On Wednesday morning, a man dressed in all black, with a scarf partially concealing his face, approached Canada’s National War Memorial in Ottawa and, with a long gun, fired four rounds into the back of an army reservist, Corporal Nathan Cirillo, who was part of the cenotaph’s ceremonial honor guard. The attacker then made his way across the street to Canada’s Parliament, entering its Centre Block through the door beneath the building’s three-hundred-foot-tall Peace Tower. A cell-phone video taken by the Globe and Mail_ _reporter Josh Wingrove, and played endlessly on Canadian television afterward, shows security personnel running toward the sound of shots by the building’s entrance. The assault ended, it later emerged, when the attacker—identified by officials as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a thirty-two-year-old from Quebec who had recently converted to Islam—was shot to death, reportedly by the parliamentary sergeant-at-arms, Kevin Vickers.
Zehaf-Bibeau was the son of Bulgasem Zehaf, a Libyan businessman who may have fought in that country’s civil war in 2011, and Susan Bibeau, an official with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. He mounted his attack two days after another Islamic neophyte, twenty-five-year-old Martin Couture-Rouleau—whose Facebook profile identified him as Ahmad LeConverti (Ahmad the Converted)—struck two Canadian soldiers with his vehicle in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, killing one, before being chased down and killed by police. Couture-Rouleau, it turned out, was known to Canadian authorities, who had seized his passport during an attempt to travel abroad, in the belief that he planned to join up with Islamist forces; Zehaf-Bibeau was apparently in Ottawa to try to expedite his passport application so that he could attempt to travel to Saudi Arabia.*
In his first public statement, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was quick to note the symbolic significance of the targets. Attacks against security personnel and governance institutions, he said, represented attacks “on our values, on our society, on us Canadians, as a free and democratic people who embrace human dignity for all.” Viewers might have expected Harper to refer, too, to Canada’s multicultural and internationalist traditions—in fact, he had been forced to cancel an event that day at which he was to bestow honorary citizenship on the Pakistani Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai—but he shifted instead to his version of “make no mistake.” “Let there be no misunderstanding,” he said. “We will not be intimidated. Canada will never be intimidated.” The government would redouble its efforts to “take all necessary steps to identify and counter threats,” and to fight terrorists at home and abroad. “They will have no safe haven,” he said.
Harper came to power in 2006, the head of a Conservative minority government that grew in 2011 to a majority. Though he projects restraint—there was no sense, during his address, of a leader posturing for the camera—he has demonstrated during his years in power a vision of Canada as a war-fighting country. In recent months, for example, his government has committed sixty-nine advisers to Iraq and six hundred troops and a handful of planes to the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. On the day between the attacks in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and the attack in Ottawa, six CF-18 fighter jets from Cold Lake, Alberta, were dispatched to fight against ISIS.
Some commentators, including the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, have drawn a connection between the deployment and the attacks on Canada’s soil. The assertion is simplistic, as the Canadian writer Jeet Heer has noted, but it speaks to a shift in the global perception of the country in recent years as more warlike (not to mention more environmentally destructive). This shift has some basis in Canadian political reality. As the historian Charlotte Gray and others have written, Harper and Canadian military leaders have, since the Conservatives came to power, sought to remind the country of its historical roots in conflict. In August, for example, Harper said in a speech at the Canadian War Museum that the country was “forged in the fires of the First World War,” an allusion to its soldiers’ sacrifices at Ypres, Vimy, and Passchendaele; in 2008, the then head of the armed forces, General Rick Hillier, called the country a “warrior nation”—an idea that Gray called“unthinkable in the late twentieth century.”
Harper and Hillier’s statements challenged an alternate perception, born primarily of the postwar Liberal governments of Louis St. Laurent, Lester B. Pearson, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, that Canada’s identity lies in its peacekeeping military and its multicultural heritage. Harper is often thought to have dedicated much of his political life to undoing Trudeau’s legacy, in particular. But while this insight is typically applied to Harper’s economic policies and his handling of regional relations, it now seems relevant, too, to his broader conception of the country. Trudeau himself was perfectly willing to deploy force—he invoked Canada’s War Measures Act following the last comparably shocking terrorist attack on domestic soil, the kidnapping of two officials, and the subsequent murdering of one of them, by militants with the Front de libération du Québec, in October, 1970.* But Trudeau projected an image of an idealistic Canada onto the world, in part by committing the country to a policy of multiculturalism in 1971. On that front, Harper’s Conservatives have polled well among voters from suburban immigrant communities, but by appealing to their fiscal and cultural conservatism, rather than to an expansive cultural vision for the country. (The party still fares poorly with Muslims.)
In his speech, Harper referred to Zehaf-Bibeau, the Canadian-born son of a mixed marriage, only as “the terrorist,” and to Couture-Rouleau as “an ISIL-inspired terrorist.” The fact that one of the Québécois men was planning to go to Saudi Arabia, and that the other had had his passport seized but was not prevented from carrying out his attack, will no doubt stick in the minds of some legislators.* The day of Zehaf-Bibeau’s attack, the Conservatives had been scheduled to introduce, “by coincidence or irony,” as the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson put it, legislation that would have given enhanced information-sharing powers to the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. “Security is the government’s primary responsibility,” said Harper when Parliament resumed on Thursday. “Our laws and police powers need to be strengthened in the area of surveillance, detention, and arrest. They need to be much strengthened.” That work, he added, “will be expedited.”
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.
*Update: Initial reports on the Ottawa attack said that Zehaf-Bibeau had been considered a security risk in Canada, and that he had been planning to travel to Syria. This post has been updated to reflect new information to the contrary. It has also been corrected to reflect that the two officials kidnapped by the Front de libération du Québec were not both Canadian, as was initially stated; one was British.
