If there was ever a moment for Premier Stephen McNeil’s siren call to “Stay the blazes home,” it was Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Lock your blazes doors and close your blazes windows.
That is the message Nova Scotians should have heard on the emergency alert system.
Yes, hearing that message screeching on cell phones would have scared the dickens out of us, like it did on Easter weekend.
But we should have been frightened. There was a maniac on the loose, armed and dangerous.
People needed to know. Not everyone did.
Kristen Beaton went to work. Lillian Hyslop went out for her morning walk. Neither knew. Both died.
That the premier and the RCMP failed to escalate this message to the emergency alert system makes this tragedy worse because if people had known, they might not have lost their lives.
RCMP were composing the emergency message when the shooter was killed around 11:26 a.m. on Sunday. If they’d sent it out at, say, 7 a.m., things might have been different for Beaton and Hyslop.
So why?
And yes, we do have a right to ask and to know, even now when the hell is still fresh.
The RCMP and the provincial government have not exactly been forthcoming. The messages have been mixed and confusing.
At first, RCMP Chief Supt. Chris Leather said he thought there was an “amber alert” sent out. Later, he said he couldn’t explain why an alert had not been sent. And after that, he said Twitter was the best way to reach Nova Scotians because thousands follow the RCMP.
But how many people in rural Nova Scotia don’t have Twitter accounts or weren’t looking? How many people in rural Nova Scotia don’t even have stable internet?
And I don’t accept the premier’s explanation that he did not trigger the emergency alert because he was not asked.
Seriously? He needs to be asked? That’s his reason?
The RCMP is a federal agency, but it is under contract to the province of Nova Scotia to provide policing services. If that doesn’t give the premier the authority to jump the normal protocols for emergency alerts, I don’t know what would.
I understand the “fog of war” mentality of the Boots on the Ground in the hours when a madman was on the loose, shooting people and setting houses on fire. They barely knew what they were up against and were making decisions on the fly in the midst of chaos and horror.
This is not a criticism of the Boots on the Ground. They are the heroes in this story.
But there were others in authority — the Boots Upstairs — who were away from those crime scenes, in the safety of their homes and offices, and watching events unravel.
These Boots Upstairs knew that some Nova Scotians were in serious danger. They had the power to warn us with an emergency alert.
They didn’t.
On Friday, RCMP explained they didn’t use the emergency alert earlier in the day because they believed the situation was contained in Portapique, even though they had not found or arrested the shooter. They didn’t explain why that decision was upheld when 911 calls came in from other parts of the province.
The RCMP lost one of its own in the line of duty. They are also traumatized and should be supported. On Friday, we were wearing red to honour the victims of the rampage.
This massacre took 22 innocent lives. Mothers, sons, uncles, friends, daughters, an unborn baby. The terror was real, the tragedy unspeakable, lives forever altered.
The journey of the living is now just beginning and will continue for a lifetime. This has shaken all Nova Scotians to the bone. We will never get over it.
We deserved an emergency alert on Saturday night and Sunday morning. And now, we deserve to know why it didn’t happen.
