Stephen Harper had to hide in anteroom during gunfight on the Hill
OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper was hustled into a small anteroom of the grand Reading Room as gunfire erupted in the hallway outside. He waited up to 15 agonizingly long minutes to be extracted from the deadly scene unfolding metres away.
RCMP protective security detail, normally stationed outside the building, raced through the hallways trying to reach him. The prime minister is not under the Mounties’ watch while in Parliament but protected by House of Commons security — only some of whom carry weapons.
When the elite protective team arrived, sources told the Star, MPs who’d barricaded the door with chairs and tables refused to open up, not believing it was the RCMP there to rescue the prime minister.
Most of the entire cabinet would wait nearly nine more hours to escape lockdown. Only a handful of ministers key to handling the public safety crisis were escorted out well after Harper — the ministers of defence, foreign affairs, public safety and justice — joining him in an undisclosed location to sit as an emergency cabinet. A couple of other ministers had rushed out a back door when the shots first rang out, unwittingly heading toward the fray before ducking up a stairwell.
It was chaos.
Some say controlled chaos, that there’s a master security plan, that the four forces responsible for security on Parliament Hill — Commons guards, Senate guards, the RCMP and Ottawa police — all worked well.
Others told the Star, “We were f---ing lucky.”
How could a man storm in through the front doors of Parliament on foot brandishing a gun minutes after a deadly shooting at the nearby War Memorial? One law enforcement source called that “the million dollar question.”
Just one minute and 23 seconds is all it had taken gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau to barge into Parliament after he’d fled, by car, the National War Memorial half a city block away.