Guess What Madness Ensued in Canada After That Recent Shooting? None.

Having moved to Canada recently from the U.S., I was braced for the worst after that recent mass shooting. Instead, what I saw shocked me.

Since I moved to Canada permanently, a lot of little things remind me that this isn’t the United States. Most of them are trivial, like how I pronounce “sorry” and “Saskatchewan.” However, the horrific school shootings in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, reminded me that the differences between the two countries run far deeper than pronunciation and access to hockey rinks. In this case, I was shocked by how different it was to be living through this tragedy in a functional democracy run by reasonably sane people, rather than in a dysfunctional autocracy run by a narcissistic fascist and his band of loyal sycophants.

The Tumbler Ridge Secondary School shootings occurred on February 10. Nine people were killed, including the shooter, and 27 more wounded. It was the worst incident in Canada since the 2020 Nova Scotia attack, and the deadliest school shooting in Canada since the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989, when 14 female students were killed by a gunman who said he was fighting feminism.

The response to Tumbler Ridge by the police, government, and public shocked me. In the wake of the shooting, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released information in a controlled, steady flow without speculation or innuendo. They didn’t wait for hours like police did in the American school shooting at Uvalde, Texas. They didn’t throw bad information out there, like Attorney General Kash Patel did when he claimed that the Brown University shooter was in custody. I knew, with confidence, that what I was being told was the truth as far as they knew it in that instant, and that they were being cautious and deliberate. Everyone did the right things and indicated that they would continue to do the right things.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for U.S. law enforcement. I hadn’t realized how used I had become to the insane........

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