I was born in Ottawa. I grew up in Ottawa. I studied in Ottawa. I work in Ottawa. Ottawa is in my DNA, as it is for more than a million other people in this northern capital. This week’s attacks, in which armed men stormed the Canadian Parliament, hit just a few hundred metres from my office, shutting down my usual lunch-spots and other work-week haunts.
Before this week, this sort of thing was unimaginable in Ottawa. This usually quiet G7 capital is a proper city, but in some ways feels like a village – the sort of ‘big village’ where the business district empties after 6 pm and it’s difficult to find a good 24-hour restaurant. Ottawa is the kind of city where, when something big is happening, one tends to know someone who was personally involved, or at least a friend of a friend.
Whatever the motives of this week’s attackers, whatever drove them to kill a reservist guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, this was an act of extreme cowardice.
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