Dude might have been drunk. If it isn't intentional, it's usually a case of too drunk or too old.

It means they double checked and the driver was definitely white

It does resemble a terrorist attack...

But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)...

They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, 'suspect is well known to the department'... gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another ... every month or other week.

At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says... that would require a political or ideological motivation.

The CoP ... you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn't. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with ... seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.

If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.

Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just... very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.

Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.

There's a very specific rubric for what counts as a terrorist attack in Canada. Probably the level of calculation and premeditation involved was a factor and that he's not a part of an ideologically organized group that is trying to influence behaviour of a government or political body.

A spontaneous hate crime made against a population is technically not a terrorist attack by Canadian definition. To count you have to have done it for a narrow slice of very specific reasons.

Only a good guy with a car can stop a bad guy with a car though. Also if everyone in a crowd had a car, stuff like this wouldn't be possible.

/s for the people in the back

Actually, I agree. Put them underground, in a tunnel, where people aren't walking.

Walking > Bikes > Trains > Buses > fuck cars.

In this case I have too little insight. But it's quite clear how biased these reports are in Germany. Anyone not absolutely German is immediately a terrorist and every white, German dude is a confused loner. Media never suspects that mental issues based on trauma from war and refugee journeys might be a good reason or that guys voting for right wing extremists and killing "woke" people might have anything to do with their political views.

Report the comments.

While yes, ideally it would've been nice if it didn't happen, but there's not enough mods to police this place. It's still better than news... That place is a complete shitshow.

But Canada is in america.

There was also an attack on the Afzaal family in London (Ontario) by a white nationalist with a pickup truck because they were visibly Muslim

Cars need to go, streets need to pedestrianize, and bollards need to go up to make sure cars stay the hell out.

To your point, imagine if this were a mass-shooting and the title were: "Nine people killed after gun shoots into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival". "Nine people killed after knife stabs into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival." It's so fucking passive as to be sickening. It reminds me of the "Man dies in officer-involved shooting" trope we see in US media because extrajudicial murder by the police is so routine and heavily whitewashed.

The AP gives it the same treatment. The only equivalent I could think of is "Nine people killed after bomb explodes into crowd", and you know why that might be written that way? Because it's not immediately obvious who placed the bomb. This mass-murdering psychopath is in custody; we can say "Nine people killed after man drives into crowd at Vancouver Filipino festival."

Is it a terrorist attack if it's a mental health issue?