What cops ‘covered up’ about the Nova Scotia massacre
Episode Stats
Summary
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
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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners,
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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The events of April 18th and 19th, 2020 shocked the country.
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Those were the two days when Gabriel Wortman, a denturist from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,
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killed 22 people in a massacre in what officials eventually dubbed the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty
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And today we're going to look at what happened on those days and the days that followed,
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There has been an official police investigation.
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Palango is a veteran journalist who worked for the Hamilton Spectator, was a top editor
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He left daily journalism years ago for a new life in Nova Scotia.
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And then this event happened and Palango realized we weren't being told the truth, not through
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He's one of the writers that I've relied on and corresponded with since those days when
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I've been writing about these issues over the past five years.
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This past week, a new book was published by Random House called Anatomy of a Cover-Up,
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the truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia massacres.
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One of his big theories, Gabriel Wortman, was an insider, an agent for the RCMP.
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Paul, what was it about the whole situation surrounding Gabriel Wortman, the RCMP, the mass
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casualty event, as they bizarrely and euphemistically call it, that made you say something isn't right
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Because you were the first journalist that I was reading at the time saying something's
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Well, Brian, it struck me on day one when my wife alerted to me what was going on that
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Sunday, April 19th, 2020, that something wasn't right.
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There was a man dressed up as a Mountie going around killing people.
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No one was stopping him, and he seemed to be everywhere in the province.
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The way they handled everything, they said, Gabriel Wortman is in custody.
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Then three hours later, reported, well, actually, he was shot dead.
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I said, none of this is the way, none of this has unfolded as I can see the way a normal police
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And that told me, based on my experience, you know, I was told a long time ago by a bunch
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of senior cops, when you see something strange going on that's absolutely inexplicable, think
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The police were doing something, and it got out of hand.
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And I thought, this sort of looks like, I'm going to go work on that theory.
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And it's sort of, that was always in the back of my mind.
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And then I tried to help mainstream journalists with what I knew and what I suspected was going
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And I knew that within about two or three weeks, they'd be off covering flower shows
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So, you know, you were uncovering things, writing for Frank Magazine, and I know it's
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a different one in Nova Scotia than the one in Ottawa, but you don't think of Frank Magazine
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And you were putting out more information, serious information, than anybody else.
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Now, your first book on what happened on that horrible weekend in April 2020 was about the
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And at the end of it, you posit that this idea that you were talking about that said Wartman
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What they did was they sort of raised it and dismissed it and said, we could find no evidence
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that Gabriel Wartman was an undercover confidential informant or agent for the RCMP in Nova Scotia.
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I had always posited that Wartman, if anything, was working for the RCMP in New Brunswick, next door.
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May well have been working in Nova Scotia as well, but they did this little sidestep.
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Like, you know, it's not something I remember them teaching me in journalism school,
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but it's something you learn working as a journalist.
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When the language is precise like that, it leads to more questions, right?
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And most journalists, almost all the journalists covering this, don't understand the distinctions,
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don't understand how the RCMP operates, don't understand or appreciate the history of the RCMP.
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You know, in one of my books, Dispersing the Fog in 2008, I have a whole chapter and much more in the book.
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The chapter is described shades of truth, that the RCMP speaks in shades of truth.
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And that one of its sort of internal sort of mottos among members is, lie until you die.
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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,
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And then the last point on this, Brian, you get back to the Mass Casualty Commission.
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What I show in the book is all these things that people talking about, Wordman, documents I find,
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that suggest he's a confidential informant and had a relationship with the police,
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If he wasn't an RCMP, confidential informant, or agent, none of this should have been in the record.
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Before we dive into the book, what is it about the RCMP that fascinates you?
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Because you seem to love the organization, and yet you're highly critical of it at the same time,
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which I can understand, but what is it that drives your desire to say, fix this broken thing?
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I got involved in this back in 1993 when I was, 1992, when I was doing a, uh, I was working briefly for W5,
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and I did an interview with an assist, former assistant commissioner, Rod Stamler,
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who had a connection to where we come from, Hamilton.
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So Rod Stamler was the, uh, investigator, uh, for the RCMP during the dredging scandal
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on the Hamilton Harbor affair, which broke in my first week when I worked at the Hamilton Spectator.
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And I always followed what the federal police were doing in the 70s.
