A look at six inquiries carried out in Nova Scotia

By Michael Lightstone

After much public pressure, the federal government in July announced a public inquiry will be held into the shooting rampage in Nova Scotia earlier this year.
 
A 13-hour killing spree last April resulted in the deaths of 22 people in various rural communities. Police said the calamity, which included other criminal activity, was spread over 16 crime scenes.
 
Nova Scotia has had several government-ordered inquiries, dating back to the 1980s, that have probed such tragedies as the death in custody of a mentally-ill man and wrongful conviction and imprisonment of a young Indigenous man who’d been victimized by racism in the province’s justice system.
 
The most recent formal probe – a fatality inquiry launched under the province’s Fatalities Investigation Act – examining multiple deaths in Nova Scotia is still going on, although the coronavirus pandemic has postponed the next stage. It’s investigating the circumstances surrounding the murder-suicide involving a former Canadian Forces soldier with mental-health issues and three close relatives.
 
Jennifer Stairs, director of communications for the Nova Scotia Judiciary, said a public inquiry is different than a fatality inquiry. It is governed by a separate piece of legislation, the province’s Public Inquiries Act.
 
“Public inquiries are called . . . whenever it is deemed expedient to look into a public matter in relation to which the legislature may make laws. Public inquiries traditionally focus on uncovering facts and can make findings of legal responsibility,” she told HalifaxToday.ca Tuesday.
 
Stairs said a fatality inquiry “follows an investigation by a medical examiner.”
 
Such an inquiry “may be recommended by the chief medical examiner or the justice minister may call one on their own if it is determined one is needed in the public interest or the interest of public safety,” she said via email. The review and conclusion, said Stairs, “shall not contain any findings of misconduct.”
 
“These are different types of proceedings with different results,” she said.
 
Not every inquiry session is held openly in front of participants, other attendees and reporters. For example, the Ontario judge who led the 2000-01 look into tainted water in Walkerton, Ont., began that 10-month process with hearings with local residents about the impact the drinking-water contamination had on them and their community.
 
“Those affected could choose to meet with me privately, and a number did so,” Dennis R. O’Connor once told a conference in Halifax.
 
An inquiry should end, he said, when its commissioners deliver their report to government, and they must not be involved in dealing with the recommendations. “Implementation of a commission report is a matter for the political process,” O’Connor said.
 
He said historically, this country has been “a very heavy user of public inquiries.”
 
“The crisis that leads to an inquiry often demands a response that is public, specific about the past, comprehensive about the future and also cost-efficient and speedy,” O’Connor told the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s annual conference here in 2007.
 
History has also shown what the government of the day chooses to do with an inquiry’s recommendations is another issue.
  
Here’s a look at six inquiries carried out in Nova Scotia.
 
** A fatality inquiry is currently investigating the 2017 deaths, in Upper Big Tracadie, of Lionel Desmond, a former soldier and an Afghan war veteran with emotional problems, his daughter, Aaliyah, wife, Shanna, and mother Brenda. He shot them at the family’s home before taking his own life. The inquiry’s mandate “is to determine the circumstances under which these deaths occurred, as well as some specific issues, including, but not limited to whether Lionel Desmond and his family had access to the appropriate mental health and domestic violence intervention services leading up to their deaths,” its website says. According to Stairs, the inquiry will resume when it’s decided proceedings can continue safely, keeping in mind public-health protocols linked to COVID-19. To date, expenses total approximately $1.4 million.
 
** The restorative inquiry into past abuse at the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children wrapped up last November with the release of a final report. Videos and progress reports have been produced for the public to see, and press conferences were held, but not all of the $4.5-million inquiry’s work was done in public. Many abuse survivors preferred to tell their stories behind closed doors, away from reporters and photojournalists. This investigation was overseen by a council of parties that included former residents of the home. The inquiry’s last report recommended a multi-member children and youth commission be set up in Nova Scotia, an independent agency that would act as a child-welfare and an advocacy body supporting youngsters and their families.
 
** The fatality inquiry that looked at the 2007 death in custody of Howard Hyde, a mentally-ill man who was detained in a provincial jail, was presided over by a sitting judge who concluded in 2010 he’d died accidentally after a struggle with corrections officers. Before he died, Hyde had been stunned multiple times with a Taser inside the headquarters of Halifax Regional Police during a scuffle with officers. “What Mr. Hyde needed . . . were better options from the mental health and criminal justice systems,” the inquiry’s report said. The 11-month, $600,000 inquiry prompted the provincial government in 2011 to release this report.
 
** A public inquiry investigated the 2004 car crash that claimed the life of a Halifax teacher’s aide. It examined events contributing to Theresa McEvoy’s death, and heard testimony from 47 sworn witnesses. About 12,000 pages of documents were filed as exhibits. McEvoy was killed in the crash by a young offender driving a stolen car at a high rate of speed. (Two days earlier, the youth had been released from custody although he was facing 38 criminal charges.) The $1.5-million inquiry made recommendations, released in 2006, on improving Nova Scotia’s youth-court system and strengthening laws governing teens awaiting trial.
 
** The 1997 report from the inquiry into the 1992 Westray mine explosion in Pictou County spread blame for the disaster around – including inside the worker-safety division of the province’s labour department. Twenty-six coal miners underground at the time of the methane-coal dust blast were killed. The mine had been open for eight months. The public inquiry, which cost about $5 million, concluded the Westray disaster resulted from a “complex mosaic of actions, omissions, mistakes, incompetence, apathy, cynicism, stupidity and neglect.” The federal government’s Westray Law came into being in 2004.
 
** A royal commission decades ago probed the prosecution of the late Donald Marshall Jr., who spent 11 years behind bars for a murder in 1971 in Sydney he didn’t do. The Mi’kmaw man from Cape Breton was a victim of systemic racism, findings from the commission’s seven-volume report, released in 1989, said. “If Marshall had been white, the investigation would have taken a different course,” it said. The inquiry into this miscarriage of justice collected 16,390 pages of transcript evidence provided by 113 witnesses during 93 days of public hearings in Sydney and Halifax in 1987-88. More than 80 recommendations were made. Marshall died in 2009 at age 55. (One of the Marshall inquiry’s recommendations was for the provincial government to revisit
the subject of redress. In 1990, a separate commission of inquiry “concerning the adequacy of compensation paid” to Marshall was held to address the fairness of the original amount: $270,000. Public and closed-door hearings were held, and a report was released.
 
Michael Lightstone is a freelance reporter living in Dartmouth

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