Ontario's provincial police insisted on Wednesday that they had provided timely information to the media and public during their search for a gunman who killed three women.

Basil Borutski, a 57-year-old accused of killing three women on Tuesday, recently got out of prison and had been accused of assault, but never convicted, a number of times before that.

A 57-year-old man has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the separate slayings of three women whose deaths sparked a lockdown and manhunt in eastern Ontario on Tuesday.