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And when I sat down with Stamler to do the pre-interview, when it was all over, I said,
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And I said, the RCMP was a serious federal police force and successful in the 60s and 70s,
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And Stamler basically took off his glasses and said to me, that is a very good question.
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And now I'm like going on my sixth book, answering that question, because federal policing is very
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As we've discussed on past episodes of Full Comment, I mean, this is a, a police force that
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Um, it really should be broken up into local policing and, or divested from local policing
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Instead, it's handing out traffic tickets in rural Nova Scotia or, you know, on the highways
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And at the same time, trying to investigate serious federal matters that it doesn't appear
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In fact, one of the things you should look at when you don't have federal, what you do
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at the federal level, when you have federal police not doing their job, that's what, you
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know, I've had policing experts tell me that if you look at all the problems with, uh, drug
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problems in small towns in Canada, fraud, cyber fraud, all those things going on, some of these
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social issues is the result of the lack of federal policing in Canada.
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And then, so the RCMP concentrates itself on selling itself as a contract police force
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to provinces and municipalities outside of Ontario and Quebec.
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They're not trained to the level of the municipal police.
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And what we see in the Mass Casualty Commission and what happened in Nova Scotia is the RCMP is
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an unaccountable police force that is oddly protected by the federal government who will
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do anything to save the force because it appears that federal politicians like the force the way
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it is, ineffective, um, just a symbol rather than an actual police force, effective police force.
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Well, and we, we saw the, uh, the degree to which the RCMP will help with cover-ups when
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it came to Brenda Luckey and trying to help the Trudeau government, um, with information
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they needed for their, their bogus decision to, uh, to ban firearms based on, on this event.
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I mean, that was incredibly political on her end and, and Bill Blair's and all of that.
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People missed the point of what that really was about.
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It's partly about the guns, but at the time that was going on, Frank, Andrew Douglas from Frank
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Magazine made the decision that the RCMP and the Mass Casualty Commission were covering up
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The RCMP had concocted a story that the Mass Casualty Commission and CERT, the police watchdog,
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went along with, that became sort of the, uh, the, the, the official narrative that two Mounties
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stumbled upon him while they're getting gas, got out of their car, saw a bruise on his head,
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identified him, recognized he had Heidi Stevenson's gun, eventually shot him in a gunfight.
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Part of that happened at another gas station that they covered up and didn't discuss.
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In the actual shooting at Enfield, we fought to get all the videotapes out,
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which showed that from the time the policeman pulled up, Constable Hubley pulled up,
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to the time, to getting out of his car and firing the first shot.
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From that moment, five and a half seconds to the first shot is fired.
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And as the tapes came out, Brenda Luckey story breaks.
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And so they made this big kerfuffle to deflect attention away from the Mounties had executed
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There's so many stories and you document them and I encourage people to read the book,
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but you, um, even the idea of him escaping and how he allegedly escaped, uh, was it a blueberry
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You, you document that he drove right past the Mounties.
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Well, it's, it's even more, more distressing than that.
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They made this story up that see what, what are the problems of the entire Nova Scotia massacres
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is the RCMP constantly speculates and builds a narrative that the media gobbles up.
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In fact, you know, one of my citizen investigators, Ryan Potter put it the other way the other day.
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He says, imagine that there's a, a train trip that sort of begins before, you know, before
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the, uh, massacres during the massacres and after, and it's a train train ride and there's
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He says, every station, the story is screwed up, manipulated and tweaked to, to fit the official
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And one of the first things was the way Wirtman escaped.
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He went down a road through a blueberry field, a road in a blueberry field that no one knew
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about and got around the, the police and got away and then lived to tell another day, then
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I show with multiple pieces of evidence, not only that, how they, how they covered it up,
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manipulated a map, uh, made evidence disappear, um, ignored evidence that was before them to make
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the case that Wirtman went through the blueberry field road.
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But the real story there is that the story was concocted before all the evidence was in
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and the media took that evidence, made a gospel.
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And the real story was he, they said he escaped at 10 45.
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But what happened was once that got out, a fellow stepped forward named Dean Dillman and
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said, well, I want to tell you that I was there at the road and, uh, I don't want to
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He was trying to be helpful, but Dillman's testimony eventually shows it was impossible,
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Because one of the victims, Corey Ellison, who was visiting his father, walked up the
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road when he saw the fires in Portapique and ended up being murdered.
