Danforth Avenue in Toronto, the site of Sunday’s attack, was a crime scene in the aftermath; a cafe window was pocked with bullet holes and the area was packed with police cruisers. But within 48 hours of the shooting, Toronto residents were again lounging on sunny patios, drinking beer and coffee, next to makeshift memorials that grew taller with flowers with each passing hour.

On Tuesday, our Toronto bureau chief, Catherine Porter, met a young man behind the counter of a souvlakia joint, next to a square where the 18-year-old aspiring nurse, Reese Fallon, had bled to death. He said he had helped 10 people hide in the basement and 10 more behind the counter, “and then brought a wounded man in and applied pressure to his leg, where he’d been shot,” Catherine told me. “And here he was, back at work. ‘This is my home,’ he said.”

Beyond the notable tenacity of Torontonians, our reporting this week also reminded me that violence in Canada, where gun-control laws are relatively robust, is by no means the new normal. The vaunted Canadian liberal model of my youth is still very much here. Torontonians have rallied together; the search for easy scapegoats that had followed some attacks in Europe was noticeably muted.

Gun homicides in Canada are about as common as deaths from alcohol poisoning in the United States, which number about 5.6 per million people each year, according to this eye-opening analysis by The Times’s Upshot column. And while the cities of Toronto and Chicago have roughly the same populations, Toronto had 61 homicides in 2017 compared with 650 in Chicago, according to police data from both cities. There were a total of 660 homicides in the whole of Canada in 2017.