GUYSBOROUGH: With a year hiatus from his law practice, Adam Rodgers is taking the time to try and help Nova Scotians hold the commission investigating April 2020’s mass shooting rampage accountable.
The Guysborough-based attorney, whose license has been suspended until October over failing to spot misdeeds by his former law partner, is pouring over documents, monitoring the live-streamed public hearings, and sharing his analysis in regular blog and YouTube posts.
Rodgers is concerned about the unwieldy amount of information produced by the independent Mass Casualty Commission that people are trying to digest.
“The public input into an inquiry is so important. There are legal elements to an inquiry but there’s also political elements,” he said in an interview with Advocate Media. “No matter what comes out of this inquiry, it will depend on the willingness or the inclination of the public to keep the pressure on political leaders to make whatever changes are recommended in order for change to actually happen.”
He wonders if the information overload will mean some theories about the killer will be left unexplored.
“Sometimes you overwhelm people with information and hope they miss a few things,” he said.
Some of those ideas, considered conspiracy theories by some, include the killer’s potential ties to the RCMP with suggestions he was an informant and had biker connections from the Hells Angels and a drug cartel.
“The mass casualty commission doesn’t seem to be delving into those things,” said Rodgers. “But there’s so much information, the public doesn’t seem to be clamouring for whatever may be missing. I know some of the family members are interested.”
Some of the details are in a new book on the massacre by former Globe & Mail investigative journalist Paul Palango, who retired to Nova Scotia and ended up reporting those details on the tragedy.
Rodgers said the commission’s trauma-informed approach seems to be leading to a lack of uniformity in questioning depending on the nature of the witness on the stand.
“You look at police witnesses versus civilians and it seems like the civilians are being grilled and the police are being handled with kid gloves,” he said. “It comes down the trauma-informed mandate that the commission is trying to fulfill, and I really don’t think they’ve figured out yet how to do that properly.”
He added that RCMP witnesses speaking at the hearings so far only include those who performed their duties appropriately, not ones who might have made missteps that enabled the shooter to flee Portapique, where he began the massacre, and continue his killing spree the next day. “Just the fact of who they’ve chosen to question is another issue,” he said.
Like many family members of the victims, Rodgers would like to see more live testimony with an opportunity for cross examination, instead of exhaustive presentations on foundational documents based on private interviews and investigating by the commission before the hearings began.
Rodgers said he isn’t expecting much from the interim report the Mass Casualty Commission had to file with the provincial and federal governments on May 1.
“I think the casualty commission is trying to foster low expectations,” he said. “They said there aren’t going to be any recommendations in the report. I would expect there’s only going to be a preliminary view of the facts because we really don’t have the full evidence yet.”