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The RCMP discovered that, left that body outside on the road for probably 12 to 14 hours.
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They discovered it three times during the night.
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And only after they put their narrative out that they discovered that were, that Corey
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That made it impossible for him to go up the blueberry field road because Dean Dillman was
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But secondly, it seems in my mind, based on the evidence to eliminate Wirtman as the shooter,
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because it didn't make sense for him to be there.
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Cause that's where the first three 9-1-1 calls come from right in that area.
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So if he had gone up the blueberry road, he couldn't have shot Corey Ellison.
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No, he couldn't get to the blueberry field road.
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Cause there's a number of obstacles that I described.
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So what this shows, the blueberry field story shows how the federal government, department
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of justice, the mass casualty commission and the RCMP all sort of colluded to massage
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the story because what they're protecting is the likelihood that a Mountie accidentally
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And then the evidence for that, Brian, there's, there's three things.
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One, in the first press conference, this horrible debacle of a press conference, in response to
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a question, Chief Superintendent Chris Leather said, we're making three references to the
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One is the, the crazy shootup of the Oslo Belmont fire hall by two Mounties who were pursuing
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And the third, he said is quote, an exchange of gunfire between the gunman and the RCMP
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And there is no, that there was never an exchange between the RCMP and Wirtman that night.
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And secondly, second piece of evidence, there's an obscure thing in one of the original statements
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by Lisa Banfield, Wirtman's girlfriend who was hiding in the woods, apparently, who said,
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I heard someone say, how's it, how's it going boys?
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And then that is not explored or just it, that disappears.
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So two questions come to mind as we're talking.
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On the one hand, in the early days or early hours, having covered a number of these breaking
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news events, you know, the shooter on Parliament Hill, you know, and on and on, you get a lot
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As a reporter, you get a lot of misinformation.
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And I've often been doing broadcast news when that's happening, radio or television.
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And so you always have to warn people, look, we're bringing you the best information that
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And so I remember when the attack on Parliament Hill happened, Corporal Nathan Cirillo was shot.
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There were, you know, reports of the police looking for multiple gunmen.
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Well, it was only one guy and he was dead, shot by Kevin Vickers in the Hall of Honor in
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But part of your contention is they didn't correct them and they weren't curious.
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Well, time and time again, when I broke stories, you know, I broke stories early on because
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I, one of the things I had to do to make them produce documents, which demonstrate I could
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penetrate the walls of the RCMP, the Department of Justice, the government, the Mass Casualty
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Commission, CERT, and get information and publish it.
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You know, we'd publish things like the RCMP had a moratorium on the destruction of evidence
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in the Gabriel Wirtman case three months into the investigation.
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They were destroying evidence and the media didn't respond.
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Like they didn't do in any of the other things we broke?
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You know, I had this famous call from, I reported in 22 murders that, uh, when I started to sort
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of explore the notion that Wirtman was a confidential informant, uh, the CBC reporter went to Darren
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Campbell of the RCMP who said, oh, that's Blango just writing another fairy tale.
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And the CBC reported, oh, here's another fairy tale from Paul Blango.
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And I said, no, this is based on my knowledge, my sources, that there's something going on here,
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but they will not, the reporters and their editors will not deviate from the official narrative of the story.
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If someone in the power is not saying it, it's not news.
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So people could just sit here and say, well, who's Paul Blango?
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Uh, this is just a crazy old man in Nova Scotia writing stuff that isn't true, but this is
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You, you, you have obviously documented it well enough that one of the major publishers
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in Canada, in the world, really in the English speaking world has said, yes, there's enough
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here to warrant putting out a book and we will stand behind it because if, um, if you're
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publishing false information, they're liable, uh, for the, uh, the consequences.
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It's all based, the thing is, it's not speculation.
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And the, and the other thing, Brian is, I wrote two books about this.
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The last line in the first book is what's the big secret?
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The second, which was forcing the mass casualty commission to address all the things I raised
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And then they tried to hide the documents and me and a group of citizen investigators
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uncovered them all as much as we could, a lot of smoking guns in there and published a
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It's not me sitting in my armchair saying, this is what the police should do.
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And they hid a lot of these documents or, or massage them in such a way that people didn't
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Tell me what you learned about the Keystone cop incident of the two Mounties shooting at
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each other, thinking they had Wartman at the, the fire hall.
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Um, utterly bizarre that this could happen in what's supposed to be a very professional
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Well, at this point, it's not a federal police force there.
