Nova Scotians understand the power of the ocean. Can they now turn a tide, in the wake of a gunman’s evil?

Open this photo in gallery:

Alexander MacLeod’s latest book is the short story collection Animal Person.

The building in which the worst mass shooter in Canadian history once ran his Atlantic Denture Clinic is located about a five-minute walk from my house. Or, to be more accurate, the demolition site where Gabriel Wortman’s office and home once stood remains very close to where I live today. It is a crater now, almost a blast zone, and its conspicuous absence has opened up a strange void on the street.

I think they tore the building down last year because the community was trying, at least symbolically, to erase the traumatic memories of the 13 hours of killing that Mr. Wortman inflicted on Nova Scotia between April 18 and 19, 2020. But I’m not sure if the plan is working. Bulldozers and wrecking balls can only do so much. The haunting presence of this man and the story of what he did are going to linger here, and across the province, for a very long time.

Certainly, it’s hard to forget the old sign that used to emerge from a corner of the clinic’s roof and hang over the sidewalk: a lurid, almost surreal mouth, four feet wide and eight feet long, just pink gums and bared teeth, next to an unsettling smile plastered on another wall. I remember, too, how the asphalt of the little parking lot always seemed freshly poured – extra black and oily – and how there would usually be a police car parked outside. What kind of place is this? I used to wonder. And what exactly is going on?

Now everyone knows.

Open this photo in gallery:

The Mass Casualty Commission’s 3,000-plus-page report was released last week, and it contains all the essential details, timelines and testimonies. The arsenal of deadly weaponry Mr. Wortman shuttled back and forth between Dartmouth, N.S, and his luxury “cottage” in the village of Portapique; the massive amounts of money, toted around in cash-stuffed hockey bags; the long history of violence, sexual assault, domestic abuse and general intimidation. How he once beat up a 15-year-old who was waiting for the bus outside his clinic. Or how he allegedly tackled a patient who owed him money, ripped the dentures straight out of his head, then stuffed the guy’s face with dirty snow. How he threatened to kill his parents, menaced his friends and relatives, and tortured his spouse, Lisa Banfield, for nearly two decades before killing 22 people.

There were warning signs everywhere: at least two formal police investigations, one assault charge, dozens of complaints and at least 16 home visits by officers. Gabriel Wortman was a sewer of the most toxic masculinity you could possibly distill, but his filth kept seeping straight into our shared ecosystem, and no official action was ever taken to stop this behaviour.

This is a major finding in the report, difficult to read, but harder to accept: “Over many years, the perpetrator’s pattern of violent and intimidating behaviours and illegal acquisition of firearms gave rise to numerous red flags and missed opportunities for prevention and intervention.”

Yes, of course, he was known to police – very, very well known. And they, in turn, were even more obsessively known by him.

Mr. Wortman fetishized the RCMP, collecting memorabilia, dressing up in uniform and restoring cruisers in his spare time. When he was a child, he’d said he wanted to be a police officer when he grew up, but as an adult, he boasted that he wanted to “kill a cop.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Open this photo in gallery:

Mr. Wortman’s dissociated relationship with law enforcement – and what this reveals about the precarious nature of our most basic ideals of community trust and safety – lies at the molten core of this story. His actions, and the RCMP’s reaction and inactions, fundamentally blurred the lines between good and bad, and this confusion had deadly consequences.

Think about it for a second: What is a person supposed to do when the exact vehicles, uniforms, symbols and subjects normally associated with peace and order are instead being used for murder, chaos and anarchy? If that key meridian dissolves, even for just a few hours, how can we re-establish it in time to protect us for the next crisis?

The critical ambiguity between law and crime was there right from the very first 911 call the RCMP received at 10:01 p.m. on April 18.

In the moments before she was killed in her Portapique home, Jamie Blair identified Mr. Wortman by first name and told the operator about his car: “It’s decked and labelled ‘RCMP’ … but it’s not a police officer.” The RCMP knew this essential fact, and yet, inexcusably, it failed to broadcast this potentially life-saving information to the community until 12 hours later.

