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As reported in the Canadian Press this week, on the day of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s lone-wolf attack on the National War Memorial and Parliament, the federal Government Operations Centre (GOC) sprang into action. Well, it tried to, at any rate. The Government Operations Centre is an emergency facility that functions, in times of disaster, crisis or attack, as a central location for co-ordinating information and federal government responses. Its exact location is not publicly known, but it is clearly close to the federal government.

On the day that Zehaf-Bibeau attacked, it took several hours for police and security officials to ascertain that it was a single-shooter, limited threat event. The GOC, therefore, suddenly found itself doing exactly what it’s trained to do — responding to an emergency in Canada. Things didn’t go well.

We’d already heard through earlier reports that the GOC was passing along inaccurate information: the CBC reported in December that the GOC was still reporting hours after Zehaf-Bibeau was dead that there may have been as many as five shooters on the loose. That’s not great, but some degree of confusion is inevitable in such a situation — even among security officials. So we can give them a pass, with a warning to do better next time, on that one.

But the other problems reported by the Canadian Press are more difficult to forgive. When the federal government went into lockdown, key officials were caught out of position and were not in the GOC. Support staff, mainly technical experts, were also not available inside the facility, and were not able to get there as the capital went into lockdown. Meanwhile, officials from other units of the government did end up inside the GOC, and that means they weren’t where they were supposed to be, either.