MCC Day 1 - Commissioners’ Remarks and Human Impact Panel

After months of delay, the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC) has begun their public proceedings. The Commissioners and parties were in Halifax at the new Convention Centre, while many family members watched from a viewing site in Truro. I was watching the livestream, which features closed captioning and French-English translation services. It was not a full day. There was about two and a half hours of Commission content in total. For the first hour of the Mass Casualty Commission proceedings, the Commissioners took turns making opening remarks. Notably, there were no opportunity provided to the other participants to make opening remarks, which is consistent with some of the criticism of the Commission that they are overly controlling of information, and of the proceedings more generally. In the afternoon, a spokesperson for the Commission walked everyone through the MCC website contents. The website is quite user-friendly, and so this presentation seemed superfluous. The other part of the afternoon involved a panel, which was called Human Impact. This was a discussion of the mental health impacts of the shootings on the people of the communities affected, as well as beyond that.