He May Have Hidden In A Closet .....

But that likely isn't stopping Stephen Harper from manipulating the narrative surrounding the Parliament Hill tragedy to his own political advantage.

At least, that is the speculation of Stephen Maher.

Crack addict Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and who was then himself killed in a barrage of shots within Parliament, is really not understood any better today than he was when the tragedy occurred on October 22. However, one thing is quite clear:

The shooting heralded the end of Trudeau’s long honeymoon, bringing him down within polling range of Stephen Harper for the first time since he became leader of his party.

But it is not a lack of data that prevents our understanding of those terrible events; two videos exist, one of which would either confirm or refute the narrative about Kevin Vickers, the sergeant-at-arms, who, we are told, finished Zehaf-Bibeau’s rampage by heroically diving, James-Bond-style, to shoot him dead.

The problem, as Maher reports, is that

... we don‘t know where that story comes from. On the day of the shooting — when the world desperately needed a story — anonymous sources told TV journalists that that’s what happened. We later learned that the shooter had been shot several times by a number of people.

The second video is one that Zehaf-Bibeau recorded to explain himself.

Unfortunately, neither video is being released to the public, despite the fact that

a week after the shooting, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson told reporters that he wanted Canadians to see it [the second video] “as soon as possible.”

In December, he took that back, and said that he might not be able to ever release it because of the “intensity of the investigation,” whatever that means.

Maher sees nothing good in this:

It’s possible that between October and December, Paulson’s political masters let him know that he should not release the video.

It suits the government to behave as if the RCMP is independent, but Paulson appears to be more like a deputy minister than a police chief.

And Harper wants to portray this attack as an example of why we must be led by him, not Trudeau or Tom Mulcair, who are too soft-headed or weak-willed to protect us from terrorists.

But of course, this kind of secrecy and the speculation it engenders is par for a government that has shown consistent, pervasisve and egregious contempt for almost everything that a healthy and thriving democracy demands.

Perhaps the larger question is, do enough Canadians care?