Front-page coverage of Ottawa shooting from around the world
International news outlets arrived in Ottawa on Oct. 22 to cover the tragic and dramatic events around Parliament Hill, with newspapers around the world placing it on their front pages. A soldier guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National War Memorial was killed and gunfire echoed through Centre Block, Parliament Hill’s main […]
Violence begets harmony, even love for a moment
GATINEAU, QUE.—The sudden, violent gunplay in Ottawa last week will live forever in the memories of those close to the scene—politicians, media, security forces and thousands of local residents caught in paralyzing traffic jams. But it does not ‘change everything’. As Green party leader Elizabeth May said with her usual prescience (but no asperity), […]
Day of terror in Ottawa also finds acts of kindness, courage
When Hill Times reporter Rachel Aiello read out Globe reporter Josh Wingrove’s tweet last Wednesday morning in our newsroom, time stopped for a second. Shots had been fired on Parliament Hill. Someone else tweeted that a man had been shot at the War Memorial. I asked deputy editor Mark Burgess to head to the […]
This is a wakeup call to our Parliament of Canada
OTTAWA—A terror attack or the act of a crazed lone gunman? Time will yield answers that may not be pretty. The fact that an armed assailant could so easily breach the perimeter of the Parliament of Canada is a wakeup call to all. Was the breach a result of insufficient police power or […]
If he’d ‘come in an hour later, when every MP is walking out into that central hall, it could have been a tragedy’
Just after 9:52 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 22, when Ottawa Police received 9-1-1 calls of shots at the National War Memorial, things would get worse before they’d get better on Parliament Hill. Honour Guard reservist Nathan Cirillo, a reservist from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, was shot and killed while standing guard at […]
‘I don’t know who made the decision, it was a massive movement’
PARLIAMENT HILL—Fifteen Hill journalists and Parliamentary Press Gallery staff members escaped from Room 350-N, also known as the Hot Room, in the Centre Block of Parliament Hill through a window and climbed down construction scaffolding just minutes after gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was shot dead one floor below them. Radio journalist Philippe-Vincent Foisy, Ottawa Parliamentary […]
‘I turned back to see one of the ceremonial guards running pell-mell over a hedge’
I had just finished locking up my bike on Sparks Street after my morning commute when I heard the shots close behind me. First two, then a half-second pause, and then two more. The sound of rifle shots echoed off the architecture surrounding the War Memorial at the top of Elgin Street, and I turned […]
Love, cigarettes and Tories answering NDP phones: tales from Parliament Hill’s lockdown
It was not a good day for Mathieu Dubé to have forgotten his cellphone. The husband of NDP MP Anne Minh-Thu Quach (Beauharnois-Salaberry, Que.) was spending his morning on Oct. 22 in the spouses’ lounge on the Centre Block’s sixth floor with his three-and-a-half month old daughter, Mila Dubé, when he heard shouting in […]
PM Harper vows to fight terrorism after Hill shooting but others urge caution
Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to fight terrorism following last week’s shooting incidents in Ottawa, describing them as acts of terrorism, but MPs from the three national parties and an international relations expert say it’s too early to conclude that last week’s attacks were acts of terrorism meant as payback for Canada’s combat mission in […]
