blogcutter

Wednesday mornings, as I may have mentioned before, are generally my errand mornings. I have an early-morning meeting downtown and then look after things like banking, shopping, getting my watch battery replaced... and so on. Quite often, I walk along the Sparks Street mall as far as Elgin, then cross through Confederation Square to the Rideau Centre. Yesterday, however, I wanted to go to the public library, which doesn't open till 10 AM. So once I'd stopped at a bank machine and gone to the drugstore for a few things, there was still a bit of time to kill before opening time. I decided to go to the Second Cup at Slater and Metcalfe for a coffee and a chance to look at my Metro paper and do the Sudoku and crossword puzzles.

By the time I'd done that, it was around 10:10 or so. Crossing Metcalfe, I missed one walk signal because of the police cars zooming through the red light, sirens blaring. But I didn't really think anything of it. Downtown Ottawa is often like that on a weekday morning. Anyway, I went into the library without incident after that, browsed for perhaps forty minutes, checked out three books, and was at my bus-stop at Albert and Metcalfe, ready to head home, by 11AM. I wanted to be home by noon, as I was expecting a delivery then.

I made it, too. I was a bit surprised at the welcome I got when I walked through the door just after 11:30. "You just missed it," I was told. Had my delivery arrived early?

I had heard nothing about the incident at the War Memorial and Parliament Hill nor the rumoured incident that had the Rideau Centre in lockdown. The buses - mine, anyway - were still following their regular route at that point and the library had seemed to be carrying on with its normal routines. But I was soon to find out. It was yet another instance of being in the wrong place at the right time.

Interestingly enough, despite Harper's whole "tough on crime" agenda, there has been no talk of imposing the War Measures Act this time around. Even though we're probably more at war today, with our ISIL-fighting troops, than we were in 1970. Would it be unconstitutional this time around, now that we have our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Or maybe all the antiterrorism legislation implemented since 9/11 - regardless of whether it has built-in sunset clauses - has simply made that sort of thing unnecessary because the new legislation is far more draconian than the War Measures Act ever was?

Meanwhile, I just learned that Daniel J. Levitin has apparently cancelled his appearance tomorrow at the Writers' Festival as a result of the incident. Of course, Montreal has always been rather twitchier about these things than Ottawa. I don't think they ever got over their FLQ crisis, the bombs in mailboxes, the protests at St-Jean Baptiste Day parades, or even, perhaps, their fires at cinemas that for the longest time had them barring children under twelve (or was it ten?) altogether. To this day, I NEVER see on-street boxes for newspapers, whether the freebie ones or the regular papers like Le Devoir or the Gazette. They DO still have mailboxes... but it will certainly be interesting to see what happens after door-to-door delivery ceases and they need those community mail boxes on every corner! Even in Ottawa, those red mailboxes (where you post your letters, not where you pick them up) were preventatively removed from downtown street corners during at least one of the major international meetings (I think a G8 Summit) held here.

Of course, the obvious question to ask would be, "What precisely SHOULD we do?" And I'm afraid at the moment, my answer is, "I wish I knew." There's definitely a risk that the government will implement all kinds of intrusive screening procedures that if anything, lull us into a false sense of security or willingness to surrender our rights, freedoms, privacy and democratic principles, while doing nothing to track down or deter actual or would-be terrorists and preserve our personal safety and national security.