Hanes: Amqui tragedy reminds us we’re all vulnerable to a disturbing trend
Amqui #Amqui
What was once an unthinkable crime has become an eerily familiar tragedy to Quebecers.
For the second time in just over a month, drivers have weaponized their vehicles, killing and maiming innocent bystanders, traumatizing tight-knit communities and leaving us all profoundly shaken.
In February, a Laval city bus driver veered from his regular route and rammed his vehicle into a daycare in the Ste-Rose neighbourhood. Two children died and six others were hurt.
On Monday, a pickup-truck driver in Amqui struck pedestrians walking along both sides of the small Bas-St-Laurent town’s main street. Two men were killed and nine other people were injured, including a baby and a toddler .
Steeve Gagnon, a 38-year-old local, so far faces charges of dangerous driving causing death for the carnage left along a 500-metre stretch of road in Amqui. While the Laval bus driver’s act was said to be deliberate, police allege Monday’s act was premeditated — which may prove a subtle but important distinction in trying to answer the all-consuming question: Why?
In the Laval case, Pierre Ny St-Amand had to be restrained by witnesses as he emerged screaming from his bus and tearing off his clothes. He has been deemed fit to stand trial on two counts of first-degree murder, but is under evaluation to see if he can be held criminally responsible. Although neither his friends nor colleagues ever saw any warning signs and St-Amand was not known to be on any waiting lists for mental health care, the behaviour of the married father nevertheless suggests psychological illness.
So far we know less about Gagnon, who turned himself in to police after the incident, although TVA found a friend who posted on social media suggesting the accused was going through a rough patch.
But there have been more sinister motives to recent vehicle attacks in Europe. A terrorist plowed a dump truck into the throngs gathered in Nice on Bastille Day in 2016; a truck driver smashed into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin that same year; Islamic State militants used a van to strike pedestrians on London Bridge in 2017; and a van crashed into pedestrians on a busy Barcelona shopping street, to name a few examples.
Closer to home, an incel — involuntarily celibate misogynist — slammed into pedestrians with a rented van on Toronto’s Yonge St. in 2018 to show his hatred for women. A man behind the wheel of a pickup truck mowed down a Muslim family in London, Ont., in 2021, prompting charges of terrorism.
Such attacks are similar to the scourge of mass shootings, but they have a chilling new dimension. Whether in a big city or a small town, it is nearly impossible to defend against a truck taking aim at civilians.
Of course cars can be dangerous at any time, as we know from the pedestrian death toll in Montreal . But fatalities are usually a result of carelessness, negligence, distraction or failure to follow safety rules. When drivers intentionally use their vehicles against bystanders, it’s the bluntest of weapons being deployed against the softest of targets. We are all vulnerable. That’s what makes the idea so horrifying.
Mass shootings are typically followed by calls for stricter gun controls. The 1989 femicides at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were a catalyst for the laws in force in Canada today. Such regulations do work. If you look at the terrifying ubiquity of gun violence in the U.S., where second-amendment rights are sacrosanct, there’s just no comparison to the much lower rates in Canada, Australia or other countries with more robust restrictions. We are not immune from shooting sprees, of course, but they are mercifully rare.
It’s easier to justify limits on lethal weapons, even if hunters and sport shooters use them legitimately. How do you curb access to something most people have — be it a pickup truck, van, car or SUV? It would be about as effective as outlawing baseball bats or knives.
You can pedestrianize some zones and erect concrete crash barriers around crowded public spaces, like festival or concert sites. But you can’t do that on every street, everywhere that people and vehicles share the road. It’s another reason to keep looking over our shoulders on the sidewalk.
Transport Minister François Bonnardel suggested suspending the licences of drivers experiencing mental distress, then backtracked. How realistic would that be when so many Quebecers struggle to access mental health support — and when the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec’s digital shift has been such a monumental disaster?
Besides, mental health problems alone are not necessarily a predictor that someone will turn a vehicle into a killing machine, as we saw in Toronto and London. And there is no mechanism to evaluate drivers for radicalization.
More work must be done on stamping out hatred, in all its forms, before it erupts into bloodshed.
Once again, Quebecers are trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. But the search for answers has taken on new urgency.
ahanes@postmedia.com