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Or sign-in if you have an account.A Montreal police officer surveys damage to the Heal restaurant, which was the scene of the shooting in the Côte-des-Neiges borough in Montreal on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. Photo by Evan Buhler /Montreal GazetteFirst Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorIn just 13 days, three Canadian police officers have been intentionally killed in three distinct attacks.On June 9, OPP officer Tarun Bali was struck and killed by a vehicle in Hearst, Ont., while attempting to locate an 18-year-old who had escaped from a hospital. The 18-year-old is charged with Bali’s murder.Two days later, on June 11, Toronto Police constable Marc Pinizzotto was shot and killed while executing a raid on an address connected to a series of attacks in the city, including a shooting at the U.S. consulate.And on Monday, a targeted ambush on Montreal police officers killed Mohamed Benredouane.In the case of the Montreal shooting, the alleged killer left behind a rambling 104-page manifesto branding police as “hired guns of the bourgeois class,” and marking them out as one of several cohorts to be killed.This newsletter from NP Comment tackles the topics you care about. (Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays)By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againAnd the deaths of Bali, Pinizzotto and Benredouane do not include the other Canadian police officers who have survived recent attempts to kill them. The Montreal attack saw a second officer wounded by gunfire, but in stable condition in hospital. And on the same day, two RCMP were shot in Melville, Sask., and their alleged assailant charged with attempted murder.All together, it’s a spasm of anti-police violence across multiple attacks in quick succession with no precedent in Canadian history.Even across decades with dramatically higher rates of violent crime, it was unusual to see more than three police officers killed in an average year.A 2010 report by Statistics Canada found that 133 police officers were murdered on duty between 1961 and 2009 — a time period that includes some of the most violent years in Canadian history.The year 1975, for instance, retains the all-time record for highest Canadian murder rate at 3.03 homicides per 100,000 population, as compared to Canada’s most recently tabulated homicide rate of 1.91 per 100,000.Still, across the 48-year period covered by the report, the number of police officers murdered on duty came to an average of 2.7 per year. The shooting death of Toronto Const. Marc Pinizzotto during the “high-risk” execution of a search warrant on Thursday has been linked to a shooting at the U.S. consulate in Toronto in March and an FBI terrorism investigation. Photo by Toronto Police handoutWhat’s more, most of those officers were killed in an era where protective vests were not a standard component of Canadian police uniforms. “Nine in ten police officers were shot to death, most of whom were not wearing a protective vest,” reads the report.As such, some of those 133 murdered officers would likely have survived had they been wearing the kit of a modern Canadian police officer.A more recent survey out of the University of Ottawa found that 166 Canadian police officers had been killed in “intentionally harmful acts” in the 60-year period from 1962 to 2022. Here again, this worked out to an average of 2.7 Canadian police officers being intentionally killed on duty over the course of a typical calendar year.What this means is that within the space of just two weeks, Canadian law enforcement will be organizing more funerals for murdered members than used to be the case across an average year.In fact, June has proved to be such a violent month for Canadian police that officers are being killed at a frequency more typical in the United States — a country far larger and far more violent.According to recent figures from the FBI, the years 2022 to 2023 saw 194 “felonious deaths” of on-duty American police officers.This means that a two-week period in the United States sees an average of 2.5 on-duty police murdered in the line of duty — a rate slightly below Canada’s June surge of on-duty police deaths. Montreal police officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane was killed in the line of duty on June 22, 2026.This is despite the fact that the U.S. population is 8.6 times larger than Canada’s, and the country dwarfs Canada on every conceivable measure of violent crime, including homicides.For Canada, the only comparable surge of fatal attacks on police occurred just three years ago, when eight officers were killed in five attacks across the seven months from September 2022 to March 2023.In those cases, the murders stood out not only for their frequency, but that so many of them had been the result of targeted ambushes on police.Most of the officers killed had no chance to defend themselves and, as in Montreal, were fired upon immediately after showing up to a call for service, or were murdered in an unprovoked attack. This is Prime Minister Mark Carney photographed just after he was captured on a hot mic saying that his MPs are “useful for votes.” As Carney was preparing for a photo op with visiting Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, a Reuters camera captured him delivering the remark, apparently as part of an explanation of the Canadian political system.The people of Regina, Sask., will soon be hearing the city’s first-ever Muslim call to prayer, after a mosque obtained a permit to start broadcasting one every Friday at noon. So on Tuesday, the Regina Police Service published a letter warning opponents of the measure that they are now subject to “recently enhanced Canadian hate crimes legislation.” That would be Bill C-9, the Liberal-introduced Combatting Hate Act that received royal assent just last week.First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. 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