Maintiens le Droit [Fr, "Uphold the Right"

"[The province's Emergency Management Office] had reached out a number of times throughout the morning to the RCMP [asking for a message to be sent out as an alert]."
Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil

RCMP Chief Superintendent Chris Leather Riley Smith/The Canadian Press

"We were in the process of preparing an alert when the gunman was shot and killed by the RCMP."
"From that initial call, our response was dynamic and fluid, with members using their training to assess what was going on while encountering the unimaginable."
"The original call to the RCMP was to one of our members at headquarters. There was then a series of phone calls that had to be made to find the officer in charge, then speak to the incident commander, have a conversation about the issuing of a message. So a lot of the delay was based on communication between the EMO and the various officers."
"And then a discussion about how the message would be constructed and what it would say. In that hour and a bit of consultation, the subject [Wortman] was killed."
"I would like nothing more than to provide the media and the public with a timeline [of events]. But it literally is still a work in progress [ongoing investigation]. It would be unfair and inappropriate for us to give that out in its current state. [We are still] piecing together the movements [of the gunman]."
Nova Scotia RCMP Chief Supt.Chris Leather

"We can confirm that around 10:30 a.m. there was gunfire at our hall and the gunfire caused considerable damage to our property, including taking one of our trucks out of service."
Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade hall

"They [two young sons of Greg and Jamie Blair] hid in the house until he [the killer] was gone and then they took off to the neighbour's house and hid inside with their two little kids next door until the cops came."
Tyler Blair, Portapique, Nova Scotia

"I knew from the gunshots I heard earlier, something was really wrong and I turned and ran for my life [after discovering his brother's dead body]."
"I'll be traumatized for the rest of my life. I'm having a really hard time with it. [I ran then lay in the woods for four hours] freezing to death [after seeing a flashlight beam pursuing him on the road]."
Clinton Ellison, Portapique, Nova Scotia

RCMP members pack up after the search for Gabriel Wortman in Great Village, Nova Scotia, Canada April 19, 2020. "We have to ensure that whatever happened there, there’s always going to be a better way to do things” source=””

Event:  Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are investigating an active shooter event in Portapique, Nova Scotia, on Sunday, April 19. The public is asked to avoid Portapique Beach Road, Bay Shore Road, Five Houses Road, and the surrounding areas and stay in their homes with doors locked at this time for their safety.  Please follow instructions from local authorities and monitor local media for updates.
Security Alert - U.S.Consulate General, Halifax, Canada, April 19, 2020 

The bureaucrats at the RCMP division in Nova Scotia evidently spent 14 hours working on various draft alerts to go out as a 'red alert' to the public, over a killer on the loose. A killer who left 16 crime scenes, 5 buildings burnt to the ground, several vehicles torched, and 22 dead bodies behind him as he made his way driving through rural communities from seaside Portapique with its 200 residents on to Truro over a 13-hour murder rampage.

As the situation was unfolding, out of Halifax, the U.S.Consulate-General issued an alert of its own, to its U.S.constituency. This, while the RCMP vacillated, engaged in communication glitches, sent out two Twitter alerts to their 100,000 followers, along with a Facebook notice, and failed to issue an emergency alert message that would be transmitted to all cellular phones and television stations throughout the province with the use of a Ready Alert system.

The government's own Emergency Management Office had requested the RCMP to do so on Sunday morning. It was on Saturday evening at around 10:26 pm that the first call for a "possible shooting" in rural Portapique came through to the RCMP and the first of the weekend's murders was discovered. Multiple requests came from the provincial government for an emergency alert message. In the end, the issue solved itself when the force was finally prepared to issue the message only to discover that the mass killer had been apprehended. Shot dead, actually, just before noon.

Most people in the area had no idea that something was happening that could morbidly impact on their lives. Area residents went about their business as usual, with no inkling that they should be sheltering in their homes, because no alert had been issued, although one had been issued a week earlier reminding residents that despite the Easter holidays, a COVID-19 lockdown was in effect. Warned about one stealth killer, but not another.

One woman, a frequent trail-walker, went out with her dog as usual for a walk through nearby forest trails. In her absence, a neighbour, aware of her dedication to walking in the forest, and knowing the situation was dire, called to warn her, but it was too late, she was already out, and became a target for the killing rage of the murderer. And nor was she the only person who met death at the hands of a psychotic killer that day or the next. A man who killed friends, neighbours and strangers with no compunction, from retirees to newlyweds, to long-marrieds, to a teenager killed along with her parents.

With the use of a lookalike RCMP vehicle and a genuine RCMP uniform people seeing him would never have guessed that he was not a protector of the public. RCMP were alerted to his guise by his girlfriend who had been assaulted by him in his cottage after an argument while they were at a social gathering. He had tied her up, left the cottage to begin his murder spree by returning to the social event and shooting dead several acquaintances there before moving on to enter homes and deal in death.

"I feel strongly about that. I do feel if we had received an alert, an Amber Alert, we've had COVID-19 alerts ... then many people might have been spared", said Heather Matthews, a long-time friend of Lillian Hyslop the woman who had gone out for a walk with her dog, innocent of the knowledge that a killer stalked the area.