WE HAVEN’T LET FEAR CHANGE US, AND THAT’S A GOOD THING: ANDREW MacDOUGALL
What words to describe the feeling as you watch, helplessly from across an ocean, as a terrorist storms your former place of work and threatens your former colleagues, including the prime minister of Canada?
“Surreal” and “impotent” are the best I’ve come up with in the two years since Michael Zehaf-Bibeau launched his slapdash assault on Parliament. Oddly, “grateful” is another.
Grateful, because it could have been worse. Much worse. Had he timed his jihadi gauntlet a little earlier in the day, Zehaf-Bibeau would have found MPs and staffers clogging the Hall of Honour he went on to strafe. Had I still be in function, I would have been right there, chatting up journalists post-caucus before dodging bullets.
Instead, I watched on Twitter from London as friends in Ottawa became trapped on the set of a real-life horror film. Here, social media was as much blessing as curse; it was the first platform to erupt with the news, but it was also the first to falsely suggest that as many as three gunmen were roaming Ottawa’s streets. For a while, it didn’t feel as though anyone knew what was going on, just like nobody ever knows what’s going on in the first hours of a news event, only that we now all feel compelled to broadcast our lack of knowledge in the rush to fill an information void that can’t be sated.
For me, Oct. 22, 2014, brought home how quickly the Internet democratizes misery. Within minutes of the bullets flying in Ottawa, I had friends in London dropping by my cubicle asking me “what the hell was going on in Canada?”
“It’s that Harper bloke they hate, isn’t it?”
Technology, bless its bloodless heart, lets everyone rubberneck world events and slap their own interpretation on it at light speed.
This new normal, of rushing to judgment without all the facts, overwhelms more than it informs. Now that two years have come and gone, what have we learned?
In the post-truth world, we reached common agreement on the facts, which is no small thing. Two Canadian soldiers — Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo — were killed on home soil by two Islamic radicals in the declared service of ISIL, for no other reason than their wearing of the uniform. And, more importantly, we haven’t overreacted to those facts.
This is, in part, because we have a new government. A new government that talks a different game on terror. Canadian bombs are no longer falling on the ISIL movement that spawned Canada’s homegrown attackers, but Canadian special forces are assisting the coalition forces trying to retake Mosul at this very moment. Instead of shouting about our contribution, the Trudeau government keeps it all as quiet as possible. Why?
Well, for one, they were elected on a pledge to end Canada’s military mission against ISIL, not deepen it. Second, anti-terrorism files have never been Trudeau’s strong suit. Witness his support for Stephen Harper’s anti-terror legislation (Bill C-51) in the last Parliament, only to then promise to repeal it, if elected. Guess what? We’re still waiting for the great repeal.
Deep in the bowels of Langevin, they know talking terror isn’t a winner for their photogenic prime minister. Never has been. It was the Parliament Hill attack, coupled with the glib Liberal response to Canada’s military mission over the skies of Syria, that took some of the shine off a prospective Trudeau premiership, shunting him down the pecking order behind Tom Mulcair in the race to replace Stephen Harper.
Two years on, Trudeau has yet to convince Canadians that he can formulate clear-headed responses to serious threats. There’s no reason our jets couldn’t still be pounding ISIL positions.
Fortunately for Trudeau, there haven’t been any further attacks on home soil to test his mettle. The killing of Vincent and Cirillo came a few days apart. It was easy to believe it was the beginning of a nauseating trend. Thankfully, it wasn’t. And with the security forces around Parliament Hill now apparently able to walk and chew gum at the same time, there will hopefully never be a repeat of Zehaf-Bibeau’s spree.
This return to the status quo is what has given the Liberal government room to continue on with its preferred version of Canada: open, generous and accommodating. We haven’t let terror turn us into a colder country, and that’s a good thing.
Had the attack happened at the White House or Capitol Hill, the response would have been to shut down everything, for all time. Today, Parliament Hill remains as accessible as it was before Bibeau paid it a visit.
That’s a fitting legacy to what was an awful day. Let’s hope circumstance — and sound antiterror policing — let us keep it that way.