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?

Was Nathan Cirillo A Hero?

As I noted on this blog previously, it is always a tragedy when a young person loses his or her life, whether to accident, disease, or mayhem. The lost potential is incalculable. Like me, however, I suspect many found the mythologizing of Nathan Cirillo's murder, his passage on the Highway of Heroes, and what amounted to a state funeral, attended by an array of dignitaries, including the Prime Minister, a little much. And as a cynical observer of the political landscape, I cannot escape the notion that all of the ceremony will prove to be of great benefit to the Harper regime's propaganda machine and its ongoing efforts to reduce our civil liberties.

This morning, a friend of mine alerted me to a piece by the Hamilton Spectator's Andrew Dreschel. It is a frank and honest assessment of this past week's spectacle. It is also brave, as I suspect it will earn him a barrage of hate mail.

While in no way detracting from the loss of this young man, Dreschel offers an unsentimental assessment of what happened:

The 24-year-old Hamilton reservist was murdered in cold blood by a homeless crack addict with terrorist notions while he was ceremonially guarding the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

Cirillo's death was tragic and senseless, but in no way was it heroic.

Dreschel then goes on to talk about what constitutes heroism: those who display remarkable courage,

by performing brave deeds and daring feats — risking or sacrificing your life to save others, valiantly defending a position, boldly destroying the enemy.

But Cirillo never got the chance to show the stuff of which he was made:

He died unprepared and unarmed, the unlucky victim of a seemingly deranged killer who was himself gunned down after storming Parliament.

All of the subsequent coverage gave this tragedy a life of its own, culminating in what the writer describes as secular canonization.

Dreschel ends on this note:

Through no action of his own, the accidental victim had become an accidental hero. But sadly, like all accident victims, he just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Unsentimental and accurate, the column raises some disturbing issues that we should all be honest enough and brave enough to confront. Of course, it is right to feel grief and empathy in tragic situations; obviously it is part of what makes us human. But we should also be keenly aware that those very human responses can work to our detriment if they are not leavened by the knowledge that those in positions of trust with far darker motives may try to exploit them to their own advantage.

As a Canadian, You Can't Help But Feel Proud Here

Let's hope this kind of integrity and decency is enough to combat the fears that the Harper regime is trying to stoke after last week's tragic events.

Thursday Morning

H/t Toronto Star

The events of yesterday were undeniably tragic. A young man, Nathan Cirillo, died. As I noticed on a Facebook posting by my cousin's wife, Nathan was a friend of their son with whom he played organized hockey. Six degrees of separation and all that, I guess.

Nonetheless, I have to confess that when I heard the news on CBC radio, my first thoughts were twofold: how these events could work to Harper's electoral advantage (I could immediately envisage the attack ads juxtaposing Harper's "strong leadership and stand against terrorism" against Trudeau's talk about searching for the "root causes" of terrorism), and how this could very well provide a pretext for further erosion of our civil liberties. Like frightened mice, many people aid and abet anyone or anything to ensure the comforting illusion of security.

Fortunately, I found a measure of balance in two Star columnists this morning, Martin Regg Cohn and Thomas Walkom.

Cohn's words bring some much-needed perspective to terrorism:

For terrorists, killing people is merely a means to an end. By far the bigger objective for terrorists is to terrorize — not just their immediate victims, but an entire population.

A soldier lost his life Wednesday. And parliamentarians lost their innocence.

But the nation must not lose its nerve.

Public shootouts or bombings are carefully choreographed publicity stunts that require audience participation to succeed: If the public gives in to fear, and the state succumbs to hysteria, then the shootings or bombings have hit their mark. If the audience tunes out the sickening violence, the tragic melodrama is reduced to pointlessness.

And he quickly gets to what, for me, is the heart of the matter:

The risk is that we will overreact with security clampdowns and lockdowns that are difficult to roll back when the threat subsides.

Terrorists will never be an existential threat — our Parliament and our parliamentarians are too deeply rooted to crumble in the face of a few bullets or bombs. The greater risk is that we will hunker down with over-the-top security precautions that pose a more insidious menace to our open society.

Thomas Walkom, while acknowledging that events such as yesterday's have a very unsettling effect, reminds us that Canada is not exactly in virgin territory here:

In 1966, a Toronto man blew himself up in a washroom just outside the Commons chamber. He had been preparing to take out the entire government front bench with dynamite. But it exploded too early.

Other legislatures have had their share of trouble, most notably Quebec’s national assembly, which was attacked in 1984 by a disgruntled Canadian Forces corporal.

He shot and killed three as well as wounding another 13 before giving himself up.

In 1988, another man was shot after he opened fire with a rifle in the Alberta Legislature building.

And no one who is of a certain age can ever forget the FLQ crisis of 1970 which led to Pierre Trudeau imposing The War Measures Act, which effectively suspended civil liberties across the country, a measure that was widely embraced at the time.

Walkom ends his piece on an appropriately ominous note:

We seem headed for another of those moments of panic. The fact that the gunman attacked Parliament has, understandably, spooked the MPs who pass our laws.

It has also spooked the media and, I suspect, much of the country.

The government wants to give its security agencies more power over citizens. The government wants to rally public support for its war in Iraq.

On both counts, this attack can only help it along.

If we are not very careful and vigilant, the real threat will come, not from terrorist attacks, but from our putative political leaders.