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.
Ten days of trial dates were set during a brief, virtual courtroom hearing this morning, three months after military police charged the former Canadian Armed Forces commander following a sexual misconduct investigation.
The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat says 240,000 employees have filed their attestations of their vaccine status to the government, out of approximately 268,000.
The committee now recommends mRNA boosters to people who received two doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, adults over the age of 70, front-line health-care workers with a short interval between their first two doses, and people from First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities.
The office of New York congressman Brian Higgins says U.S. Customs and Border Protection won't be requiring a negative COVID-19 test for fully vaccinated travellers in order to cross the land border with Canada.
Speaking while on a trip to the Netherlands ahead of back-to-back international summits, he says ministers are working this morning in Ottawa to meet a deadline to decide whether to appeal the Federal Court ruling that upheld two historic decisions from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
In Spring of 2021, the Surrey RCMP Drug Unit initiated an investigation into a drug trafficking network with ties to the Lower Mainland Gang Conflict. Through an extensive investigation, three residences in the Whalley area were identified as locations of interest.
