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It means they double checked and the driver was definitely white

Dude might have been drunk. If it isn't intentional, it's usually a case of too drunk or too old.

What are you talking about, the victims weren't white?

/s

It does resemble a terrorist attack...

But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)...

They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, 'suspect is well known to the department'... gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another ... every month or other week.

At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says... that would require a political or ideological motivation.

The CoP ... you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn't. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with ... seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.

If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.

Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just... very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.

Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.

There's a very specific rubric for what counts as a terrorist attack in Canada. Probably the level of calculation and premeditation involved was a factor and that he's not a part of an ideologically organized group that is trying to influence behaviour of a government or political body.

A spontaneous hate crime made against a population is technically not a terrorist attack by Canadian definition. To count you have to have done it for a narrow slice of very specific reasons.

I prefer to call them "Poilievre voters"

No. East Asian looking male with a history of mental illness.

Most likely the political component of this tragedy is how the Socreds closed regional mental health institutions in the late 20th C, and subsequent governments just swept the whole thing under the rug while homelessness spread through the province and mentally disturbed and unsupported people lashed out in random ways.

Now you have dorks and bootlickers like Mayor Sims turning a health system failure into an opportunity for cruelty and repression. Punishment will be the talking point. They will roll with that, watch.

Only a good guy with a car can stop a bad guy with a car though. Also if everyone in a crowd had a car, stuff like this wouldn't be possible.

/s for the people in the back

Conservatives are a terrorist threat

FTFY

Actually, I agree. Put them underground, in a tunnel, where people aren't walking.

Walking > Bikes > Trains > Buses > fuck cars.

Cars need to go, streets need to pedestrianize, and bollards need to go up to make sure cars stay the hell out.

To your point, imagine if this were a mass-shooting and the title were: "Nine people killed after gun shoots into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival". "Nine people killed after knife stabs into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival." It's so fucking passive as to be sickening. It reminds me of the "Man dies in officer-involved shooting" trope we see in US media because extrajudicial murder by the police is so routine and heavily whitewashed.

The AP gives it the same treatment. The only equivalent I could think of is "Nine people killed after bomb explodes into crowd", and you know why that might be written that way? Because it's not immediately obvious who placed the bomb. This mass-murdering psychopath is in custody; we can say "Nine people killed after man drives into crowd at Vancouver Filipino festival."

Edit: the death toll is now eleven, not nine.

There are a lot of areas that were designed based on cars. Where I live would be difficult for most of the residents without cars or something similar. The population density is too low to make most public transportation practical.

Your not wrong but this isn't why.