Ottawa October 2014

This past Wednesday, in Ottawa, there were two tragic deaths.

There is no doubt that the murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was just that: murder. He was doing his job, unarmed, standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was doing something that many Canadians, if they had thought about it, would agree was symbolically important. He was doing something that I suspect he felt great pride in doing. He would have thought that it was an honour to be there.

He had not done anything wrong. He had not offended or attacked his killer, he had not done anything to hurt anyone. His murder was a senseless, random act of violence. Without wanting to sound crass, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. His killer would have killed anyone who was standing in that spot, doing their job.

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau also died on Wednesday. He, of course, was the person who killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo before going on to the Parliament buildings and apparently attempting to shoot more people. In the up-coming weeks we may find out more about him, but right now we know that he was a petty criminal, an addict, someone who had been radicalized by some content on the internet and someone who at least twice asked the Canadian court system to help him deal with his addiction. He was someone who in all likelihood lived with some form of a mental illness. None of that background is a justification or an apology for his actions. What he did was profoundly wrong. There can be no excuse.

The consequences of the events in Ottawa on this past Wednesday maybe long lasting. The various guardians of public security will demand more power to investigate the lives of Canadians. The government of Canada has in fact already made it clear that they will seek to pass legislation to increase such powers. Police will review various policies and increase security at all of the usual places. For the next year political parties will jostle each other both in the House and in the streets to prove who has the best solutions to preventing another tragedy. However increased powers of surveillance would not have stopped Zehaf-Bibeau from committing murder (the police could not even notice that he was driving without license plates). Even if the State had the right to investigate all who had been radicalized in some fashion, there could never be enough tax dollars to fund the extraordinary increase in man/woman power required to staff that law. We can spend the next year fretting over the events and promising that we will do all that we can, including attacking the root source of the radicalization - and this time next year a person similar to Zehaf-Bibeau might try and might succeed in doing something similar.

There is something that we can do to prevent mindless, random acts of violence perpetuated by people who are addicted to substances and who live with some form of a mental illness. At the very least we can have systems in place to help people who ask for help. I know that talking about mental health is not as sexy as talking about  increasing our national security but I have to believe that if the system had been able to offer help to Zehaf-Bibeau at the right time, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo would still be alive. His death was not the result of a failure of our national security agencies, but rather as a result of our collective failure to help those who need help.