are hoping that they could chase Wirtman down, kill him before he got out of Colchester County.
00:43:10.340 He got out and that's how Stevenson got killed.
00:43:13.600 So why, why do you suspect New Brunswick, um, that, that he was working with the RCMP there?
00:43:21.600 I mean, I imagine it would be across the, the, the maritime provinces, but why New Brunswick if he's based in Portapique?
00:43:31.080 Well, he's from New Brunswick.
00:43:33.080 He was active all his life.
00:43:34.880 His early criminal activities were involved in Fredericton and the border and smuggling guns, grenades.
00:43:40.360 None of this comes up to the MCC.
00:43:42.200 They don't get into Wirtman's criminal background because that would force them to open files.
00:43:48.080 The RCMP to open files.
00:43:50.080 And in the previous years, uh, the assistant commissioner in New Brunswick, uh, Larry Trombley took over all anti-biker operations in the Maritimes.
00:44:01.620 And there was a particular focus on the Hells Angels and their, their puppet clubs.
00:44:06.780 And in the months leading up to what was the massacres, a series of arrests were happening in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
00:44:15.740 The last one being on April 10th, when two Hells Angels and two, uh, uh, uh, Red Devils were arrested in New Brunswick.
00:44:23.880 And the culmination of a case against the top, uh, Hells Angels guys in that province.
00:44:29.780 And I was led to believe by my sources that Wirtman was actually working as an agent on that.
00:44:35.860 And it didn't help.
00:44:36.340 Helping nab the RCMP.
00:44:38.860 Yeah.
00:44:39.000 So the, the national fallout from this though, is that we've got this, the Trudeau government used this within weeks to announce on May 1st, I mean, it wasn't even two full weeks, May 1st, 2020.
00:44:59.480 They announced a massive, uh, gun ban and then the so-called buyback program that five years later they haven't bought back.
00:45:08.080 I mean, they never owned the guns, but they haven't, they haven't, uh, seized a single firearm from any licensed law abiding gun owners.
00:45:16.700 This is all happening because of what you say is, uh, an RCMP coverup of an undercover agent behaving badly and the RCMP botching all of it.
00:45:31.760 And, and we're going to end up with this huge cost, uh, for seizing guns from legal licensed law abiding gun owners.
00:45:41.340 It's utterly bizarre.
00:45:42.540 Well, what I'm showing and what I'd hope to show in a future book is that how I knew this was going to be a coverup was based on me looking at coverups in the past, coming at the, after the fact, recognizing them, seeing how they worked, and then having the media calling me a conspiracy theorist.
00:46:02.060 So I looked at the playbook they used to implement social policy, social engineering, get what they wanted for the government to get what they wanted or big business to get what they wanted.
00:46:13.140 And I looked at that playbook and I was prepared for this one.
00:46:17.140 And I knew they were going to use the same playbook with a few twists, which they did.
00:46:21.400 And so I covered it in real time.
00:46:23.180 So I knew what I was looking for.
00:46:24.760 You know, if you look back over, I don't know if you can see it over my left shoulder, you can't see it, but I got a whole stack of the mass casualty commission report.
00:46:32.660 Like it's this high, all these different volumes.
00:46:35.800 The real story was in the last volume halfway through and nobody read.
00:46:40.420 And that was that the, in spite of everyone saying it was going to be transparent and we're all working together, the commission said the federal government, DOJ and the RCMP stymied them at many turns, refused to give them documents, refused to cooperate and basically, uh, caused them not to be able to do the most transparent job they were hoping to do.
00:47:06.320 Sounds like the foreign interference commission. 0.52
00:47:08.280 That's, that's how it all works, Brian.
00:47:10.980 That's the point.
00:47:11.840 This is not just about the shootings in Nova Scotia.
00:47:15.500 This is how the world works in Canada.
00:47:18.560 This is how it's long worked.
00:47:20.600 The Braidwood commission, the Arar inquiry.
00:47:23.820 I get into the Arar inquiry and show how that taught me to look at this.
00:47:28.380 So it's, it's, uh, it's the story of Canada and how it really works brought down to look, I dissect it at the base level, but it can apply.
00:47:38.280 It can apply to almost every issue over the last 40 years.
00:47:40.680 This is their playbook.
00:47:41.660 Paul, it's a fascinating read and a fascinating story.
00:47:45.720 I encourage everyone to go out and pick it up local bookstores or online, however you want to get it.
00:47:50.100 Thanks so much for the time.
00:47:51.660 Well, thank you very much.
00:47:53.360 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.
00:47:55.680 My name's Brian Lilly, your host.
00:47:57.360 This episode was produced by Andre Pru.
00:47:59.620 Theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:48:01.420 Kevin Libman is the executive producer.
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00:48:16.280 Thanks for listening.
00:48:17.100 Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.
00:48:18.680 Here's that clip from Canada Did What?
00:48:25.420 I promised you.
00:48:29.180 Two years later, he was still opposition leader, and he lost again to the Pearson Liberals.
00:48:36.040 Despite this, Diefenbaker doesn't resign as leader of the Progressive Conservatives,
00:48:41.080 which put the party in an awkward situation that hasn't really happened before.
00:48:45.420 The typical rules of a Canadian political party were that you stayed leader until you died or resigned.
00:48:52.160 And if you lost twice in a row, you were supposed to do the honorable thing and step aside.
00:48:57.580 But Diefenbaker just didn't.
00:49:00.360 Prompting the party to take the unprecedented step of forcing a party convention in Toronto
00:49:05.080 for the singular purpose of crowbarring Diefenbaker out of the leadership.
00:49:11.280 Diefenbaker shows up, pretends everything is fine,
00:49:13.960 and gives a finger-wagging speech chastising his fellow party members for their disloyalty.
00:49:19.700 I followed this party when I didn't agree with policies.
00:49:25.820 I gave loyalty to leader after leader.
00:49:30.220 Because I believe that there is no other way.
00:49:33.960 He's politely cheered by the assembled conservatives,
00:49:37.020 and then abjectly humiliated in their subsequent leadership vote.
00:49:40.640 On the first ballot, Diefenbaker gets a distant fifth place,
00:49:44.660 and even then he refuses to admit defeat.