Ottawa shootings to prompt security review, fortifications of public buildings

Regardless of whether Wednesday’s Ottawa shooting rampage was a planned terror attack or the act of one mad man, it’s clear access to public buildings will become harder, maybe much harder.

A shooter who reportedly began by gunning down an ceremonial guard carrying an inoperable rifle at the National War Memorial, then gained access to Parliament a few hundred metres away before being cornered and killed by the Commons Sergeant-at-Arms.

Hard questions will undoubtedly be asked about how the gunman was able to get through a lightly guarded door used by MPs and accredited media, among others.

The larger question is, how far do we go in a free society in turning public buildings into fortresses in the name of security, making the word public more ironic than real?

“In a democratic society people expect access to democratic sites,” former public safety minister Stockwell Day told Yahoo Canada News. “Having said that, I think generally the public, especially now, are going to be more open to even heightened areas of security.”

But a security expert warned the effort could be counter productive, simply pushing attackers to look for softer targets.

“We shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction off this because then we’re just playing into what these extremists and terrorist ideologies want us to do, which is to be afraid,” said retired Lt.-Col. Stephen Day, former commander of the armed forces Joint Task Force 2, the elite special operations unit.

“So we can control our own reaction to this and show them as a G7 country, as a first world nation, that we are going to react appropriately as a first world democracy should react.”

The reflex certainly will be to double the guard. But there are thousands of federal public buildings, large and small, scattered across Canada, not to mention provincial government buildings and city halls, all of them conceivably targets for terrorism.

“Everything will be looked at,” said Stockwell Day, adding. “Practicalities will be taken into consideration.”

[ Related: Parliament Hill shooting: Soldier killed, one gunman dead; both now identified ]

Day, who held the public safety portfolio from February 2006 to May 2008 and retired from politics two years later, said it’s still too easy to get an unauthorized vehicle into the Parliament Hill complex despite the recent addition of what Day called light barriers.

The barriers were added after a disgruntled man drove his car up to the steps of the Centre Block in 2003. Four years later, a woman ignored a security guard’s order and drove her car through a restricted entrance.

“That’s one area they may want to look at in terms of vehicle access,” he said. “It’s just one of many challenges of making something secure and yet still relatively open to the citizens who expect to be there.”

The entrance the gunman reportedly used is guarded by two officers from the House of Commons security force, the former minister said. You need a pass to get through.

“But if you were running and if you had a gun, you could easily dispense with the two officers that were there and absolutely make your way into the heart of the building,” said Day, who used the entrance recently.

Stephen Day (no relation), who retired from the army last March and now operates a private security consultancy called Reticle, said the attack will trigger a top-to-bottom review of security on Parliament Hill and other federal buildings.

But he believes the fairly quick take-down of the shooter shows existing security worked very well.

“It’s an individual tragedy on a couple of levels,” he said. “The reality is on a higher level this is actually a success story of Canada’s security apparatus reacting appropriately.”

“There’s always improvements that can be made after an event. You’ve got to sit down, assess what happened, look at the protocols, our tactics, techniques and procedures and then try to draw the appropriate lessons from that. I don’t think at this early stage we would want to rush to judge what worked and what didn’t work.”

A 2012 report by the Auditor General of Canada suggested there were gaps in Parliament Hill security, which is a joint responsibility of the RCMP, the House of Commons Security Service and Senate Protective Service.

The administration responsible for Parliament accepted a recommendation to ensure each had an equal capacity to react to threats and to study the possibility of creating a unified protective force for the parliamentary precinct. It’s not clear where that review stands.

The Ottawa attack, coupled with the vehicular attack on two soldiers outside a Service Canada office in Quebec on Monday, which killed one of them, Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, send a signal that no federal facility is too small to target.

But Stephen Day said it would be a costly and perhaps ineffective to try and protect every public building from any potential danger.

“You actually need to balance what is the true threat and what is the consequence of action or inaction?” he said. “The challenge is you can’t harden everything.”

[ Related: Canada police say they were tracking man who killed a soldier ]

Increasing security in and around more buildings would simply transfer the threat elsewhere, he said.

“Every point that you harden you actually just push potential terrorists or extremists onto another, softer target,” said Day.

Access to many federal buildings is controlled by the Corps of Commissionaires, mostly recruited from the ranks of armed forces retirees.

Stockwell Day suggested perhaps its time to consider armed guards instead.

“Some people don’t want to even get into the discussion because it’s somewhat repelling to them,” said former minister, who presided over the arming of Canada Border Services Agency officers. “But I think it’s a discussion that needs to be had when we look at public buildings.

“Here in Canada, you can carry a firearm if you are protecting a truck full of money but you can’t carry a firearm if you’re protecting a building full of people.”

But Stephen Day warned the measure would be costly, complex and fraught with its own risks, certainly if commissionaires were drafted in.

“My answer would be, before we start turning Canada into an armed camp, how many people do we want running around with guns?” the former soldier asked.

“I would not personally be a fan of that approach unless we were willing to put the resources behind it to make sure they were proficient with that sidearm.”

The real answer, he said, is not to erode our sense of freedom by putting more of government behind walls but by providing flexible, layered security that identifies the threat before it gets to the door.

“It’s not about holding the one-yard line in the football analogy, it’s about starting to defend at centre field,” the former soldier said.