Bravery and sobriety in the face of terror

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.