Another city, another shooting. Three dead in downtown Montreal, and UK counter-terror experts have already offered their support. The headlines are grimly familiar, but what happens on the ground tells a different story.
At lunchtime on a Tuesday, a gunman opened fire in a busy plaza near McGill University. Panic sent shoppers scrambling for cover. Within hours, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed the death toll and sparked a global security response.
But in Montreal, this is not abstract geopolitics. It is a community that has seen too many memorials. The victims were a student, a retired teacher and a local shopkeeper.
Their names will be briefly famous then forgotten. Meanwhile, life goes on. The coffee shop at the edge of the cordon reopened the next day, serving lattes to reporters.
Social media is filled with candle emojis and calls for action. But change, as ever, is slow. The UK offer of assistance is a diplomatic gesture of solidarity.
But on the ground, Montrealers are doing what people do after a tragedy: they grieve, they rage and they try to make sense of the senseless. The cultural shift is subtle but real. We are learning to live with a low thrum of anxiety, a new normal of routine tragedy.
The question is whether this latest shooting will be a turning point or just another statistic.
