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.
