Canada killer's 12-hour rampage is one of worst gun massacres in nation's history

Only one mass shooting event in Canadian history has led to a greater loss of life than Sunday's shooting in Nova Scotia

Residents of a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada woke up on Sunday to chaos as police hunted a mass shooter who had left a trail of bodies and burning buildings behind him. By the end of the ordeal, at least 10 people were killed, including one member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Though mass shootings are far more prevalent in Canada's neighbour to the south, the country has weathered its own share of tragic violence at the hands of gunmen.

Reuters reported that the worst shootings in Canadian history took place just over three decades ago at Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school in Montreal. A shooter marched the men in a classroom outside and killed the 14 women remaining in the class. Ten women and four men were injured in addition to those killed.

A few years later, in 1992, an associate professor at Concordia University in Quebec killed four of his colleagues and injured one other individual.

In 1996, a man travelled to the wedding of his estranged wife's sister in British Columbia and killed nine of her relatives before killing himself. Two others were wounded in the shooting.

In more recent incidents, a man in Edmonton, Alberta in 2014 killed his wife and eight others before killing himself. Two years later, a student in Saskatchewan killed his two brothers in his house before firing a gun at a high school in a remote community, where two more people died and seven others were wounded.

A year later in Quebec, a man attacked a mosque during an evening prayer, killing six people and wounding five others. Another 12 had were injured during the attack and had to seek medical treatment. Then, in 2018, a man in Toronto walked down a busy street and began shooting randomly into restaurants, killing two people and wounding 13 before he killed himself.

The mass shooting in Nova Scotia wasn't the first in which a member of the RCMP has lost their life.

In 2005, a group of four RCMP officers went to the home of an Albertan man to execute a warrant to repossess his property. When they arrived, the man fired on them, killing all four.

Nearly a decade later, a gunman in New Brunswick attacked a group of RCMP officers, killing three and wounding two others.

Two years later, in 2018, two more police officers were killed at a shooting in New Brunswick. Two other people died during the same incident.