Canada is no stranger to terrorism. Unprecedented as the attack on its Parliament building might appear — it has even been described as “the end of Canada’s innocence” — the country has had long experience of terrorism, from well before any other Western nation. In 1970, the Quebec Liberation Front kidnapped a British diplomat and the Canadian Labour Minister in a two-month-long episode that saw Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau send the army into Quebec and suspend civil liberties. The year before, FLQ had set off a powerful bomb at the Montreal Stock Exchange. In 1985, an Air India plane that took off from Montreal exploded mid-air, killing all 329 people on board, most of them Canadian citizens of Indian origin. Canadian investigators held the Canada-based Khalistani group Babbar Khalsa responsible. The gun attack on the House of Commons, in which a lone gunman slipped into the thinly guarded Parliament building and opened fire after killing a guard at the nearby war memorial, recalled the incident in which a deranged soldier killed three people in the Quebec National Assembly in 1984. Though the motives of the gunman, who was shot dead by a Parliament official, are not clear, Canada is understandably nervous, particularly as only two days before the latest attack two soldiers were run over near Montreal — one of them died — by a man driving a vehicle who investigators suspected to be a jihadi inspired by the Islamic State. Links are being drawn to the Canadian Parliament vote earlier this month to participate in the United States-led military campaign against the IS in Iraq and Syria, but there is no evidence yet that there was a larger conspiracy behind either of the incidents.
It is inevitable that Canada will now become more security conscious. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has described Wednesday’s incident as a terrorist act and pledged that the country would not be intimidated. Speaking in Parliament a day after the attack, Mr. Harper called for a tougher anti-terrorism law. In fact, new legislation giving more powers, including for preventive detention of terror suspects, to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was already on the anvil and was to be introduced on the day of the attack. It appears the government might now make all efforts to fast-track this. In countries that live under the shadow of terrorism, including home-grown terror, citizens know only too well that anti-terror measures usually involve the curtailment of individual freedoms. As well, it is all too easy for such measures to turn into a security backlash against members of one community. It is in everyone’s interests that Canada, which has a large immigrant population, including a large Muslim population, ensures a measured and sensitive response.