Amateur videos posted on YouTube and security tape footage show several officers surround the front door of a streetcar, stopped at a corner, near Victoria’s Spa and Rehabilitation Centre. Passerby Markus Grupp began filming just a few minutes past midnight. The shadowed figure of one officer in particular is especially chilling: his arms unwavering, gun raised and pointed at the doorway, where a person stands. They shout to drop the knife, the figure shouts back calling them pussies. “If you take one step in this direction with that foot …[inaudible] die,” shouts an officer. The figure moves slightly, met with three bullets, followed seconds after by at least six more. The body falls, and is seen to be Tasered.

Const. James Forcillo, who fatally shot Yatim, is a six-year veteran from 14 Division. He has been suspended with pay. The SIU is investigating, assigning six investigators and two forensic investigators. The unit has not yet interviewed Forcillo, whose lawyer says is “devastated.” As National Post columnist Christie Blatchford quotes activist Bromley Armstrong in her thoughts of the tragedy: “If I should beat my wife, you don’t ask my cousins to investigate.” Here, Blatchford is using these words to illustrate how police would investigate each other before the formation of the SIU. Post-SIU, however, the mistrust remains, this isn’t the first time someone who needed help was killed by police instead.

Hundreds participated in the protest Monday evening. It started at Dundas Square and led to the spot Yatim was killed, Dundas West and Bellwoods Avenue. A brief and heated stop was made outside a local police station. Yatim’s  mother and sister were in attendance and requested the march move forward. Later, event coordinators wrote on the Facebook page Sammy’s Fight Back for Justice, “we are not here to terrorize the O.P.D that is not our mission. We are only here to fight for Sammy’s Justice and hopefully have stronger laws correlated to prevent this from happening to anyone else.”

Toronto police chief Bill Blair said at a Monday press conference that he understands the public’s concern, “The public also has a right to demand that the Toronto Police Service examine the conduct of its officers and to ensure that its training and procedures are both appropriate and followed. This will be done.” The same day, city councillor and TTC chair Karen Stintz wrote on her website, “Speaking as an elected official, and as a parent, I was disturbed.”

Witnesses reported seeing Yatim holding his penis and a knife, up to three inches long. “He did not seem mentally present,” says passenger Ing. The 505 driver evacuated the streetcar’s passengers, Yatim was left on alone and police were called. It was right they were called, but the officers did not do what they were trained to. According to The National Use-of-Force Framework for Police Officers in Canada, lethal force is to be used in response to “Grievous bodily harm or death.” The videos show Yatim standing, moving slightly, then being shot at least nine times. He was not Tasered first, but after. There was no attempt shown at negotiating. The Toronto Star collected instances where police have disarmed people with knives, without any fatalities, or even guns being raised in some. “He was cornered on an empty streetcar,” tweeted city councillor Janet Davis, who also questioned where the Mobile Crisis Intervention Team (MCIT) was. The Toronto Police website says, “As a second responder, the MCIT will answer calls, along with the primary response unit, that will ensure the client in crisis and those close to them are safe.”

Michael Eligon died on my street- he didn’t need to. Either did 18 yr old Sammy Yatim. He was cornered on an empty streetcar! #MCIT #topoli

— Janet Davis (@Janet_Davis) July 28, 2013

It isn’t known for sure whether or not Yatim was suffering mentally, there wasn’t a chance to find out. He wasn’t given the chance. The 18-year-old recently graduated from an all-boy Catholic school, Brebeuf College School on Steeles Avenue East. He planned on studying healthcare management at George Brown College in September. He and his sister, Sarah, moved to Toronto from Aleppo, Syria five years ago. They lived with their father after their parents’ divorce. His mother and extended family stayed in his home nation. Yatim’s uncle, Mejad “Jim” Yatim told The Star, “Sammy used to spend the summers with his mom in Syria until the situation became so dangerous.”  Canada was supposed to be safer. The bereaved uncle adds, Yatim fit in with his friends by wearing hoodies and “pants lower than his father (Nabil) would stomach.” Nabil, who returned home early from a business trip after hearing the news, now says all he wants to do is bury his son.

After arguments of his pot use the teenager moved out of his father’s home in June. He and friend Nathan Schifitto moved to another friend’s place. Josh Ramoo and his seven-year-old son, Braden Scopie opened their doors to the teens. When Scopie talked to the Star, he told them he was sad, “He was my friend.”