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There's operating under the laws of Nova Scotia as a provincial or municipal.
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What was going on there and never really understood by the mass media was that an incident earlier
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at the Fisher house in Glencombe where Wartman apparently knocked on their, would knock on
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their door and they called the, called the, the Mounties, the Mounties.
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As the Mounties approached there, an order was given that they had compromised authority.
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Compromised authority meant if they saw him, they could shoot him without getting approval
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So the cops went from that scene down to DeBert where two VON nurses were shot, horrible situation.
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And then the next stop was the Oslo Belmont fire hall.
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They were chasing Wartman, trying to find him, didn't know where he was, but they were not
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putting up roadblocks in front of him to stop him because they're afraid to have a confrontation.
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Nobody got in front of him, but they were following behind.
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He drive, there's a Mounties sitting in the Oslo Belmont fire hall, protecting some of
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the victims from Portapic who are being kept there.
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I believe that Wartman, and this is never disclosed, but this is one of the six incidents
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I point out where I believe Wartman used a phone or a radio connected to the RCMP system
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And the fire, the two Mounties show up and in their version of the story, which is accepted
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It was an emergency measures organization, a guy named David Westlake.
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And we, and we shot and they ended up missing everyone, uh, bullets going through the wall,
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Then they went in and saw nobody was like, got in the car and drove off and didn't report
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it until the 9-1-1 call came in from the fire hall.
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But when the Mass Casualty Commission addressed this, this is how they addressed it.
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They interviewed, they brought out into the public forum, the people who were inside the
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fire hall, not any of the multitude of witnesses on the outside who saw what happened.
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And what happened was the Mounties in an unmarked, uh, Nissan Altima pulled up and stopped short
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of the fire hall where they could, they couldn't possibly have known or seen him and made an
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Well, they started shooting from far away, so far away that they put a bullet through the
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neon sign or the electronic sign on the Western edge of the property where there's a giant
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So they were far away trying to sneak up on them.
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So that tells me they had advanced knowledge, but the MCC said, uh, we don't know what the
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They didn't, but they exposed none of the witnesses on the outside who saw this, including
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one guy who was right in the middle of it, a guy named Jerome Bro, who I wrote about in
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And in fact, the mass guy or the cert, the police watchdog said, well, he couldn't hear
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what was really being said because his car engine was on.
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That's how far they went to cover up the story, that story.
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Uh, when we come back, I do want to ask you more questions about the, uh, just ridiculous
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way the RCMP investigated this, but the ongoing coverup that you detail more in moments.
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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
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00:27:02.520
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So Paul, when this was still a breaking news story, it was Frank magazine out of Halifax
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It was, uh, someone else, but they had, they had tracked down Gabriel Wartman's father who
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told them that, yeah, this guy had illegal guns.
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We'd reported him for violence before RCMP never did anything.
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And perhaps that, uh, you know, points to your theory that Wartman was, uh, uh, a, a police
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informant, that that's why they were allowing things to go on, even as people were reporting
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How did you end up at Frank and how did Frank become the place that was publishing this
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Well, I started doing stuff for McLean's, uh, because I got hooked up with Stephen Marr who
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asked me some questions and I gave him some, I told him, this is what I would do.
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And then next, uh, you know, I, I found a Wartman's money that he got 475,000 from Brinks
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and I used a talk radio as a medium to get the story out.
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The Halifax newspapers wouldn't cover the story properly.
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It wouldn't go near me because I was too controversial.
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Um, the CBC and all the TV stations, uh, they don't know how to do this.
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Um, I went to the net after McLean's got itchy and said, well, you know, something, there
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was some, uh, pushback from the government about the confidential, uh, informant theory
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And so then I went and did a couple of stories in the national post and then I wanted to do
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a story on Lisa Banfield and Frank magazine was the only one who named Lisa Banfield and
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He says in Lisa Banfield being the Wartman's girlfriend, his, his girl, his abused girlfriend,
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And Andrew cleverly, uh, did a cover photo of her and says the hero of Portapic.
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And so he, he got her name up and, but nobody six, seven months after the massacres, she
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Wartman was unnamed because the, all the newspapers took it, taking their cue from, uh, prime minister
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Trudeau who said, we should not glorify this infamy and not name him.
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There's a lot of media that do that now after, um, uh, any sort of mass shooting or mass
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killing, uh, I don't know what purpose it serves.
