The shooter, identified as Gabriel Wortman, 51, was shot dead by officers after a 12-hour manhunt in Nova Scotia province ended Sunday morning.

Among the victims was a veteran female constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which also handles municipal and provincial law enforcement in the province.

Police said the suspect had been on the run since Saturday night, when officers were alerted to shots fired in the town of Portapique, around 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Halifax.

Gun violence in Canada is far less frequent than in the neighboring United States, and weapons more strictly controlled, but the killings were the country’s worst ever, exceeding the toll in 1989 when a gunman murdered 14 female students at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.

Public broadcaster CBC quoted RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki as saying police know of at least 16 victims, besides the shooter.

“What has unfolded overnight and into this morning is incomprehensible and many families are experiencing the loss of a loved one,” Nova Scotia RCMP Commanding Officer, Assistant Commissioner Lee Bergerman, wrote on the force’s local Facebook page.

“That includes our own RCMP family. It is with tremendous sadness that I share with you that we lost Constable Heidi Stevenson, a 23-year veteran of the Force who was killed this morning, while responding to an active shooter incident.”

In addition to Stevenson, a mother of two, a male officer was injured and is in hospital with non-life threatening injuries, Bergerman said.

The National Post newspaper said another victim was an elementary school teacher, citing a Facebook post from the woman’s sister.

Several victims were discovered both outside and inside a house in Portapique, sparking the manhunt through multiple communities, police said.

“The search for the suspect ended this morning when the suspect was located. And I can confirm that he is deceased,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Chris Leather told a press conference.

Leather said that at one point, the suspect appeared to be wearing part of a police uniform and was driving a vehicle made to look like an RCMP cruiser.

RCMP tweeted several times that he was not an officer and warned he was considered “armed and dangerous.”

“The initial search for the suspect led to multiple sites in the area, including structures that were on fire,” Leather told the news conference.

Another police spokesperson said, without further details, that the gunman was killed after an officer intervened.

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“We will be, by mutual consent, temporarily closing our northern border with Canada,” Mr Trump tweeted.
He said trade would not be affected.

Both countries had already issued sweeping travel bans but had maintained exemptions for each other.
Canada relies on the US for approximately 75% of its exports.

The two leaders discussed the changes on Wednesday, Mr Trudeau said.

“I want to be clear though that essential travel will still continue,” he said at a press conference.

“No matter who you are or what you do, this is a time when you should be focused on your health and that of your neighbours. Not: are you going to lose your job, are you going to run out of money for food or medications.”

What is in the agreement?

Details of the final deal have yet to be released in writing but both leaders have stressed that cross-border trade will not be blocked.

Supply chains must be preserved so trucking would not be affected, Mr Trudeau said.

“That is something we remain committed to,” he added.

About $2 bn in goods and services crosses the US-Canada border each day.

Canadians who needed to travel for other “urgent reasons” would also not be impacted, Mr Trudeau said.
There is no set timeframe for how long the border closure will last.

Mr Trudeau’s government had previously resisted closing the border to his country’s most important trading partner.

“Nearly 200,000 people cross that border every day, and that border and that traffic that goes across that border is literally a lifeline for both the Canadians and the Americans on both sides of that border,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Tuesday.

“We get our groceries thanks to truckers who drive back and forth across that border. Very urgently needed medical supplies and medicines go back and forth across that border.”

But both leaders had kept the notion of travel restrictions on the table, as both countries have struggled to halt outbreaks of Covid-19.

Earlier this week, Mr Trump warned against discretionary travel and said that “we have very strong emergency powers when it comes to something like this, both on the southern and the northern borders”.

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While there were no new deaths confirmed outside Hubei, the national tally of verified infections rose by 769, about half of them in Hubei, the National Health Commission said. It said 461 of those infected were in a serious condition.

China has sealed off Hubei in the country’s centre, an unprecedented operation affecting tens of millions of people which is intended to slow the transmission of the respiratory virus.

The end of the Lunar New Year holiday, China’s busiest travel season, was pushed back to Sunday from Friday to “effectively reduce mass gatherings” and “block the spread of the epidemic,” a Cabinet statement said. Schools will also postpone reopening until further notice, it added.

Cases have been confirmed in the semi-autonomous territories of Macau and Hong Kong, where the government is turning holiday camps into quarantine centres. South Korea confirmed its fourth case on Monday.

Scattered cases have also been confirmed in Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Vietnam, Singapore Malaysia, Nepal, France, Canada and Australia. The US has confirmed cases in Washington state, Chicago, southern California and Arizona.

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