Canadian Lessons from the Tucson Shooting

Calling for someone's assassination live on the CBC might not be a good idea, in hindsight.

Last weekend’s shooting in Arizona is a warning sign to Canadians, according to the Toronto Star’s James Travers. Whether or not it turns out that right-wing vitriol helped fuel suspect Jared Lee Loughner’s murderous rampage, Travers says it’s clear that in both the U.S. and Canada, rhetoric has reached poisonous levels. “Here as in the U.S., politicians routinely accuse each other of the basest motivation,” he writes. “Allegations of hidden agendas, crooked schemes and Taliban sympathies roll off Canadian lips as easily and often as promises made to be broken.” He urges Canadian politicians to reign in their sharp tongues, lest we follow in the Americans’ footsteps.

The Star’s Linda McQuaig also sees Canadian parallels to U.S.-style political hate speech, particularly in that memorable CBC interview in which former Harper staffer Tom Flanagan called for the assassination of Julian Assange. But McQuaig gives little weight to the fact that Flanagan later apologized and retracted his comments as “glib and thoughtless.” The flip side of her argument is that the Flanagan incident is actually a sign of the relative health of Canadian political culture. The day that Sarah Palin admits to being thoughtless will be right around the time hell freezes over and Alaska thaws out.

This editorial in the Ottawa Citizen does an excellent job of articulating an argument being made elsewhere, cautioning against reading too much into the act of a madman. “As useful as the metaphors might be for those who already believe there's something wrong with the state of the union, the bare facts are less pliable,” says the Citizen. “There is no reason to believe the shooter was motivated by mainstream political rhetoric.”

That said, the paper’s editors figure now is the perfect time to address the decreasing civility in Canadian politics. “The tragedy in Tucson had, no doubt, complex causes … That doesn't mean politicians on the left and right can't take this moment to examine their own roles in public life and ask themselves whether they could make better use of that most precious freedom, the freedom to speak our minds.”