Ottawa, June 24 (IANS) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has denied meddling in an investigation into the 2020 mass shooting, the worst the country's history.
Brenda Lucki, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), has been accused of pressuring local officers to help advance Trudeau's gun control plans, the BBC quoted the Halifax Examiner as saying, which was the first to report on the development.
According to the Halifax Examiner, the accusation stemmed from notes made by a local RCMP officer, released as part of a public investigation into the mass shooting on April 18-19, 2020, during which a gunman posing as a police officer killed 22 people in Nova Scotia.
The suspect died in a stand-off with police.
Addressing reporters on Thursday, Trudeau said that his government "did not put any undo influence or pressure" on police.
"It is extremely important to highlight that it is only the RCMP, it is only police that determine what and when to release information," the BBC quoted the Prime Minister as saying.
Denying the accusations, Commissioner Lucki said in a statement released on Tuesday that information sharing between the federal government and police is normal during a high-profile event such as a mass shooting.
The RCMP chief however acknowledged that she "should have been more sensitive" in her approach.
Canada's opposition Conservative Party has called for a debate in the House of Commons, and a parliamentary committee voted on Thursday to hold a hearing into the matter.
In the wake of the deadliest rampage in Canadian history, Prime Minister Trudeau in May 2020 announced an immediate ban on the sale, transportation, importation, or use of some 1,500 makes and models of "military-grade assault-style" weapons.
The new survey says 743 homicides were reported by Canadian police in 2020 — a figure that was the most since 1991 and includes the 22 victims of a gunman's rampage that began in Portapique, N.S., in April of last year.
Freeland was responding today to criticism in the House of Commons from Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong who said the Liberal government is not being effective against a series of protectionist trade measures by the Biden administration.
The flooding hit on Nov. 15, with a subsequent mudslide wiping out the highway and destroying or damaging dozens of properties in the area. B.C.'s Ministry of Transportation did not return an immediate request for comment on an estimate on how long repairs to the highway would take.
Amita Kuttner, an expert in black holes, was appointed Wednesday by the Greens' Federal Council to lead the party until a new leader is elected next year. Kuttner, 30, will be the youngest person as well as the first trans person and person of east-Asian descent to lead a federal political party.
The research, conducted by Natural Resources Canada and published Thursday in the journal Nature, says rising temperatures and falling humidity are the biggest drivers of the change.
Over five weeks, the PBO costed 130 proposals from four parties and published 72 of them, marking a faster pace than the 216 requests and 115 that were published in 2019 between June 24 and election day on Oct. 21 of that year.
