Tag: Ottawa

James West celebrates the CBC’s coverage of Wednesday’s attack on the Canadian Parliament building, especially this segment:

Canadian authorities have released more details about the gunman, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. Apparently, Zehaf-Bibeau had a criminal record in three cities and planned to travel to Syria, but he was not flagged as a security threat:

Commissioner Bob Paulson of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the gunman’s motives remained largely unknown, but the commissioner said he was confident that Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau had acted alone and had no strong ties to other extremists. The commissioner, the head of Canada’s national police, said that much remained a mystery about the shooting frenzy that led to Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau’s death, trapped thousands of people in downtown Ottawa and, at one point, left Prime Minister Stephen Harper without bodyguards and separated only by a wooden door from a gunfight.

“The R.C.M.P. did not even know Mr. Zehaf was in Ottawa,” Commissioner Paulson said during the lengthy news conference.

“We need to look at all operations to deal with this difficult and hard-to-understand threat.” The police, he said, had only learned about Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau’s Syrian travel plans from his mother after his death. Nor was he among the 93 people that the national police forces monitor as being likely to travel abroad to join organizations recognized as terror groups under Canadian law.

The RCMP has not found any links between Wednesday’s shooting spree and the other attack on Monday by Martin Couture-Rouleau, another convert to Islam who ran over two Canadian soldiers with his car near a base south of Montreal before being shot dead. Both men are currently believed to have acted alone. Keating notes that this is the kind of attack ISIS has been urging its supporters in the West to carry out:

Even if the attacks were ISIS-inspired, that probably doesn’t mean ISIS commanders in Syria or Iraq actually ordered them. ISIS has specifically called for “lone-wolf” attacks against Western countries, and it seems entirely possible that Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau, both reportedly active in jihadist web forums, could have hatched these not-particularly-sophisticated plots on their own. This certainly isn’t cause for comfort, though. Self-starting terrorists are a lot more difficult to track than those with direct ties to international networks. The incidents will also raise questions about the seriousness of Canada’s radicalization problem.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells remarks on what these incidents say about the changing nature of jihadist terrorism:

This strain of radicalism, more fury than politics, has always been strong among the Western converts to Islam, but in the ISIS era it has become the movement’s singular face. Alongside its manias, Al Qaeda always had a pedantic, textual side, the Zawahiri influence — at times, as when it excommunicated the group that would become ISIS, it took its own interpretation of the Qu’ran seriously. There was an anti-colonial strain to its politics. ISIS has none of this finickiness, and the stories of its Western recruits that have emerged have looked quite similar to those of Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau. In their lives, Islam can seem almost an opportunistic label, a way to channel and articulate a more basic rage and alienation. ISIS’s genius, in recruiting, has been not to overcomplicate things, to happily play the role of maniac and murderer, of piratic social disease, of simple uncivilized Other. … The alienation and manias of Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau seem more elemental than politics.

Jeremy Keehn considers how these events are likely to influence Canadian politics:

With a federal election slated for November, 2015, political discussion in Canada has focussed on the Conservatives’ economic record and the corruption trial of a Conservative senator that is scheduled for the spring. Suddenly, security is at the fore.

Given my fellow Canadians’ generally deserved reputation for level-headedness, and the fact that the Conservatives won their 2011 mandate with under forty per cent of the popular vote, this seems unlikely to lead to a rally beneath the party’s banner. The federal Liberals, decimated in the 2011 election under Michael Ignatieff, are now led by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Justin, which will, as 2015 approaches, inevitably place the father’s vision of the country in a certain relief. But in the short term, as questions are put to the government about the attacks and what Canada will become in response, it may be Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the social-democratic New Democratic Party, the country’s Official Opposition, who takes the lead role in arguing for an alternative. Mulcair has a temper, but his finest moments on the floor of Parliament, interrogating the prime minister during Question Period, have been, at their best, awesome displays of focus and restraint. These are the very qualities that Canadians might hope for their government to exhibit in response to two terrible crimes.

Adam Taylor highlights the gun-control angle:

For some Americans, the fact that the relatively gun-free Canada had a gun-related incident is a sign that gun control doesn’t work. In Canada, however, the debate may be more nuanced: Many of the country’s gun laws are shaped by another public shooting, the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre, in which a 25-year-old man shot dead 14 women with a legally purchased semi-automatic rifle. It’s possible that in the coming days the focus on gun-control legislation will return.

A representative of Canada’s Coalition for Gun Control was hesitant to speak about how the gun-control debate might change after the Ottawa shooting until more information came out. However, the representative did note that gun control laws had been weakened since 2012 and that the Canadian Parliament had been due to debate another law that would liberalize gun control in the country when the shooting occurred.

Meanwhile, Shane Harris and Reid Standish wonder if the shooting will prompt Canada to adopt NSA-style surveillance:

On Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed members in Canada’s House of Commons, mere yards from where the gunman was shot dead by authorities the day before, and promised to push even harder for previously proposed enhancements to Canada’s surveillance and detention laws for suspected terrorists.

The amendments would make it easier for Canada to monitor its citizens abroad and to share information with other countries’ spy agencies, particularly the U.S. National Security Agency, which runs a vastly larger and more sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus than its counterpart to the north. The proposals have been hotly debated in Canada for the past week, and passage isn’t a foregone conclusion. But the shooting may have given Harper’s conservative government, which holds a majority of seats in parliament, the final push it needs to get them turned into law.