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I, I, I know that the theory is that these guys crave fame.
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Well, most of the time they're dead and we need to know who we're talking about.
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Because other people know them and it sort of awakens things in them and, and more information
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And so seven, eight months go by and they haven't named, they haven't named her and
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They said, the girlfriend, the perpetrator, uh, they call them GW and, and things like
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And the poor, innocent person who escaped from handcuffs and did all this stuff and then
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hid outside all night on a night where it was snowing in Halifax with no shoes, no socks,
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a pair of yoga pants on and a, and a spandex top.
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So I didn't believe her story, you know, that, you know, my expert was nature, you know, it's
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And so I wanted to write, I was gathering more and more information about Lisa Banfield.
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I wanted to write about her, but I finally got, you know, I, I tried one outlet.
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I got a note back saying, oh, well, you know, the editor thinks, uh, you know, the women's
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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
00:31:28.160
And so when no one would run it, I phoned, uh, Andrew up and I says, okay, here's the
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.
00:31:41.540
And so we were getting ready to do our first story and it was public knowledge.
00:31:55.180
The RCMP charged Lisa Banfield with provide, and her brother and brother-in-law with providing
00:32:06.400
And I remember at the time I had, uh, uh, journalists come to me and say, well, what
00:32:16.000
They're like a traffic ticket, but they're going to use this to hide behind that Lisa
00:32:20.480
Banfield does not have to do interviews and we can't do anything to her because she's
00:32:25.160
And she goes to the Mass Casualty Commission and finally testifies in July 15th, 2022.
00:32:35.020
One, the charges against her are dismissed or in a restorative justice process, which I
00:32:43.860
And two, then they release all the financial records about Lisa Banfield, which show her
00:32:51.480
And it's the financial records that you say prove 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
00:33:08.620
Well, I show that they have a, they likely had a polyamorous relationship.
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.
00:33:47.340
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
00:34:15.560
One of the weapons that Wartman used, of course, he had, uh, several illegal firearms smuggled
00:34:24.120
But in the end, he was using a, uh, RCMP issued pistol belonging to Constable Heidi Stevenson.
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
00:34:55.460
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.
00:35:11.980
And then a couple of days later, Brian Sovey from the National Police Federation, the police
00:35:20.320
She rammed Wartman and took him off the playing field and saved lives and lost her life.
00:35:27.360
A couple of days later, the RCMP comes out and says, no, no, no, that didn't happen.
00:35:35.180
Um, Wartman rammed her and, but she was involved in a gun battle with Wartman and she fired shots
00:35:45.460
at him, but there's no real detail on that until about two years later during the Mass Casualty
00:35:52.240
But this fantastic story comes up that Heidi Stevenson fired 14 shots at Wartman, winged
00:36:00.280
him in the head and, uh, 12 of those shots were outside the car and two were inside the
00:36:11.500
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?
00:36:37.860
I said, well, 19 people were already dead and she was alone in a car.
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.
00:37:12.040
12 bullet casings are outside the car and two are inside the car.
00:37:21.560
The two bullets inside the car are problematic.
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.
00:37:41.540
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.
00:37:54.680
So I started to wonder, I concluded as I was writing that chapter that Heidi, they faked this story.
00:38:12.160
All the witnesses I talked to said she never got out of the car.
00:38:17.440
But how, I'm just going to say this to go down the line.
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.
00:39:15.340
Anyway, I'm going through there and I see another document.
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,
00:39:37.220
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,
00:39:53.600
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,
00:40:15.380
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.
00:40:30.380
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.
00:40:58.260
She was killed, so they thought, we'll make a hero of her.
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.
00:41:41.100
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.
00:42:19.720
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.
00:42:39.780
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.
00:42:59.340
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?
00:43:34.880
His early criminal activities were involved in Fredericton and the border and smuggling guns, grenades.
00:43:42.200
They don't get into Wirtman's criminal background because that would force them 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.
00:44:39.000
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.
00:45:42.540
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.
00:46:24.760
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.
00:47:11.840
This is not just about the shootings in Nova Scotia.
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.
00:47:41.660
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.
00:48:03.720
Please subscribe to Full Comment wherever you get your podcasts on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, wherever it is.
00:48:09.020
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00:48:12.420
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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.
00:49:00.360
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.
00:49:33.960
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,