Twenty-one people died after that first call was made. This makes it impossible to deny the gruesome reversal at the heart of this case: On that night in April, we had a criminal acting like a police officer, and a police system acting with a seemingly criminal degree of incompetence.

There are dozens of other findings in the report that support this line of argument, from the beginning all the way through to its terrible aftermath. Even now, its authors observe: “More than two years after the event, RCMP leadership had done very little to systematically evaluate its critical incident response to the deadliest mass shooting in Canada’s history.”

Open this photo in gallery:

But what are we going to do with this unacceptable information? And where will we send this document, in the end? After everything, must we still rely on the police to police themselves?

If you watched the news conference held to mark the release of the report last week, a disturbing trend emerged. Though the exhausted families of the victims were all still there, waiting for answers and ready to talk to reporters, nearly every single individual who was responsible for the RCMP’s chain of command in Nova Scotia in 2020 was absent; they had “moved on” to retirement or “other duties” or different positions within the organization’s massive bureaucracy.

This efficient bit of human-resource shuffling conveniently left no one behind to officially answer for the police’s role in these events.

Even more chilling, the new people – interim RCMP commissioner Michael Duheme and Dennis Daley, commanding officer of the Nova Scotia RCMP – both admitted at the time that they had not read the report yet, nor even its executive summary.

This is a frustratingly effective tactic for managing difficult conversations. How can we communicate with the institutions that run our lives if they practice such strategic silence?

It’s like addressing your questions to the void where a building used to stand.

Open this photo in gallery:

Open this photo in gallery:

Nova Scotia is a small province, relatively speaking, but so much has happened here – and a lot of our geography is soaked in the intergenerational trauma of our difficult history.

The Shubenacadie residential school does not exist any more, physically, and the fields of Grand Pre no longer pulse with Acadian life. Africville was bulldozed from the map of Halifax, and the explosions that collapsed the mines of Westray, Spring Hill and New Waterford still reverberate. We have cemeteries that hold the bodies of the passengers of the Titanic, and our Remembrance Days are still massive affairs, with people of all ages gathered together in whatever weather November wants to offer. And though you can’t see it, under the ocean in the middle of Halifax Harbour, not far from where I live, there is another massive crater – this one from 1917, when one boat, loaded with explosives, collided with another and shattered every pane of glass, and every life in the city. We live in the present, but the past is never that far away.

In one part of the province, a denture clinic falls; in another, a different structure rises. Right now, in Portapique, they are busy building a new community centre, set to open in the fall. The facility will host “dances, weddings, and other community events such as children’s programs, and yoga.” There will be a nice outdoor space for barbecues, music and summer festivals. It seems only fitting that the new building will be erected where the old Portapique Community Hall once stood for almost 200 years, near Cobequid Bay, where the Fundy tides, the strongest in the world, keep flowing continuously back and forth, independent and unfeeling, twice a day, to infinity.

I know the authors of the Mass Casualty Commission were reaching for this familiar powerful metaphor when they decided to title their report “Turning the Tide Together.” That’s a nice phrase, and we can all understand what they were aiming for: a sense of collective purpose and action that might allow us to make the drastic necessary changes we require in our policing, justice and social-service systems.

In theory, I support this plan entirely. But in practice, anyone who has ever lived in this part of the world knows that when the moon pulls the ocean in one way or the other, no amount of trying can ever really turn that rushing water to our preferred direction. That is simply not possible: not in nature, and not against the wave of human evil that Gabriel Wortman unleashed upon us.

Instead, as the Mass Casualty Commission’s enormous report shows us, all we can do is try to come to terms with this profoundly compromised reality. Shaped by our shared experience, and working with a new kind of disciplined vigilance, we hope to ensure that a thing that never happened before cannot happen again.

We don’t get to choose the hardest truths that structure our lives. But like the people of Portapique, we have to live with them, and somehow find a way to keep going. And if we cannot turn a tide together, we will at least turn the pages of this report, read deeply, and do our best to move forward.

Nova Scotia shootings: More from The Globe and Mail

The Decibel podcast

In depth

Five takeaways from the Mass Casualty Commission's report

N.S. families find optimism, disappointment in commission report

Three years after Portapique’s tragedy, the community rebuilds

Justin Ling: The RCMP must change, or die