Screen capture of The National Use-of-Force Framework for Police Officers in Canada

Yatim planned to move into his own place come September, but in the meantime renovated the room he shared with Schifitto, described by Ramoo as “a teenage dream room.” He searched for a job (his last was at a McDonald’s six months ago) and went with friends to help out on construction sites.

Joshua Videna was a friend of Yatim’s, “He seemed a little bit different, a little bit more stressed in life.” Videna says his friend would say, “I gotta get my life straight. I’m 18-years-old and pretty much not going anywhere.”

Sasha Maghami says she was Yatim’s best friend. When she left for a five-month trip to Australia on July 21, he asked her not to forget about him. Before she left, she says he seemed less talkative and playful.

He was a teenager.

A visitation for Yatim will be held today from 6 to 9 at Highland Funeral Home in Scarborough. His funeral will be tomorrow at 11. Facebook group Justice for Sammy invites people to attend the Toronto Police Services Board meeting Tuesday August 13 at 1:30.

What prompted you to write What We Talk About When We Talk About War?

I remember the moment when it started. I was sitting in my kitchen listening to Shelagh Rogers talk to Master Corporal Paul Franklin about the IED explosion that killed diplomat Glyn Berry in 2006. It was a very spirited conversation and he was a decent fellow. He compared Afghanistan to the Second World War, suggesting basically that it was a “just” war. The conversation basically suggested that if we had pulled out of Afghanistan then, in what was a very tough year of fighting, that Master Corporal Paul Franklin had been wounded for nothing.

I was already, I knew, very disturbed by the changes that were being wrought in Canada’s sense of itself. My first book, This is My Country, What’s Yours?—and this one—are both interested in the power of story. If I was to summarize What We Talk About When We Talk About War, I would say it shows how we narrated ourselves into conflict and through conflict and out of it. That too is very interesting to me. As much as the militarists and right-wing pundits hated that idea, it’s true as well that they really understood the power of story, that they held it in some esteem. They understood that they needed to replace a whole packet of concomitant stories about what it meant to be Canadian with another set of stories. So all the things this gang found objectionable—Canada’s liberal society, its multiculturalism, its attitude to immigrants, this idea of Canada as a land of opportunity, and most of all the ideas that predisposed us to be in favour of soft power and peacekeeping, all these related ideas, needed to be replaced by the story of Canada as a warrior nation.

From what I understood when I read the book, you split the stages of the war in Afghanistan into three. The second stage, for me, was epitomized by the 2008 Manley Report. You quote the part of the Manley Report that says “Canada is a wealthy country. Our good fortune and standing impose on us both authority and obligation in global affairs.” In the first stage of the war you talked about how the Conservative government, media figures like Christie Blatchford and Don Cherry, and even then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff talked about Vimy Ridge and Canada as a warrior nation. In the second stage of the war, though, there seemed to be a return to a more classical appeal to Canadian-ness. And so I was wondering if you could talk about the complicated nature of that second stage in terms of war-making, nation-building, Canadian-ness.

I do divide it into three stages: committing, staying on, and getting out. And this is expressed in all sorts of ways in language. Speaking of the conflict as a war invokes obligations to the Geneva convention that the government was not particularly willing to entertain—the government being Liberal, and then the Harper government. In the second stage, we did call it a war, and we called it a war because it was tough, and we were stuck in it. And then third, it became something else—it became a mission, which was interesting to me. A war is something you win or lose. A mission is something you begin and end, like a shift at the factory.

The fundamental question I brought to the book was “has Canada effectively been changed so quickly, in so short a time?” Perhaps the period in which I grew up in Canada was the aberration, and what I was confronting was right: we had always been a warrior nation. The fifty years of UN operations and relative global peace were the unusual moment.

In those first years, those sorts of arguments about so-called Canadian values were routinely dismissed, and quite pejoratively. And so it was kind of fascinating that in the second period—being stuck in, and staying on, and trying to justify to the Canadian people why we there—that the government itself, through the Manley Report, returned to some of those ideas. The Manley Report was very odd. It was very cowtowing on one hand, and craven, but on the other, affirmed the core ideas of what it means to be Canadian. And those core ideas were summarized in the phrases you just picked out.

On the one hand this has been very frustrating to the advocates of the military project and the warrior nation like Jack Granatstein, who asked “Why won’t this peacekeeping myth ever die?” The idea that perhaps it never died because it has functioning, sustainable roots is anathema to these people. What they present is a Canada that supports an internationalist, multilateral idea.

