An alarming story is developing north of the border – all schools in the Canadian Province of Prince Edward Island have just been evacuated due to an unspecified threat. Over 19,000 students are affected.
The CBC reports:
All schools in P.E.I. are under an evacuation order due to a potential threat, say police.
A police news release Wednesday says school staff are taking students to safe locations in the community, and buses will meet the children there.
Child-care centres in schools will follow the schools’ evacuation procedures. Other child-care centres will operate as usual.
Parents and guardians can now pick up their children from the safe locations, which are identified in each school’s evacuation plan. Parents can go to the school, where staff will direct them to the safe locations, said the province’s Department of Education.
RCMP say there are no reports of injuries.
The University of Prince Edward Island and Holland College are also closed for the day.
Prince Edward Island, the smallest province in Canada, is an island with a population of 140,000 located just north of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (which borders the American state of Maine.)
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, three post-secondary schools in nearby Nova Scotia are also under evacuation orders this morning as police say they are investigating bomb threats.
Coming on the heels of the bombing and knife attacks in New Jersey, New York, and Minnesota this weekend, it isn’t surprising that these threats are being taken seriously. Officials plan to have a press conference concerning the evacuation at 11:00AM Eastern/12:00PM Atlantic Time.
Canada is often pointed to by American opinion writers as a nation with gun control laws that American should emulate. It’s de rigeur for those writers to express surprise and shock when violence, or the threat of it, rears its head in our northern neighbor, protesting that “this isn’t supposed to happen in Canada.”
In contrast, David Kopel wrote an article some years ago about the ineffectiveness of Canada’s gun laws (as well as historical and cultural differences between the two nations,) titled “The Failure of Canada’s Gun Laws“. A 2016 article in the Globe and Mail actually bemoans the nation’s number of suicides with a firearm, claiming that Canada just does’t have enough gun control, in case you thought that letting the camel’s nose in the tent wouldn’t eventually result in the camel taking over the tent.
One thing is clear: when an attack is underway, Canada’s people will not be as ready to resist it because of their nation’s disarmament laws. So much the worse for them.