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.
David Shearing, who now goes by the name David Ennis, shot and killed George and Edith Bentley; their daughter, Jackie; and her husband, Bob Johnson, while the family was on a camping trip in the Clearwater Valley near Wells Gray Provincial Park, about 120 kilometres north of Kamloops, B.C., in 1982.
The country's headline inflation figure registered an annual increase of 4.1 per cent in August, fuelled by rising demand as more parts of the economy reopened amid supply-chain constraints for many goods.
The company says it has signed a $90-million, five-year contract with Emergent Biosolutions to make part of the drug substance, and also to fill and finish the vaccine, at its Winnipeg manufacturing plant.
The Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, a group that provides guidance to the province on the pandemic, said the post-COVID-19 symptoms affect about 10 per cent of those infected and can last from weeks to months.
A lawyer for Teal Cedar Products Ltd. told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that the protests against logging are becoming more sophisticated, organized and dangerous and “anarchy” will result if the extension is not granted until September 2022.
Health Minister Adrian Dix says the aim is to get more health-care workers to move to the north and stay there as many parts of the country experience a shortage of nurses in particular.
