Could there be a less likely terrorist target than leafy, peaceful, backwater Victoria?
“No one would have expected it in Boston, either,” replied Umar Muhammad, pushing a stroller across the legislature lawn Tuesday.
Muhammad, a tourist from San Francisco, was reacting to the news that right there, right where he and his wife and their three beautiful children were standing, someone had tried to detonate three bombs the day before.
If it angered him — “There’s a civilized way to tell government that you don’t like something,” said Muhammad, nodding toward a placard-draped man demonstrating outside the legislature — he did not seem particularly surprised. “It has become the norm.”
Locals showed more shock. Colwood’s Sherry Daughtry and Ron Ward had come in for the Canada Day fireworks, made a night of it, staying at a hotel. The idea of strolling through Ground Zero left them stunned: “You never expect anything like that from Victoria,” Ward said.
No, you don’t.
The capital had one brief brush with terrorism in 1999 when Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber, drove his rented Chrysler onto the Coho ferry with a trunkful of bomb-making materials with which he intended to blow up Los Angeles International Airport that New Year’s.
But Victoria was just a bit player in that drama. Ressam was a Montreal-based Algerian terrorist who was just passing through town. He was caught not because of intelligence-gathering or any ongoing operation, but because his fidgety responses to questioning (he pulled a Costco card when asked to produce ID) set off the internal radar of Port Angeles customs inspector Diana Dean, a sweet-natured middle-aged woman who, years later, still seemed awed by what she had done — or prevented from being done. (“I thank God every day that we stopped him and found what he had,” she once told me. “It brought home to us that we might just be a sleepy little town on the peninsula, but terrorists can show up anywhere.”) Last October, an appeal court increased Ressam’s sentence to 37 years from 22.
The Canada Day case is different. It involves not the stereotypical foreign radical belonging to some far-off terrorist network, but a rather bizarre home-grown couple. Their arrest resulted not from a hunch, but from an investigation that began in February when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service tipped off the RCMP-led Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, which maintains a three-member unit in Victoria.
“I was incredibly relieved to learn that they were working alone,” Premier Christy Clark said of the suspects on Tuesday.
Yes and no.
Yes, it’s a comforting that there wasn’t a web of well-co-ordinated evil at work. But it’s also disconcerting to think of a “self-radicalized” couple popping out of nowhere to hatch a plot on their own.
It’s both sobering and impressive that the authorities were able to identify and nullify the threat posed by people who were said to be unconnected to any terrorist organization.
It’s also impressive that the police were able to get hold of the pressure-cooker bombs and render them harmless before they were placed outside the legislature. That’s reminiscent of what the RCMP reportedly did in Project Samosa, in which three Ontario men were charged in a 2010 terror plot. In that case, the Globe and Mail reported last year, police swapped harmless dummies for circuit boards with which the men planned to detonate explosives remotely.
“I’m so proud of the security system here,” said Wendy Chen of Calgary, perched on a bench on the legislature. If she and husband Kent Chen had any concerns about Big Brother being that effective, they were subsumed by images of what the carnage would have looked like had the bombs gone off.
“I prefer safety,” Kent said.
So what are we supposed to do now that we have been shaken out of our backwater complacency?
Nothing, really. “We cannot let this change us,” Clark said Tuesday, the legislature serving as a backdrop. “We cannot be ruled by fear.”
But nor can we think it can’t happen here.
