Bravery and sobriety in the face of terror

A reminder that we are living in the real world

As I thought about what, if anything, to say about Monday’s carnage on Yonge Street, I vaguely recalled speaking with Mayor John Tory about whether we might see something like this some day in Toronto. It would have been the sit-down interview he does with various media outlets at the end of the year, I reckoned, and something awful must have happened in December that would have made me ask about it. I couldn’t remember what it was, though.

Listening back to the interview, I remembered: it was the previous day’s botched bombing attempt at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.

I had completely forgotten about it. I realized I had also completely forgotten about the Oct. 31 attack on Manhattan’s West Side Highway. Eight cyclists and pedestrians died and 11 were injured, in my favourite city in the world, and my memory just didn’t have room for it.

I tried to tally up all the recent attacks using weaponized motor vehicles: La Rambla in Barcelona, Promenade des Anglais in Nice, the Christmas market in Berlin, London Bridge, the murder of a Canadian soldier in SaintJean-sur-Richelieu. I forgot about the attack on London’s Westminster Bridge last June, the attack outside a Paris mosque that same month, the attack with a truck in Stockholm in April 2017. There are others.

In many cities around the developed world, this sort of low-rent, low-tech terrorism, which is incredibly difficult to stop once someone has decided to do it, has been on a list of bad things that might happen to you on any given day for years.

Indeed, I was surprised to find myself un-shocked by Monday’s horror. Nor did my fellow Torontonians seem especially rattled. Walking around downtown on a sparkling spring afternoon, I watched as more and more people furrowed their brows into their phones and then looked up, as if to process the information. I didn’t see any disbelief.

After the London Underground bombings in 2005, Toronto councillor and Toronto Transit Commission chairman Howard Moscoe questioned the idea of taking federal money to boost security, because it might make the city a target. “Terrorists would have to find where Toronto is before they attacked it,” he said, noting Canada had no troops in Iraq — unlike the U.K. and Spain, which both suffered bombings in 2004.

The comment attracted much scorn from War on Terror hawks. But it annoyed me on a perverse level, too: why not here? This is the economic capital of a G7 nation with which many people around the world have many grievances. Canada is an actor in the world — not a huge one, perhaps, but much bigger than other Western countries with much bigger terrorism problems. Why so complacent?

By luck of geography, Canada mostly has the luxury of picking and choosing who comes here and who stays. We don’t have to worry about the mass unregulated migration that Europe has struggled with — not about security threats, not about resources, not about nativist backlashes.

And we’ve made good on that luck.

“One, I think our police do an excellent job,” Tory told me in December. The fact we haven’t had any recent attacks on civilians doesn’t mean no one was planning any. Tory also credited a “politics and general discourse that tries to stay away from polarization.” And he argued Toronto takes a pretty common-sense approach to security as a general concept — neither overreacting nor underreacting to threats either real or theoretical.

I think that’s about right, which is why it infuriates me when people decadently take it all for granted.

You can glibly exaggerate the threat illegal bordercrossers or Syrian refugees or any given Canadian community represents, or glibly suggest there are no threats at all anywhere and anyone who says otherwise is racist, with reasonable confidence that Canadian society is resilient enough to keep everything off the boil. And you’ll probably get some votes in the offing.

Whatever motivated Monday’s attack, it’s a reminder that Canadians and Torontonians live in the real world. This isn’t a game. And the excellent response, from bystanders to police to wellwishers, is a reminder that Canadians disagree about things far less than many politicians would like us to believe.

“It’s hard. It’s the first time I’ve seen a dead body. I couldn’t feel my legs and hands before. I still can’t feel my hands,” 28-year-old Amir Farokhpour told a reporter on Yonge Street, describing rushing to the aid of a victim who died.

“I was just going to the convenience store. It could have been me, you know?”

We know, man. Everyone knows. The dregs of tweeting humanity aside, as I write this everyone who matters seems to be getting the response to this atrocity just right — neither overreacting nor underreacting nor flying off the handle in entirely the wrong direction.

I have every confidence that will continue. Toronto and Ontario and Canada won’t be unique in that regard, but it is certainly a blessing to hang on to in a time of grief and anxiety.

SURPRISED TO FIND MYSELF UN-SHOCKED BY MONDAY’S HORROR.