The Globe and Mail reports on Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the suspected shooter. He had been named a “high risk traveller” and blocked from leaving the country because of fears that he might become a jihadi:

“He wanted to go back to Libya and study,” [friend Dave] Bathurst said. He urged his friend to make sure study was on his mind and “not something else.” Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau insisted he was only going abroad with the intent of learning about Islam and to study Arabic. Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau was blocked from fulfilling those plans. Sources say he intended to travel abroad, but he had not been able to secure a valid travel document from federal officials, who have been taking measures to prevent Canadians from joining extremists overseas.

Reid Standish notes that the “attack comes as Canada has ramped up its role in the fight against the Islamic State militant group, though it remains unclear whether the attack has any connection with these recent decision”:

Canada has sent 26 special forces troops to Iraq to serve in an advisory role, and on Oct. 7 Parliament voted in favor of joining U.S.-led airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq. In late September, a video released by the Islamic State’s spokesperson, Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani urged the group’s supporters to kill Canadians and commit domestic attacks on Canadian territory.

Joe Friesen has more context:

For a country that lived through more than a decade of Western anti-terror wars largely without domestic bloodshed, Wednesday’s attack was a potential turning point.

It was the second targeted killing of a Canadian Forces soldier on home soil in a matter of days, raising further questions about the country’s security and intelligence regime, the rise of domestic radicalism and the impact of Canada’s military deployment to the Middle East to combat the Islamic State.

Keating takes a look at gun ownership in Canada:

Canada’s gun laws are still strict compared with America’s—gun owners must get a license from the federal government which requires a gun safety course, and there are more stringent restrictions for more powerful weapons—but by international standards the country is relatively gun-friendly.

Canada has the 13th-largest civilian firearms arsenal in the world according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey, with 30.8 firearms per 100 people. (The U.S. is first with 88.8 per 100.) It suffers about 0.51 firearm homicides per 100,000 people compared to 2.97 in the United States. While safe by the standards of the U.S. or Latin America, Canada does have significantly more gun violence than countries like Germany, France, and Australia.

He suspects that yesterday’s incident, “involving a shooter armed with a double-barreled shotgun, may prompt another round of soul searching”:

Ironically, what the Conservative government calls a “common sense” package of gun control reforms that would “ease restrictions on transporting firearms, make firearms-safety courses mandatory for first-time gun owners and prevent people convicted of spousal assault from legally owning guns,” was on the docket to be debated in the House of Commons [yesterday], before the shooting started.

Arthur Bright provides his own rundown on Canadian gun laws:

Unlike the US, where Washington sets some gun laws and others are set by the individual states, Canada’s gun laws are predominantly the domain of the federal government in Ottawa.

Under Canadian law, there are three categories of firearms: prohibited, restricted, and non-restricted. Prohibited firearms include short-barreled handguns, sawed-off shotguns and rifles, and automatic weapons. Restricted firearms include all handguns that do not fall under the “prohibited” class, as well as semi-automatic weapons with barrels shorter than 47 cm (18.5 inches). In addition, specific guns can be designated by regulation as prohibited or restricted. Large-capacity magazines are generally prohibited, regardless of the class of firearm they are used in.

Note that despite the use of the term “prohibited,” prohibited firearms are not illegal. Rather they are governed under a stricter set of regulations. Non-restricted firearms are any rifles and shotguns that do not fall under either of the other categories.

A Canadian reader joins the thread:

I work at a government building downtown, and it was definitely a sad, surreal day. Most of downtown was in lockdown mode until mid-late afternoon, with some sections just opening up in the evening. A few thoughts, outside the real tragedy of the soldier who was killed and the shock running through people in the city:

Twitter can be great, but it can also be terrible. Throughout the day, we were monitoring the news and numerous media outlets were reporting just tons of unconfirmed shit that was really unnerving that turned out to be false or at best unsubstantiated. A shooter on a roof somewhere, a shooting inside and/or near a shopping mall downtown, a shooter or two at large, a high-speed motorcycle chase on a highway, etc. etc. I get it, and it’s so customary now … everyone wants to report in real time, but there was so much noise that just served to stress people out even more.

It’s hard to understand how this guy got inside the Parliament building with a gun, especially at this time. I trust more will be written about this in the days to come, but one reporter tweeted that the British Columbia Legislature along with other Legislatures had received information “from Ottawa” earlier in the week that they should be more safety aware. In our building, we experienced noticeably more stringent ID checks starting on Monday this week, which may have been a coincidence, but something I am going to check with colleagues in other government departments. You have to believe relevant security forces were aware of the latest reporting on that unbelievable White House breach. In the press conference this afternoon, the police were a bit vague on the threat level, only saying Parliament Hill was at the same level it has been for a long time now. It just makes me feel like governments can institute all the measures in the world but it comes down to people doing their jobs at the optimal level (and there was a really positive example of that today as well).

I really hope there’s not an over-reaction to this. Politicians are going to try and exploit this for various purposes, which is inevitable. The Prime Minister made a point of saying that an attack on soldiers and our institutions (in this case, attempted attack on politicians) is an attack on ALL Canadians, and I understand why he’s saying that, but the public mood is necessarily going to be less fearful than it would have been had the attack(s) targeted civilians (for example at a mall). He also said Canada will not be intimidated, which is great, but I’m pretty sure he’s at least partly foreshadowing an attack on any opposing politician who criticizes Canada’s proposed engagement in Iraq, ongoing engagement in Afghanistan, etc. That stuff is going to happen, but I at least hope that Ottawa won’t go into some hyper security mode that makes it a less open and accessible city.

Basically, it was a sad, shitty and confusing day. But it could have been a lot worse, and I just hope the people who live here and in the rest of the country won’t give into the fear that so much of the media and politicians thrive on.