Chrystia Freeland is the federal member of parliament for Toronto Centre and the author of Plutocrats: the Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

On Tuesday, Canada celebrated the life and lamented the death of Corporal Nathan Cirillo, the young reservist and father who was killed last week as he stood guard at our National War Memorial in Ottawa. And we are mourning Patrice Vincent, the warrant officer who was in killed in Quebec two days earlier.

That tragic week has also given Canada a living hero, Kevin Vickers, the sergeant-at-arms in the House of Commons. Last Thursday morning, when parliament resumed sitting, just 24 hours after shots were fired in our chambers, we gave the shy, white-haired, 58-year-old Vickers a three-minute standing ovation. The prime minister and leaders of the two main opposition parties walked up to his seat at the entrance to the House, shook his hand and gave him a hug.


Vickers’ role is partly a ceremonial one: His position is older than Canada, dating back to around 1415, when London’s House of Commons received its first sergeant-at-arms. Last Wednesday morning, when the current, Canadian sergeant heard the shots, he took his handgun from his office, went into the marbled hallway, and shot and killed the shooter.

So far, so Jack Reacher. But here are some other things about Vickers: He served in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 29 years before coming to parliament as our head of security. Last Wednesday was the first time in his career that he fired his gun in active service.

He didn’t hesitate to use deadly force when necessary, but the hallmark of Vickers’ eight years as sergeant-at-arms has been his defense not just of our bodies but also of our values: He has been a champion of an open and pluralistic parliament. According to a paper by Dr. Anne Dance about security and public access to Parliament Hill—an endnote-heavy academic study that has suddenly become required reading—in his job interview Vickers said there would be no walls built around Canada’s parliamentary buildings.

In a conversation with Dance a few years later, Vickers argued that if you made parliament completely secure “and no one wants to come here, what have you accomplished?”

“I think it’s fundamental to our democracy that citizens have access to their place, their building,” he told Dance. “This is a House of Commons, and it’s for commoners.”

Vickers has long emphasized that in Canada, those commoners are a diverse group. In 2011, Quebec’s provincial legislature banned the kirpan, a Sikh ceremonial dagger. Some thought the House of Commons should follow suit. To his credit, Vickers disagreed.

At a dinner in Ottawa hosted by Sikh Canadians to honor his decision, Vickers said the dispute was a reminder of “how vigilant we must be to not only defend but promote the practices, cultures and religions of all peoples.”

Mere tolerance, he said, wasn’t enough: “I am going to tolerate you wearing the kirpan within the Parliamentary Precinct? No. As head of security, I am going to accept and embrace your symbol of faith within the Parliamentary Precinct.” The goal, he said, was to help Canada on our “journey of sewing together the fabric of our nation with the thread of multiculturalism.”

Pluralism and openness are great values to have, but it can be easy to mistake them for weakness. That happened last week, as some people mourned Canada’s loss of innocence. Toby Reigart, a self-described U.S. admirer of the Great White North, wrote in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen that on visits to Canada he had been struck by our friendliness and courtesy: “We often thought this is how America could have been or at least could strive towards. Now that dream or naiveté is shattered.”

It is a kind sentiment, but a little off the mark. We do try to be nice, but we understand that the world can be nasty. As the Globe and Mail, our national newspaper, put it, “Canada isn’t Hobbiton.” Think of Vickers, whose work uniform—a black robe, black hat and shiny chain of office—would fit right in in Colonial Williamsburg, and whose most visible daily task is to carry the Mace into the House of Commons. But he also packs heat and knows how to use it. Or recall George Black, speaker of the House of Commons in the 1930s, who used to shoot rabbits from his office window and brag about especially good hunting days.

More than 66,000 men and women from Canada and Newfoundland were killed, and more than 172,000 were wounded in World War I, a fight that helped to establish Canada’s independence from Britain. Canada declared war on Germany nine days after the invasion of Poland, and more than two years before Pearl Harbor. A million Canadians and Newfoundlanders, out of a population of just 11 million, served in uniform. Per capita, Canada lost more soldiers in Afghanistan than the United States. It is true that we declined to join the 2003 war in Iraq, but time has shown that decision is better described as wise than wimpish.

Nor are we entirely inexperienced when it comes to attempted murder in the House of Commons. In 1966, a man brought dynamite into parliament. It blew up early, as he was leaving the bathroom. Question Period continued uninterrupted.

We are also familiar with more organized and effective domestic political violence. In 1970, a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister were kidnapped by Quebec separatists; the cabinet minister was later killed by them. To fight the terrorists, the Canadian government, for the first time during peacetime, invoked the War Measures Act, giving the government emergency powers, including a serious suspension of civil liberties.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau described these measures as “distasteful” and promised to revoke them as soon as possible. But he said they were necessary: “If a democratic society is to continue to exist, it must be able to root out the cancer of an armed, revolutionary movement that is bent on destroying the very basis of our freedom.”

Canadians understand that there are times when democracies need to put themselves on a war footing to prevent themselves from being destroyed. We’ve done that. That’s why we know how grave that decision is, and that it can only be taken reluctantly, deliberatively and as a last resort.

We also know that it is during times of crisis that we need to be most assiduous in defending our pluralist democracy. One night after the shooting in Ottawa, a mosque in Cold Lake, Alberta, was spray-painted with the words, “Go Home.” That was the reaction many of us had feared. But the next morning, dozens of people in Cold Lake came to the mosque and cleaned it up. Some brought hand-written signs that read, “You Are Home.” Their civic response was celebrated across the country and this week in parliament.

On Tuesday, we buried our dead. Now and inevitably, the unity inspired by this tragedy will fade, and we will return to the intense partisan debate that is how democracies make their choices.

But character is revealed in crisis, and in the trauma of the past week, we learned something about Canada’s. It turns out that we are pretty good at keeping our head when all about us are losing theirs. I’m obviously biased, but New York magazine, too, noticed our “maturity and dignity” and Mother Jones was struck by our “calm, credible breaking-news reporting.”

It also turns out that, like Vickers, we appreciate that the whole point of security is to defend our diverse democracy and that all security measures we take need to be grounded in that understanding.

“The best way we can react to this, after the initial shock, is not with a panicky search for false assurances, nor even defiance,” Andrew Coyne, a conservative columnist, writing in the country’s conservative national newspaper, argued the day of the attack, “but a collective insouciance, a flick of the metaphoric cigarette, a magnificent national shrug.”

Most of us don’t smoke anymore. But, when the weather is warm, on Wednesdays at lunchtime anyone who wants to can do yoga on the lawn in front of the House of Commons. It is already too cold for that, but next spring when you see us doing our downward dogs, you will see a country magnificently shrugging, and keeping calm and carrying on.