Shortly after the van attack in north Toronto this week, authorities placed big concrete barriers outside the Union Station transit hub downtown. A sensible precaution in the circumstances, you might say.
But wait. Officials were insisting there was no evidence the attack was part of a wider plot and no reason to fear a threat to national security. In any case, a determined assailant could plow into crowds of pedestrians in all sorts of other places, from the Bay Street financial corridor and the busy downtown shopping area of Yonge and Dundas to the waterfront on a nice weekend.
It’s impossible to terror-proof every “soft target.” We can’t put barriers and bollards on Yonge Street all the way from the lake in the south to Finch Avenue to the north. We can’t turn the city into a fortress. Nor would we want to. The last thing Toronto should do in response to Monday’s attack is surrender to fear and take futile measures that would compromise the way we live.
Union Station barriers erected after Toronto van attack draw pushback
Governments already spend countless millions on security measures that may or may not make us safer. Doors on public schools that were once open to anyone now have locks and intercoms. Airport visitors endure tiresome rounds of checks – shoes off, please ma’am – that have made air travel a misery. The countermeasures get ratcheted up every time some incident or other hits the news.
Before we become an armed camp, we ought to remind ourselves that the chance of being hurt in an attack like Monday’s is tiny. Canada is fortunate to have suffered just a handful of such attacks in the past few years, this one being the deadliest. The combined toll is far less than the national number of deaths from car accidents on a summer long weekend.
In his important new book on how we underrate human progress and overplay threats, Harvard professor Steven Pinker notes that, in 2015, an American was 350 times more likely to die by homicide than by any form of terrorism, 800 times more likely to die in a car crash and 3,000 times more likely to die in any sort of accident. Yet terror attacks grab headlines and undermine our sense of security, making an overreaction almost inevitable. As Prof. Pinker puts it in Enlightenment Now, “Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that it is what it is designed to do.”
None of this means we should just shrug off horrors like what happened on Yonge Street. This was a shocking, unfathomable event. People naturally feel it more deeply than the toll from a bad long weekend on the roads. They start to think: What if I had been there on that sidewalk? Could it happen again? Is the city really safe? Political leaders feel pressure to “do something” even if, as in the case of vehicle attacks, it is far from clear if anything really can be done.
What it does mean is that we should be careful about how we respond. That response should be deliberate, proportionate and coolly rational. It should weigh the action against the risk. It should avoid anything that would diminish the quality of city life. What a mistake it would be to put up barriers that suck the vitality out Toronto’s lively streets.
Those concrete slabs outside beautifully renovated Union Station are ugly. They get in the way. They probably do nothing to protect pedestrians, given that traffic in front of the station generally moves at a crawl anyway. They should come out as soon as possible.
Marcus Gee