First officer on scene in Portapique during tragedy raised emergency alert early on

When the first police officer arrived in Portapique, N.S. around 10:25 p.m. on April 18, 2020, the perpetrator behind Canada’s worst mass killing had already murdered residents and set fires.

Enacting a protocol used to respond to active shooter situations, RCMP Const. Stuart Beselt and two other officers headed in on foot, into the dark, while hearing gunshots – trying to find the killer.

Amidst that danger and chaos - and less than an hour after getting there - Beselt suggested over police radio that the public should be notified of the ongoing threat.

That’s according to a transcript of police radio transmissions made public by the Mass Casualty Commission this week.

At 11:16 p.m., Beselt said, “Is there some kind of emergency broadcast that we can make that – make people go into their basement and not go outside."

Staff Sgt. Brian Rehill, who was on duty that night as the risk manager, responded over the radio, “They were using the 911 map to call as many as they can to tell them to shelter-in-place.”

Just what that means, is so far unclear.

At the commission’s public proceedings this week, the head of the RCMP Operational Communications Centre, which takes 911 calls, was asked about what was described by one lawyer as, “reverse 911.”

“Reverse 911 is the ability to search geographic areas for phone numbers so, a database,” said Darryl Macdonald. “But it's not something that's done on a dispatch side.”

When asked by CTV, a spokesperson with the Nova Scotia Emergency Management Office said, “The ability to conduct a mass callout to homes via "Reverse 911" is not a functionality that exists in Nova Scotia or, to our knowledge, anywhere in Canada. Police have the ability to access home phone numbers independent of the 911 system.”

CTV News asked the Nova Scotia RCMP whether calling residents to shelter in place or using some kind of “911 map” is part of RCMP procedure. But the force would not answer those questions, citing the ongoing work by the Mass Casualty Commission.

The commission’s foundational document on first responders in Portapique does indicate information on “communication using the ‘911 map’” will be contained in a forthcoming document on public alerting. That document is not on the schedule for release this month.

When it comes to the idea of an emergency alert, the radio exchange between Beselt and his risk manager the night the killings began appears to be the last he heard of the idea at the time, according to Beselt’s interview with commission counsel Roger Burrill last year.

In a transcript of that conversation, Burrill asked: What kind of broadcast did you have in mind?

Beselt: Just like, an emergency alert or something....warn people...to shelter and hide.

Then Burrill asked: And did you get a response to that?

Beselt: No, not really.

A tweet about a firearms complaint was sent by the RCMP that Saturday night, with further tweets to come the next morning - long after the commission believes the shooter had left Portapique.

But no provincial emergency alert was ever issued.

Dalhousie University professor emeritus of law Wayne MacKay says these details raise more questions.

“The front-line people were asking for the right thing,” he says. “There needs to be a lot more clarity about what the current rules are, and if they are not adequate, hopefully clear recommendations on how they can be improved.”

That’s something families of those killed have wanted from the beginning. After killing 13 people in Portapique, the gunman massacred nine more people the next day in communities throughout central Nova Scotia. Police apprehended him at a gas station in Enfield, N.S., where he was shot dead.

As for the idea of police calling affected residents to tell them to shelter in place, a lawyer representing many of the families affected questions that tactic.

“That doesn’t seem very practical to me, given the emergency nature of that evening,” says Robert Pineo. “Certainly wasn't a substitute for the Alert Ready system that was there to be used.”