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.
In a rare departure from his usual deference to powerful member countries, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of COVID-19. The first human cases were identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
A wildfire in Lytton, B.C., during historically high temperatures points to a serious need to prevent similar occurrences, says the chairwoman of the Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the possibility that a freight train could have been linked to the disaster.
Tiff Macklem says the central bank largely expects higher prices right now are temporary and the inflation rate will fall back to the bank's two-per-cent target as the economy opens further.
Evacuation orders affecting more than 1,400 properties are posted for 10 of the 26 fires currently listed by the B.C. Wildfire service as potentially threatening or highly visible.
In a report today, parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux estimates that a one-time tax of three per cent and five per cent on Canadians with net wealth over $10 million and $20 million respectively would yield between $44 billion and $61 billion.
A well-known American advocate of stronger Canada-U.S. ties helped state lawmakers from across the Midwest formally vent their bilateral frustrations Wednesday with an official request that the two countries "immediately" open their shared border to fully vaccinated travellers.
