“Perhaps you thought yourself safe from retaliation,” would-be terrorist Aaron Driver told Canadians in a martyrdom video shown today at an RCMP news conference.
“You still have a heavy debt, which has to be paid.”
Driver was speaking in what he seems to have thought would be the aftermath of his attack. As things turned out, Canada’s luck held again – but, experts warn, that’s unlikely to last.
Since 2001, nearly every Western country has seen at least one major terrorist attack.
Belgium had several attacks in March, France last November and again this summer, Britain in 2005 and Spain in 2004. The United States, of course, endured one in 2001; more recently, 49 people died in a mass shooting in a nightclub in Orlando, Fla. this year. Germany has seen a series of smaller-scale attacks; one in July killed 12 people. And that’s certainly not an exhaustive list.
But Canada, so far, has only experienced a handful of small-scale individual attacks — spectacular, in the case of the 2014 Parliament Hill shooting — but not a big, ambitious terror event taking dozens or hundreds of lives.
READ MORE: Brussels attack: Could large-scale attack hit Canada? Ex-ISIS fighters make expert uneasy
All the attacks targeted places where large numbers of people were going to assemble, and in most cases that has meant mass transit systems.
Police feared that Driver was planning something similar: Wednesday morning, before he died in a confrontation in Strathroy, Ont., the RCMP warned the Toronto Transit Commission and Metrolinx, a regional transit authority, of a potential terrorist threat.
READ MORE: Toronto transit authorities ‘made aware’ of RCMP terror threat investigation
“I predict there will be more attacks,” warns Lorne Dawson, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo.
“There’s a high probability that someone will succeed in doing something here. The odds, regrettably, are moving in that direction.”
“I think that Canada will be involved in those attacks, and they will be like what we’ve been seeing Brussels and Paris and Nice. Soft-target attacks.”
While other terrorist groups have been reluctant to attack civilians, ISIS has no inhibitions, Dawson says.
“They would be willing to have someone just walk into a mall with a weapon and just start shooting people. There’s not much we can do about it, either.”
If a large attack happened in Canada, University of Calgary professor Michael Zekulin predicts it would target large groups:
“They go where there are large numbers of people who congregate, that are not significantly hardened in the sense that there aren’t outer perimeters of security, or metal detectors, or large numbers of police doing bag searches.”
Why hasn’t a large terrorist attack happened in Canada yet?
“These things are very hard to gauge,” Dawson reflects.
But some of it seems to have to do with the fact that the cultural tensions in countries like France or Belgium don’t happen here in as harsh a form.
“We have fewer terrorist incidents, and the ones we have have been disrupted earlier, and they seem to be less serious in scope. Scholars would say that it does have to do with Canada’s more successful pluralistic society – a society in which fewer people feel alienated or pushed to the margins, and fewer people feel that being a Muslim is somehow an unacceptable phenomenon in our society.”
The question was put to RCMP deputy commissioner Mike Cabana at today’s new conference.
“I think it’s a combination of things,” he answered. “I think proximity in Europe to some key hot spots, or countries, is likely a factor that facilitates these types of attacks, and I hope this is not going to come across as derogatory or negative towards our colleagues in Europe, but the level of coordination we have here in Canada is quite extensive.”
In March, Queens University political science professor Christopher Kilford, an expert on terrorism, argued that Canada doesn’t have the same kind of deeply alienated Muslim populations that some European countries have, which form a base for terrorist groups.
“We just have a better way of integrating people and accepting people,” he says. “That’s not to say we wouldn’t see similar attacks.”
The people behind recent terror incidents in Canada haven’t been immigrants from Muslim countries.
Driver, a convert to Islam, didn’t have a traditional Muslim background. Neither did Martin Couture-Rouleau, who killed a Canadian soldier in a 2014 car attack in Quebec. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who murdered a soldier in Ottawa before attacking Parliament Hill with a rifle, had an Algerian-Canadian father and a Quebecois mother.
Kilford pointed to a danger from returning Canadian ISIS fighters if the group is defeated in the battlefield. The federal government is aware of 60 Canadians who have come home after fighting for ISIS, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told Global News in January. (The real number, of course, is anybody’s guess.)
“A lot of work has been done to say they’ll just come back and most of them will have seen such horrible things that all they’ll want to do is forget it, get back into society and wish they’d never gone in the first place.”
“Then there are others that may come back with a lot of anger, and we’ll have to see how that plays out. The security services in Canada are not blind to this, and they will do their best to prevent something like what we see in Brussels happening here.”
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