Twenty five years ago and a phone call...

We know what happened twenty-five years ago. I then lived in Ann Arbor while Allison studied at the University of Michigan. Four memories of that living through that time as an alien on an American visa, time, not only the day but the weeks that followed it, stand out for me. I remember the Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor we attended, and the service on the Sunday that followed the Tuesday of 9/11. The pastor climbed into the pulpit and began his sermon with “Oh. My. God.” I remember calling my brother in Toronto to check in on him, and hearing from my sister in law that my brother was in New York. In fact, he had been at Bloomberg in midtown when the planes hit the towers, but that morning there had been a breakfast meeting on the topic of risk management in the insurance industry at Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower, and two of his colleagues had gone. One was late and survived; one was on time and didn’t.

I remember travelling home to Canada after the border closures and the weeks of uncertainty, and driving north to the bridge at Sarnia, when we passed Selfridge Air National Guard Base. At that time the Americans were flying combat air patrols over their cities, and we saw the Detroit CAP coming in. That F16 had a weapon on every hard point; it looked like a flying missile battery rather than an airplane. And in that moment I felt very glad, very grateful, that someone was minding the store.

In our collective memory in Canada, we remember 9/11 from the perspective of Gander, the feat of air traffic control that brought hundreds of US- flights and tens of thousands of planes safely down in Canada. We remember the hospitality extended by the Gander community to stranded travellers, and the bonds of friendship forged there. And we should.
But we tend to forget the harder, darker meaning of Canada’s response on that day. We forget the uncertainty and the emotions that accompanied the uncertainty.

Nobody making decisions on that morning or afternoon had any way of knowing, how many hijackers al-Qaeda had in the air, or how many aircraft they controlled. The Americans closed their airspace precisely because of this. At the moment the FAA closed US airspace to incoming traffic, Prime Minister Chretien had to decide whether Canada would accept a significant portion of the risk the American government had refused. It strains the bounds of optimism to believe an al-Qaeda hijack team would have willingly accepted the news their flight would divert to a Canadian airport, far from their American target. If any of those aircraft had hijackers aboard, they might well have either tried to take the aircraft and attack the nearest Canadian city, or else engaged in a murderous tussle with the passengers and crew that could have ended with the aircraft going down in an inhabited area.

We think of aircraft landing at the small town of Gander Newfoundland, but US-bound aircraft also landed at Toronto Pearson, Montreal Dorval, Halifax, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Calgary. Prime Minister Chretien had to accept an unknown risk. He took it; we’ll never know if he hesitated, but he acted decisively and in good time, and in doing so he protected the lives of about 40,000 passengers and aircrew: well over ten times the number of lives taken by al-Qaeda on that day.

It’s good to remember the kindness and hospitality shown by Canadians, but it’s also important to remember the courage that made the hospitality possible.