In the wake of the arrest of seventeen individuals suspected of planning to plant explosives at yet unknown Canadian landmarks, news reports in the American media were - typically - crap. One reporter on CNN stated that "terrorism has, for the first time, come to Canada." A Faux News bobblehead declared, "Today, Canada lost its innocence." What are we, a naive, ditzy waif wandering the polar icecaps? To paraphrase that erudite observer of the political landscape, Britney Spears, "We're not that innocent."
It's bad enough that we're held up (or derided) as an icon of respectability, the squeaky-clean welfare state where everything works, everyone's happy and healthy, and the only thing that ever goes wrong is that we might trip over a beaver turd whilst skipping through the heathery meadows. But to claim Canada has not suffered its share of terrorism and violence - or worse, that we don't know how to deal with it, is either ignorance or wanton revisionism.
First, let's dispel one notion. As a nation, Canada has known violence. Over 110,000 Canadians died in the two World Wars (which is fairly large for a nation that consisted, at the time, of between 8 and 10 million). 7,000 Canadians who died in the three-day
Battle of Vimy Ridge are buried there. But Canada has also known terrorism, and I want to offer for your consideration just two examples.
The October Crisis
By 1970, the Front de libération du Québec had already been on a terror campaign for six years in the Province of Quebec. The FLQ racked up over 200 violent incidents, including the death through bombings and gunfire of seven people. In 1969, a massive explosion ripped through the Montreal Stock Exchange, seriously injuring 27 people. Finally, in 1970, two cells of the FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte. Laporte was later murdered by his captors, and the government of Pierre Trudeau enforced the War Measures Act - essentially imposing martial law on Quebec. The military was deployed in major Quebec centres and in Ottawa, and Canadians were witness to the rare site of tanks in the streets of Montreal and outside Parliament Hill. Nearly 500 people were arrested during this period of martial law, of whom 62 were charged.
The Air India Bombing
And lest you say, "But this is ancient histoire!" - it gets more violent.
On June 23, 1985, a Boeing 747 flying out of Toronto and carrying 329 people exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. The Air India Bombing was the largest mass murder perpetrated against Canadians, of whom 280 were on board.
The perpetrators, it is largely suspected, were supporters of the independent Khalistan movement, based in India. Only one individual was convicted in the terrorist attack - two others were acquitted after a trial that took nearly twenty years, and resulted in the murder of a key witness. That murderer has never been found.
So What's the Deal??
What do Canadians have to do to make the US media realize that we're capable of not only being victimized by terrorism, but, in fact, of fostering home-grown terrorists? Burn down the White House or something? We have the chairperson of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, saying that the Canadian government "I don't think was tough enough as far as going after terrorism" - which, given the US government's failure to prevent the Oklahoma City bombing, the first WTC bomning, and the attacks of 9/11, is a little rich.
Canadians have faced the death of tens of thousands of fellow citizens in wars from 1812 through Afghanistan. We have faced terrorist threats from the Rebellions of 1837 through the WTC attack, in which 24 Canadians died. We have no innocence to lose.