Canada’s Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers is being hailed a national hero for his role in stopping a gunman on Parliament Hill Wednesday.
Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender and former Member of Parliament Ken Dryden was a colleague of Vickers’ in Ottawa for five years and says he is deserving of all the praise he’s receiving for his courageous actions.
“When somebody does something special that invariably they get described in overwhelming terms for an act that they’ve done, it happens that Kevin Vickers really is all of those things that people say he is,” Dryden told Jeff Blair on Sportsnet 590 The Fan Thursday.
The 58-year-old Vickers reportedly took down the gunman, who has been identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, in a terrifying shootout in parliament’s Centre Block shortly after the assailant allegedly shot Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, who was guarding the National War Memorial. Cirillo, 24, succumbed to his injuries.
Vickers is from the small town of Miramichi, N.B., and spent 29 years as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer—stationed everywhere from his home province to Alberta to Ontario to the Northwest Territories—before he became the Sergeant-at-Arms in 2006.
“In hearing about it, all I could think of was [Vickers] was a guy who had been preparing his skills obviously all of his life, but even more than that he was just developing as this person,” added Dryden, who was a Liberal MP from 2004 to 2011. “When the moment happens that he sort of looks around and realizes, ‘Something needs to be done, somebody needs to do something, I need to do something,’ and he did.”
Vickers received a lengthy standing ovation in the House of Commons Thursday and was thanked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and MPs.
CPAC on Twitter: “Statement from Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers. #cdnpoli http://t.co/27IQcbrFR2”
Parliament Hill is understandably in a state of heightened security, but Dryden hopes one day it can return to the way it was before Wednesday’s attack.
“There is something quite special about Parliament Hill, and it’s not just the way the Peace Tower looks and it’s not just that there’s a front lawn, but there’s a front lawn that is used, that people play Frisbee and people play touch football on that front lawn and that says a lot about us,” Dryden said.
“You focus now on making sure that things are secure, and then you have those big questions ahead about what really did happen [Wednesday]. Was it an individual who was cruel and violent, or was there even a larger story to it? Because whatever the story is, in many ways, determines one’s response or the right kind of response.”
