Since I moved to Canada permanently, a lot of little things remind me that this isn’t the United States. Most of them are trivial, like how I pronounce “sorry” and “Saskatchewan.” However, the horrific school shootings in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, reminded me that the differences between the two countries run far deeper than pronunciation and access to hockey rinks. In this case, I was shocked by how different it was to be living through this tragedy in a functional democracy run by reasonably sane people, rather than in a dysfunctional autocracy run by a narcissistic fascist and his band of loyal sycophants.
The Tumbler Ridge Secondary School shootings occurred on February 10. Nine people were killed, including the shooter, and 27 more wounded. It was the worst incident in Canada since the 2020 Nova Scotia attack, and the deadliest school shooting in Canada since the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989, when 14 female students were killed by a gunman who said he was fighting feminism.
The response to Tumbler Ridge by the police, government, and public shocked me. In the wake of the shooting, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released information in a controlled, steady flow without speculation or innuendo. They didn’t wait for hours like police did in the American school shooting at Uvalde, Texas. They didn’t throw bad information out there, like Attorney General Kash Patel did when he claimed that the Brown University shooter was in custody. I knew, with confidence, that what I was being told was the truth as far as they knew it in that instant, and that they were being cautious and deliberate. Everyone did the right things and indicated that they would continue to do the right things.
The same, sadly, cannot be said for U.S. law enforcement. I hadn’t realized how used I had become to the insane response to the frequent mass shootings in the United States.
In Canada, the public reacted with shock and horror, but it didn’t jump to conclusions or immediately begin demanding action in the absence of facts. Everyone seemed content to let the evidence come to light before designing laws and policy meant to prevent this from happening again. The perpetrator was transgender, but no one is calling for the RCMP to start rounding up all trans people or take away their legally owned firearms. The system failed at multiple points, any of which could have prevented this tragedy, and the public is patient enough to accept that a complicated problem will require a thoughtful solution.
Politicians in Canada have also banded together in shock and horror, with only the (largely irrelevant) Bloc Québécois veering off script into off-topic grievances about language. It hasn’t devolved into rants about banning all guns, banning transgender people, or blaming it on video games or the opposition party, all of which are inevitable responses to such things in the U.S. Prime Minister Mark Carney of the Liberal Party and Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party of Canada leader, stood shoulder to shoulder and put politics aside. Neither of them went off script, and neither posted disgusting, crazy things on social media about what happened. Their goal was to speak to a grieving nation and unite it, if but for a moment.
These politicians appear content to wait for the investigations to be finished before they reach their own conclusions on what is to be done. Everyone involved expects a consensus to emerge, at which time the solutions will be well reasoned and supported by the public. Parliament will vote to implement them, and they will be upheld by the courts.
To an American like me, this level of calm sanity is surreal. I have become so accustomed to the inevitable and pointless kabuki dance that follows every shooting in the U.S. that the lack of it makes the silence almost eerie. I keep expecting U.S.-style insanity, and it never comes.
Of course, some Americans did react the way I expected. The U.S. ambassador to Canada offered “hearts and prayers” and the Christian nationalist prayer that Canada “find the peace and comfort that only He can provide.” Unlike other world leaders, Donald Trump offered only silence. This is probably the best he can do at a time like this, given his penchant for inciting nastiness might result in the U.S. Embassy getting sacked like it’s Tehran in 1979.
Elon Musk and other U.S. conservatives once again blamed mass shootings on an imaginary “epidemic of transgender violence,” which the data does not support. When a province-level politician in Canada went down this track, rather than jumping on her bandwagon to hunt for a scapegoat, Canadians generally reacted with disgust. The Conservative Party seems uninterested in following her lead.
I remember that in the days following 9/11, an Arizonan Sikh gas station clerk in the neighborhood I grew up in was shot to death in retaliation for the attack. Instead of turning a tragedy into an opportunity to terrorize other Canadians who had nothing to do with it, the country is listening to its better angels.
Compare all of what is happening now in Canada with the usual shitshow that accompanies a mass shooting in the U.S. The shooting happens, police response is often bad, and the misinformation flows freely from all angles. Trans people immediately get blamed for everything, even if they had nothing to do with it (like the roommate of the man who killed Charlie Kirk, who had no foreknowledge of his roommate’s plans and who cooperated fully with the FBI).
Politicians say outrageous things, and blame “the other side.” Everyone has an instantaneous solution, which has no chance of ever being passed. None of the arguments or solutions are made in good faith, and no one actually believes they are in good faith. Politicians are just saying the things their base and donors expect them to say before the news cycle moves on and no one cares. No one believes anything will change, but everyone is required to pretend the entire kayfabe process is real.
The only people who think something might get done—but I don’t mean something good—are transgender people. They are terrified they’ll be put on a list, have their constitutional rights revoked, or be interned against their will in the name of “public safety” for something they not only had nothing to do with personally but regard as horrific in the same way everyone else does.
This has been perfectly illustrated by Monday’s shooting at a Rhode Island youth hockey league game, where the suspect killed their ex-wife and son, then themselves, and wounded three others in the melee. The suspect appears to have been transgender, which led some on the right to call for the entire transgender community to have their Second Amendment rights revoked and be involuntarily committed. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and an architect of Project 2025, said, “We believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday.” He said the solution is to “outlaw it.”
In the final analysis, after the mass shooting in Canada, what I was shocked by wasn’t the violence: I’ve become too numbed for that, after having lived in the U.S. I was caught off guard by how used I had become to living in a cynical, dystopian competitive autocracy. I expected the inevitable Sturm und Drang of U.S. politics after a shooting, but I witnessed instead what an actual, functional country should do. And at the same time, I believe many Canadians, particularly those opposed to being annexed by the U.S., fully comprehend the consequences of living in a single-party authoritarian state that has no interest in the common good.
