Anatomy of a Cover-up: The Truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia Massacres by Paul Palango

Reviewed by John Oughton

“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” – attributed to Finlay Peter Dunne. Paul Palango’s new book, Anatomy of a Cover-up, a follow-up to his best-selling 22 Murders, reminds us how important – and rare – good investigative journalism is, the kind that uncovers facts and stories that governments, corporations, and bureaucracies would rather keep hidden. Too many news media are now owned by either corporations or billionaires, who control editorial stances and what stories are published. Under Jeff Bezos, current owner of The Washington Post, the Watergate scandal coverage would probably never have appeared.

Although it lacks the narrative drive of the first book, since it follows not the 2020 mass killings in Nova Scotia but the rather less dramatic findings (and lack of them) of the Mass Casualty Commission that evaluated the RCMP’s response, in Anatomy Palango does a masterful job of skimming through the thousands of pages of documents the commission considered and finding his own informants in and outside police forces. He is careful to position his criticisms as not of individual police officers, but rather the command structure and traditions of the RCMP.

It’s worth noting the complexity of policing in rural Nova Scotia, as Palango explains; while urban areas have their own police forces, the Mounties are on contract to provide (often minimal) protection and investigation in less populated areas. This creates a kind of police work patchwork, with no common communication channel shared by the RCMP and city forces – which would have helped reduce the body count and catch a killer like Gabriel Wortman sooner. He moved around north-west Nova Scotia in a number of vehicles, including a reconditioned RCMP car that resembled the real thing. At one point after many killings, he briefly drove through Truro and was caught on surveillance cameras – but no-one sent the Truro police a BOLO (“Be on the lookout”) that this was a possibility.

Overall, Palango finds that the Commission failed to answer or solve many of the conundrums surrounding the police response to Canada’s worst mass killing. Among these are:

1. Wortman was well-known not so much for his denturist practice, but for an active business smuggling guns, drugs, and other contraband across the US border. Yet he was never investigated or charged for this (even though tax returns vs. his spending made it obvious he had clandestine income). Was he protected from prosecution because he was an RCMP confidential informer? This seems possible; he had friends not only in the Mounties but also in biker gangs, the RCMP’s main focus in recent years.

2. His common-law wife, Lisa Banfield, appeared the morning after the killings started, telling police she had escaped his custody and spent a cold night barefoot, hiding in the woods. Yet witnesses noted that she had clean feet, was lightly dressed, and showed no signs of hypothermia. Did she help Wortman, at least at the beginning of his homicidal spree? Both the RCMP and the commission chose to treat her as a domestic abuse victim, and never explored the possibility of her colluding.

3. Both the Mounties and RCMP insisted Wortman had neither a phone nor police radio with him, despite contrary evidence from some witnesses. If the assumption was wrong, would this explain how he so easily dodged police officers and cars in his travels?

4. Why, when the RCMP knew Wortman was driving around an area with few roads, were no blockades with armed officers put in place?

5. Why did the RCMP not warn the public as soon as they had a description of Wortman and his “RCMP” car by using the Alert Ready network that reached all cell phones in the province, but instead relied on the much less-used Twitter service?

6. The RCMP also insisted that they had many officers in the Portapique area warning local people and watching out for Wortman, but several were seen hanging out at a rural fire department, rather than on the roads trying to catch Wortman. Palango points out many inconsistencies in the force’s continually changing timelines of the many killings and arsons.

I could go on. But – while I am neither an investigator nor someone who attended the Commission hearings and read the supporting documents, as Palango did – he makes it clear what a disastrous job the RCMP did to stop the mass killing. The problems with communication, tactics, and leadership meant that not just citizens were at risk -- officers were patrolling on their own with no clue Wortman might be nearby. Constable Chad Morrison was wounded, and Heidi Stevenson was killed. Yet, the force did its best to shut down questions they didn’t want to answer from reporters, withhold (and, Palango thinks, destroy), praise as heroic those officers who were victims of being sent into a free-fire zone with no warning. They also generally covered up and denied, denied, denied to preserve the myth of RCMP infallibility.

Palango writes: “The families of the victims deserve the truth. So do the members of the public, who pay the bills. The story as told by the RCMP, the Mass Casualty Commission, and politicians is full of holes. It doesn’t answer the question about a Big Secret, but all the finagling, subterfuge and loose ends shout that there is one.” If anything could convince RCMP higher-ups and their government overlords that the force needs serious reform, it should be their handling of this terrible mass shooting.

Rather than being characterized as conspiracy theorizing, this book should be on the reading list or provide case studies for Mountie training courses, as well as criminology classes. You don’t have to agree with everything Palango says to recognize the tremendous job he has done digging, summarizing, comparing, and critiquing all the conflicting evidence, and the damning picture he paints of a change-allergic RCMP far too “comfortable” with its current state.

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About the Author

PAUL PALANGO is a veteran investigative journalist. He started his career at the Hamilton Spectator, his hometown newspaper. In 1977, he joined the Globe and Mail as a reporter, and between 1983 and his resignation in 1990, he served successively as its sports editor, Metro editor, and, eventually, national editor. During his tenure at the Globe, Palango’s reporters swept the Centre for Investigative Reporting Awards in five consecutive years. In 1989, he accepted the Michener Award on behalf of the Globe.

About the Reviewer

John Oughton lives in Toronto and has retired as a Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College in Toronto. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Universe and All That (Ekstasis Editions), the mystery novel Death by Triangulation, and over 400 articles, reviews and interviews. John’s studies include an MA in English Literature, where his teachers included Irving Layton, Frank Davey, Eli Mandel and Miriam Waddington, and non-credit courses at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he worked with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs and Robert Duncan. John is a long-time member of the Long Dash Poetry Group. He is also a photographer and guitar player. https://joughton.wixsite.com/author

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Canada

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 10 2025

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1039010121

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1039010123