This remarkable video, shot by Globe and Mail reporter Josh Wingrove on his iPhone, shows a view of the Hall of Honour, the main hall running north-south from the front door of the Centre Block to the entrance of the Library of Parliament at the north end. Security forces appear to shoot an armed suspect just outside the door of the Library of Parliament.
Mid-way down the Hall of Honour are entrances on either side to Parliament Hill’s two main committee rooms. On the left, or west side, is 237-C – the Commonwealth Room — where, at the exact moment that the shooter was moving down the hall, the prime minister and all his Conservative MPs were meeting.
This is what it looked like inside the Conservative caucus. Those are MPs barricading their door just before the fusillade you see in Wingrove’s video.
It was a mirror image right across the Hall of Honour.
As they realized a shooter was on the loose in the halls of Parliament, NDP MPs — the country’s Official Opposition — began barricading the doors in the Centre Block room where they were hold their weekly closed-door caucus meeting.
The room is known as 253-D or the Railway Room and contains a reproduction of the famous painting of John A. MacDonald and the Fathers of Confederation holding their meeting in Charlottetown.
The main entrance to the room is right off of the Hall of the Honour, the hall that the shooter moved down after he entered the Centre Block.
NDP MP Charlie Angus said it was an anxious time inside his room.
“We didn’t know how many shooters there were,” Angus said Tuesday evening. “We got people on the ground. We got people under the table. We tried to keep everybody calm.”
Then the shots — the fusillade — rang out and everyone in the room could hear them, Angus said.
The MPs could not know it but that fusillade had included shots from the sidearm of Kevin Vickers, the House of Commons Sergeant-At-Arms, who hit the suspect and is believed to have fatally wounded him.
After a few tense minutes, security officers came into the NDP room and hustled the group — about 100 MPs — out of 253-D through an anteroom and into a hallway leading to the Senate side of the Centre Block.
At this point, some of the MPs got separated. Several ended up being taken to another secure location inside Centre Block — where they remained until just after 9 pm ET — while the rest made it to their offices in buildings a block away from Parliament Hill.
Angus said that while he realizes there will be discussions about security on Parliament Hill in the coming days, he believes MPs should do all they can to maintain the free and open access to Parliament Hill that Canadians cherish.
And he vows that threats and violence will no impact on the political decisions he and his colleagues have been elected to make.”
“Nobody’s gonna intimidate us.”
Is Trudy still making fun of Canada’s military? Is Mulcair still telling Harper “not to be too hasty”? Thank goodness we have intelligence running this country in the Harper Conservatives rather than the Liberal tree huggers and the know nothing NDPers.