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That’s one of the reasons you never forget a mass killing, if you’ve been near one. It sounds awful, but it’s true: a single homicide can feel like a private thing. Most murders in this country don’t attract much public notice. Suicides, drug overdose and fatal collisions rarely get any at all. A mass killing is different. A mass killing spreads grief like poison gas. It clouds everything in all directions. It makes it impossible to turn away.

The last day of the 2025 federal election campaign played out in the shadow of the worst mass killing in Vancouver history. On Saturday night, a man drove an SUV into the crowd at a Filipino street festival, killing at least 11 people and wounding dozens more.

Like many Torontonians, I’m sure, I thought about the Yonge St. van attack when I heard the news, then I thought about the Danforth murders that bookended that dark summer of 2018. I covered both events, for the National Post. The stories I heard in the days and weeks after each will never leave me. It wasn’t just the shock and the pain. It was the terrible sense that what had happened had been kinetic somehow, almost alive, not a discrete tragedy but a series of them, violence careening down two of Toronto’s most important roads.

I felt some sympathy for the party leaders who had to react to the killings Sunday. Political campaigns are exhausting in the best of times. By the end, even the healthiest, most balanced leaders will be rubbed raw from the tension, travel and lack of sleep. (And frankly, not a lot of healthy, balanced people go into politics.) To be in that state, at the end, and then to be plunged into that pit of grief and pain is its own kind of second-hand cruelty.

Still that’s the job they’re asking for, all of them. Elected office at the highest level isn’t really about executing plans. It’s about reacting to the worst that comes and doing it well, with some measure of humanity and grace.

Mark Carney upended his campaign schedule Sunday. He cancelled several rallies, attended a series of smaller events across the country, then appeared at vigil Sunday night in Vancouver. Pierre Poilievre largely left his itinerary intact. He joined a Filipino church Sunday morning to express his condolences. He offered words of sympathy and grief at several rallies. But at his final event, not just of the night but of the campaign, he didn’t mention the massacre at all.

I was at that rally, at a maple farm outside Ottawa. I’ll admit it struck me as a strange omission. Poilievre has a section of his stump speech dedicated not just to crime, but to crime in Vancouver specifically, and he left it largely unchanged. Watching him stand in the backup of a pickup truck, intoning in his jaunty, solemn way about the same 40 offenders being arrested 6000 times in Vancouver while ignoring the 11 people killed in Vancouver less than 24 hours earlier, he appeared to me, not for the first time in this campaign, as a man who has a hard time adjusting to the moment, a man not well suited to change.

It’s possible that feeling had more to do with me than with Poilievre. I’ve written critically of the Conservative leader in this campaign; I’ve written critically of Carney and Jagmeet Singh as well. But that’s not what I mean.

I never really got over what I saw and heard on Yonge St. and the Danforth in 2018. I wasn’t new to this job then. I had already been up close with tragedy and violence and grief. But something slipped for me covering those two stories. It never really slipped back. I haven’t put my hand up to cover a major crime story since.

That was in my mind as I waited for Poilievre to appear Sunday night, as the sun set over the maple trees and the Conservative crowd. It was in my mind all day. I think I was expecting the event to reflect what I was feeling, the horror and sorrow.

It didn’t, of course. Instead, it was just another rally, a piece of choreographed theatre on a day when everything else felt all too real.