Commissioned Reports including Technical and Expert Reports will be added here throughout the proceedings, as well as any related source materials.
An important part of the Commission’s work is to explore the causes, context and circumstances giving rise to the mass casualty. To support this work, the Commission has commissioned both Technical Reports and Expert Reports. The sharing of Commissioned Reports prepared by independent report writers will help the Commission to better understand the related issues in the mandate. These reports focus on key government and policy structures, as well as, academic research and lessons learned from previous mass casualties.
See the list of reports to expect.
For a schedule of proceedings including details on when Commissioned Reports are being presented, visit our calendar.
Expert and Technical Reports
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Structure of Policing in Nova Scotia
Technical Report
Author: Barry MacKnight
This report will explain the structure of police services in Nova Scotia. It will provide a snapshot of how policing was structured and resourced to function in April 2020, including the role of the RCMP and municipal police services. The report will explain the role of other government agencies such as Canada Border Services Agency and the Criminal Intelligence Service Nova Scotia. It will also look into governance and oversight, operations, resource allocation, and strategic planning, integrated policing and information sharing.View Document (PDF 227 MB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0040450 -
Communication Interoperability and the Alert Ready System
Technical Report
Authors: Chris Davis, Cheryl McNeil & Peter Gamble
This report will explain the Canadian Communications Interoperability Continuum and the Alert Ready system as it has been designed and implemented. Specifically, the report will explain what communications interoperability means, how efforts to pursue communications interoperability are governed, and how interoperability systems are designed in Canada. In addition, the report will describe Alert Ready, explain how it works, how it is governed and designed, as well as its capabilities and limitations.View Document (PDF 881 KB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0055672 -
Mass Shootings and Masculinity
Expert Report
Authors: Tristan Bridges & Tara Leigh Tober
This report will explain what constitutes a mass casualty event. It will also evaluate the published research about other mass casualty events by identifying gaps within the scholarly and policy literature. The authors will describe their work to establish a register of mass shootings in the United States of America and their own research on mass casualty events, including research into the relationship between masculinity and mass violence.View Document (PDF 573 KB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0055671 -
Understanding the Links between Gender-Based Violence and Mass Casualty Attacks: Private Violence and Misogyny as Public Risk
Expert Report
Authors: Professor Jude McCulloch & Professor JaneMaree Maher
This report will explore the relationship between mass casualty events, family violence and gender-based violence. It will describe trends within research and policy with respect to these kinds of violence, and explain how expertise in family violence and gender-based violence may help researchers and policy actors to better understand, prepare for, identify warning signs for, and respond to mass casualty events. The authors will also attend to research that documents how other forms of inequality and marginalization such as Islamaphobia and racism, are also implicated in the perpetration of mass casualty events.View Document (PDF 451 KB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0053826 -
Police Culture: Origins, Features, and Reform
Expert Report
Author: Dr Bethan Loftus
This report will describe key research conclusions about police culture and efforts to effect change to police culture. The report will explain the methodology of ethnography, and set out the value of ethnography to policing research. The author will supply a definition of the phrase “police culture” and explain the key components of police culture, to the extent that these emerge from research over time. The report will identify some standard strategies used by police services to change aspects of their culture, the success and failures of these strategies, and explain what research suggests about why these strategies are successful or unsuccessful. Where possible, the report will address attempts to influence police culture with respect to family violence, gender-based violence, and the provision of equitable policing services to racialized groups, and the success and failures of these initiatives.View Document (PDF 635 KB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0053825 -
Crime Prevention & Community Safety in Rural Communities
Expert Report
Author: Professor Karen Foster
This report will address crime prevention and community safety in rural communities. This author will explain the concept of urban bias in policy making, and how this concept applies to crime prevention and community safety in rural communities. The report will describe how responsibility for rural crime prevention and community safety is effectively delegated to municipal and local governments and civil society and the resource implications of this allocation for those communities. Community resilience within rural communities will also be considered.View Document (PDF 453 KB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0053824 -
The History of Gun Control in Canada
Expert Report
Author: Dr. R. Blake Brown
This report will provide a legal history of firearms regulation in Canada. The report will explain the strategies that have been used to address the dangers associated with firearms (in particular semi-automatic long guns) and address the debates that have played out within Canadian public policy about these strategies. This report will address the enforcement of firearms regulation and the smuggling and illegal trafficking of firearms and associated paraphernalia. Where possible, the author will identify the strength and shortcomings of past legislative approaches and of plausible alternative approaches. Where possible, the report will identify what (kinds of) weapons have been implicated in mass casualty events in Canada, with reference to specific examples and the legislative or policy response, if any, to these events.View Document (PDF 1 MB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0053823 -
Survivors and the Aftermath of the Terrorist Attack on Utøya Island, Norway
Expert Report
Authors: Professor Grete Dyb, Dr Kristin Alve Glad, Ingebjørg Lingaas & Dr Synne Øien Stensland
This report will describe the key research findings that emerge from the authors’ research and that of others into the psychiatric and social impacts of surviving a mass casualty on survivors and families, with a particular focus on the research and findings that emerge from the Utøya mass casualty event and its aftermath. The report will describe the immediate, medium term and long term supports offered to survivors of Utøya and their families, and the gaps that the researchers’ studies have identified in those supports, identify the supports needed by survivors and families of victims of mass casualty events and the timescale on which these supports are necessary, and share insights or recommendations emerging from their research about how institutions and communities can prepare for and respond well to mass casualty events when they occur and in the medium- and long-term after such events.View Document (PDF 582 KB)
Published:
Document ID: COMM0053822
Commissioned Report Source Material
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