Five people have been killed and two more are critically injured in a school shooting in remote northern Saskatchewan, Canada, on Friday afternoon. The shooter is in custody, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday afternoon.
5 people are dead, 2 critically injured after a school shooting in Saskatchewan
Libby Nelson was Vox’s editorial director, politics and policy, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
Trudeau described the news as “every parent’s worst nightmare.”
The shooting, in La Loche, Saskatchewan, happened at about 1:30 pm at a community school enrolling all ages of students. Local media reported the shooting was at the portion of the school serving seventh- through 12th-grade students.
No details are yet known about the victims or the shooter.
La Loche is a town of about 2,500 people, nearly all of them of either First Nation or Métis ancestry. Its unemployment rate is 22 percent; 46 percent of the population is living in poverty, according to the Canadian census.
Gun violence is much rarer in Canada than in the US, as are school shootings. The last fatal school shooting in Canada was in 1999, just after the Columbine shootings in the US.
This shooting is the deadliest school shooting in the country since the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989, when a 25-year-old gunman announced that he hated feminists and killed 13 female students and an office clerk.
