‘This cannot happen again’

I have been attending the Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill and downtown generally almost every year since 1998. I always encourage friends and family to visit from out of town to celebrate with us. This year I had family visiting from California who had planned for the better part of the year to be here.

I came downtown with our visitors, and we spent three hours in line, with no information, some misinformation that led us to believe one of the lines was for Major’s Hill Park security screening and general confusion about where we were headed.

After three hours we learned from an Ottawa police officer that we were looking at another two-hour wait. We left. My family, who planned for so long to visit, got to experience OC Transpo, a three-hour line on Queen Street, a large video screen with no sound and the mid-day Parliament Hill show on YouTube after we got home.

We experienced artificial choke points with large numbers of people entering and exiting through narrow access spaces that were completely unsecured. If someone had wanted to launch a terrorist attack, this would have been an ideal site. Thousands of people jammed together, barely able to move, hemmed in by fencing, food trucks and concrete barricades. This mess was created by volume and by a total lack of information and crowd control. None of us off the Hill were made more secure by the chaos created by the Parliament Hill screening process. The only people who were more secure were those who made it on to the Hill.

All I experienced and witnessed was poor planning, poor communications — among security personnel and with people waiting in lines — and increased risk. This cannot happen again.

Chris Farley Ratcliffe, Ottawa