The family of a woman shot by an officer in Edmonton during a wellness check says her death was unnecessary, as the number of police shootings across Canada show little sign of relenting over the past four years.
“I see my daughter’s death as being a result of a complete mishandling of the tools available to law enforcement in the application of dealing with mental health issues,” the family of the woman, who has not been publicly identified, says in a statement from their lawyer, Tom Engel.
Edmonton police have said officers were called for a welfare check earlier this month. There were risks the woman may harm herself, so police say officers entered the apartment, there was a confrontation and the woman was shot.
Family says that had the police approach been gradual and gentle, she would have understood the nature of the visit and would still be alive.
A tally compiled by The Canadian Press found police shot at 85 people in Canada between Jan. 1 and Dec. 15 — 41 fatally. It was based on available information from police, independent investigative units and reporting from The Canadian Press.
“This is a spectacularly unrelenting phenomenon,” says Temitope Oriola, a professor of criminology at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Sociological Association.
This year, the number of police shootings has nearly matched the total from 2022, when 94 people were shot at, 50 fatally. It remains a significant increase from four years ago, when there were 61 shootings, 38 of which were fatal.
The resulting snapshot shows more officers firing their guns since 2020, when the high-profile murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis spurred global movements urging police accountability and transparency. Criminologists say officers need more training and restraint, while the RCMP union says police have been forced to the front lines of Canada’s mental health crisis and face increasingly dangerous situations.
“No cop that I have ever dealt with wants to go down this road,” says Brian Sauve, president of the National Police Federation, which represents about 20,000 Mounties across Canada.
“And every one of them is impacted momentously by the fact that they’ve had to discharge their weapon.”
Officers have the right to safety, Oriola says, but police shootings in Canada have been trending upward for too many years. Oriola says he is particularly concerned about the number of shootings in Alberta.
“We should not be leading the country in terms of police shootings,” he says.
This year, Alberta saw 21 police shootings — a rate of 0.45 per 100,000 people — marking a 90 per cent increase from 2020, when there were 11.
There were 28 police shootings in Ontario — a rate of 0.18 per 100,000 people — up from 23 the year before. There were nine in Quebec.
All Atlantic Canada saw six police shootings, up from two the year before.
There were 17 shootings in British Columbia, down from 24 in 2022. Saskatchewan and Manitoba also saw decreases.
There has been at least two shootings this month that are not included in the tally. A man was killed on the Red Earth Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. A man was also injured in a shooting in Grande Prairie, Alta.
Young men continue to make up the majority of people shot by police. Race was identified in 18 cases and more than 60 per cent of those were Indigenous, Black or other people of colour.
The original 911 calls mainly involved a weapon, stolen vehicle or erratic driving. Six involved an active shooting.
In nearly 70 per cent of the police shootings, the person had a weapon. In 30 cases, it was a firearm or replica gun. In 20 cases, the person had a knife or other bladed weapon.
Sauve says police shootings in Canada remain rare compared to many other countries, but increasingly officers are encountering people with weapons. When there are guns or knives, he says, police must respond differently.
“Sometimes it’s Justin Bourque,” Sauve says, referring to the man who killed three Mounties in Moncton in 2014.
This year, three officers were killed in situations where they fired their weapons at someone. Another officer was shot and injured.
Sauve says police interactions have also become more confrontational, because there’s been an increase in the “general disrespect for anyone in authority, whether that’s a bylaw officer giving a parking ticket or whether that’s a police officer trying to defuse and de-escalate” a situation.
Due to pressures on overburdened social programs, Sauve says officers are also being relied on to respond to mental health crises and issues with homelessness.
Six shootings started as a call about a public disturbance, five for an unwanted person and another six were wellness checks.
Officers must make split-second decisions, Sauve says, adding the average gunfight is over in under three seconds.
Vancouver police were called to Granville Street Bridge in February because it looked as though a man, draped in a blanket, was going to kill himself.
An officer called out to the man and his demeanour changed, the Independent Investigations Office of British Columbia said in its report. The man pulled out a knife and one officer unsuccessfully used a stun gun twice, the report said. A second officer fired their gun.
The man died.
Later that month, Vancouver city council approved $2.8 million in funding for mental health services, including hiring additional mental health nurses to be teamed with police.
Sauve says these types of partnerships are becoming increasingly important, but there isn’t funding to have them deployed across the country.
He supports additional training, access to less-than-lethal weapons and better technology for police. But, Sauve adds, long-term solutions lie in a societal response to homelessness, addictions and health care.
Oriola says there are clear changes that could happen, but policing remains “incredibly resistant to change” even as calls for reform grow.
“We should not be having the sheer volume of shootings we currently have and certainly not the degree of fatality that we are seeing.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 30, 2023.
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
