First, there's a command triangle. The command triangle would go through any request if you were looking at, as in our case, wanting to be more proactive in getting the information out. If in fact it would compromise the integrity of an investigation, the command triangle would say, we can provide the number of weapons, and we can provide the general type. We can't get into makes and models and where they were found. But we can generally talk about this.
That's great, and that's exactly what happened. Nobody was asking for specific information. We were asking for the number of weapons because 22 people had been killed by weapons. So of course everybody wanted to know generally what type of weapons were being used, and that would go through the command triangle. I wouldn't make that information....
We also had a rule for anybody doing media that only the information released first by the RCMP would be talked about publicly.
That would be why for a request like, “Are you going to be talking about the victims or are you releasing names?”, they couldn't talk about the names until we released the names, even if they were out in the media. They couldn't talk about the weapons unless we talked about the weapons.
There was always a back and forth when we were talking about media, and I know the deputy and I were really trying to get the Nova Scotia comms team in a good position to be more proactive and more strategic.