This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. We live in a time of great retrenchment. People are scared and wary, and not engaging with each other. It’s a very adversarial time. And so the instinct is to retreat. That’s not the Canada that Lester Pearson was trying to build. That’s not the Canada that I grew up in.

It’s very romantic instinct, to my mind, that these people obey—a kind of fearful nostalgia for a time that is passed, a time that these people prefer. And that’s why we’re turning back to the monarchy, and putting Royal back on the title of our armed forces, why we’re putting up portraits of the Queen. It’s a kind of harkening back to a white, monarchist, secure, uncomplicated Canada in the face of a future that is already here. We already live in an international world, where the repercussions of economics, health, and computer viruses, security and terrorism act out internationally. But it takes a much broader mind to be able to operate in that sphere. And the advocates of the warrior nation don’t like that, and they retreat behind simple lines: good and evil.

In the book you use different approaches to storytelling—the novel being the complex, broadminded approach, as opposed to the epic and the romance and the myth. You talk about how the dominant narrative has changed with the Conservative takeover of power and even before that. I was wondering if you think that the fundamental nature of Canadians has changed alongside the dominant narrative about war and our participation in war?

I don’t have the definite answer to that. I think that the Harper government drives that depended first on the Vimy Ridge story, and then on the Remembrance Day theatrics, and on the language of “Support Our Troops,” and so on has been remarkably successful. The “Support Our Troops” business is an awful kind of blackmail, and it’s not at all contradictory —as, for instance, Christie Blatchford wrote—to question the war and to support our troops. I’m pretty confident that my book doesn’t come across as an assault on the Canadian Forces. I don’t think it’s that at all.

I think there have been signals that the Canadian remains who he or she is. One of them is what happened around the earthquake in January 2010 in Haiti, when Canadians gave more per capita then any other country in the world. When the idea of helping was suddenly less complicated than the demand that we derive some idea of good out of bombing people, and occupying a territory in a war that quietly we have all understood we cannot win. Harper himself said you cannot win against this insurgency. That’s amazing. That demanded that we start speaking of it as a mission and not a war so that we could leave with our heads held high. But in Haiti we’re suddenly helping in a straightforward way: rebuilding hospitals, mending limbs, creating order, making people better and feeding them.  We may not have continued to do so, but the way in which we approached that mission impressed me. That even Harper actually, to his credit, matched the surge of feeling.

What role did media figures like Christie Blatchford and Don Cherry play in the war-mongering, nation-building rhetoric? How much stock do you think Canadians put into figures like Christie Blatchford and Don Cherry?

Wasn’t Don Cherry a contestant for The Greatest Canadian on that CBC series? Isn’t there a film being made of his life? Don Cherry is a professional buffoon. I’ll defend that. He’s paid to be a clown.

The CBC’s general documentation of the war was lamentable. It was a kind of a ra ra 1940s-era boostering of the war that was unthinking and generally uncritical. It seemed like there was a kind of competition among a number of our news organizations to appear most blandly to support our troops.

It has been suggested that I put too much important into the writings of Christie Blatchford and Rosie DiManno. What they say—they’re paid a great deal to say what they say, and they’re read by a lot of people—and I suppose what I was trying to attack was the absolute banality of the stuff they were proferring.

What was interesting to me was how selective were the mantles of alpha male heroism that these people were collectively bestowing upon soldiers, and critically, that certain soldiers in uniform did not get the heroic treatment. There has been over the last ten years an extraordinary flourishing of the cult of the hero, in which anybody in uniform, virtually just by putting on a uniform, is a hero. The exceptions to that would be two peacekeepers who died in Haiti and the another, Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, who was killed on the Lebanese-Israeli border, about whom our Prime Minister Harper effectively said, Well, he shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That’s outrageous. He was blaming a soldier for his own death. Imagine doing that with a soldier in Kandahar. None of these three were given the huge funereal services of other Canadian Forces soldiers or even the Toronto Police Services Sergeant who was killed in 2011, Ryan Russell.  We’ve reached a point in Canada where we tow the line to such a degree that we accept things that are so outrageous as to be comical in incredibly dutiful fashion.

What has the Harper government gained from refashioning Canada into a warrior nation?

Dividing the world into strict simplistic lines of good and evil is fantastically useful to a government that is not interested in engagement, negotiation, compromise—all the things that Canada used to stand for—but instead understands that it merely needs not even half, but 35 percent or 40 percent of popular support to get its way. Not an issue goes by without them trying to create a conflict along some well-entrenched line. That’s how they got about their business. And Canadians need to ask if that is in fact the Canada they prefer.