As lockdown lingers, a rural reckoning with domestic violence

Before he perpetrated the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history, the gunman had allegedly inflicted something lamentably more mundane: violence against his partner.

And if Nova Scotia was shocked by the 13-hour rampage through its rural hinterland that resulted in 23 deaths, including the gunman’s, in the middle of a global pandemic, it was less startled when a former neighbor of the gunman in Portapique told the media he had a history of domestic abuse.

That included one incident that she says she reported to police in 2013, in which he is alleged to have beaten and strangled his female partner before three male witnesses. It was not the first incident to be “whispered about” yet not confronted.

“I think sometimes in rural Nova Scotia, there is this culture of not speaking out, of minding your own business, not rocking the boat,” says Johannah Black, the bystander intervention program coordinator with the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre, a women’s shelter serving

“In a room full of people, and they all turned away”Silence amid the pandemic“You can come and live with us, now”