OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) – Canada treasures its image as an orderly, open society, a place where the seat of government welcomes weekly public yoga sessions on its front lawn beneath a monument called the Peace Tower.
That sensibility has been tested by two deadly attacks this week on symbols of the government, one of them at the Parliament building itself. The assaults, which the prime minister has described as terror attacks, left two soldiers dead in their homeland and exposed vulnerabilities in safeguarding the capital.
But as lawmakers acknowledge they need to reassess security, they stress maintaining an atmosphere of openness.
“I think we’re going to have some tweaking and changes, but I think we’re going to do this the Canadian way,” Mark Eyking, a Liberal member of Parliament from Nova Scotia, said Friday.
Canada has debated how to balance homeland safety and freedoms before, perhaps most acutely when a radical Quebec separatist group kidnapped two government officials and killed one in 1970, prompting limits on civil liberties for a time. And Parliament Hill has been the target of violence before, including a 1966 bombing attempt and a 1989 standoff with a gunman who fired several shots from a hijacked bus.