May 31, 2021
Members of the Mass Casualty Commission team are planning to visit the Portapique community as part of our fact finding work on Friday, June 4th starting at around 9am. We have reached out to community members to check if there are any concerns with this date.
The group will include several people including members of the Investigations, Legal, Research & Policy, and Community Engagement teams. This visit is meant to help our understanding of the community geography in order to inform our ongoing work to better understand what happened April 18 & 19, 2020 in Nova Scotia. We plan to spend time walking around the roads that make up the Portapique community. Some members of the team may be there most of the day, depending on their role.
We are considered essential workers and are permitted under Nova Scotia’s COVID-19 restrictions to travel for this work. Most people will be travelling individually to ensure physical distancing, and there may be around 10 vehicles. All vehicles will have Nova Scotia license plates, except one from Ontario. We will be following COVID-19 protocols and all of our work will be outdoors. We do not expect to interact with community members, but if anyone wants to talk to us about our work, we can do so in a socially distant and safe way.
At this point, we expect that we will need more than one visit to this community and others, and will let communities know in advance of any visit.
If any member of the community wishes to speak to the Commission in advance please reach out at info@masscasualtycommission.ca or call 902-407-7532 or toll-free 1-833-635-2501.