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We’ve written previously about the 12-year-old girl who’s in B.C. Children’s Hospital after being wounded in the shooting at school.

In response to what’s happening in Tumbler Ridge, the health authority in northern B.C. Says a free, twice-daily shuttle between Fort St. John and Tumbler Ridge will be made available for patients accessing services and for health authority staff travelling between communities. 

Fort St. John is about 124 kilometres north of Tumbler Ridge — a two-hour drive. 

The bus can take up to 25 passengers, is wheelchair accessible and has a washroom on board.

The first bus from Fort St. John into Tumbler Ridge left at 3 a.m. MT today, according to Northern Health. 

Just a few weeks ago, Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka expressed concerns about available ambulances.

A second one was stationed in the community to take patients needing care outside the local emergency department's hours to the closest hospital. But B.C. Emergency Health Services data shows those two ambulances are not always staffed. 

From September to December, shifts for one ambulance were filled 92 per cent of the time, while shifts for the second were filled 83 per cent of the time.

"That means there's days that we don't have an ambulance or we don't have a second ambulance," Krakowka says.

Emergency health care is quite limited in Tumbler Ridge — the emergency department is only open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. To 5 p.m. 

It's something residents have been critical of in recent months as the community struggles with a lack of health-care professionals overall.

We just finished an interview with Quebec MP Nathalie Provost, Carney's secretary of state for nature and a survivor of the 1989 École Polytechnique mass shooting.

Provost told host Catherine Cullen that Tumbler Ridge survivors "need a place to cry" and express "incomprehensible" feelings.

"If I would be with them, I would just stand there as an adult capable to receive [those feelings]. And they will need it now, but they will need it for a long period of time.

"What I remember vividly right after the [École Polytechnique shooting] and in the two, three years after was waves. It's big, big waves that just gently over time calm down. But at the beginning, it's a tornado — it's crazy."

Asked for her thoughts on information the RCMP has shared in the Tumbler Ridge case — including the shooter's history of mental health problems and the guns found at the scene — Provost said, "I know we will have to go to that discussion. For me, it's a bit soon."

Even if the RCMP does find a suicide note from the shooter, a motive that could provide any peace to the victims, the families or the community may never be determined, Benson-Podolchuk says.

She repeats that you just never know who will snap. While there could potentially be a history of bullying, and we know there was a history of mental illness and access to firearms in this case, that doesn’t provide a specific reason for the shooting.

"There might be no motive here," she says.

"And for the country, and the families and friends, and the community that is grieving, they just have to understand that there might not be anything that says, 'Yup, that’s it, and now we can fix that so it never happens again.'"

Benson-Podolchuk notes that while officers did initially seize the weapons in the shooter’s home, they were returned.

According to RCMP, Van Rootselaar had a firearms licence that expired in 2024. An RCMP spokesperson said firearms from the family home had been seized under the Criminal Code two years ago, but the lawful owner of the weapons petitioned for their return.

The laws would have had to have been different for police to have held onto the weapons, Benson-Podolchuk says.

“We’re always looking back. We need to look forward on how do we never let this happen again in any community.”

Premier David Eby's office has clarified the throne speech is not cancelled as one is required to open the legislative session. 

Instead of giving a speech outlining the agenda for the coming months, the lieutenant-governor will deliver a speech from the throne that will be dedicated to the people of Tumbler Ridge. 

Any information about the legislative session ahead will be enveloped into the initial opening remarks on budget day, set for Tuesday.

Sherry Benson-Podolchuk, a former RCMP officer in Gimli, Man., says whether or not local police had already pegged the shooter as a red flag is “the billion-dollar question.”

“And that doesn’t mean that at any one time one of those people might snap somehow,” she said.

“It’s very hard to predict something like that.”

She adds that for police to proceed differently, Canada would need to change the laws about mental health and firearms, so that if officers are called to a house for a mental health check and see firearms, they can seize them. They shouldn’t be returned until everyone in the home is cleared, Benson-Podolchuk says, and that perhaps could include being given mandated therapy.

Police need better tools to be able to keep the weapons and not return them, she says.

“We just never know who is going to snap.”

Pastor George Rowe of Tumbler Ridge Fellowship Baptist Church says he prepared himself mentally, spiritually, and emotionally for conversations with parents learning their children didn’t survive the shooting.

“I talked very little — just let him know that we are there and that the community is there.”

It was later confirmed that the friend’s son had died in the shooting.

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