Thomas Mulcair on terrorism and root causes

From the NDP leader’s scrum this afternoon, in which he was asked whether this was the wrong time to be having a discussion about root causes.

The question is what terms are you going to be using and what the analysis leads to. Sometimes, you have to take a step back from these situations and try to understand what it involves internationally. But the root cause of an eight-year-old child being killed at the Boston Marathon is that somebody who doesn’t care about other people’s lives placed a bomb. And that’s what we have to look at, that reality. Beyond that, of course you can have discussions about all sorts of things but I think that it’s unwise to go beyond the immediate fact that human life was lost that day and that’s what we’re looking at...

It’s part of the analysis and the ongoing work that every government does, that every person does. That’s not the question. I think we have to be wise in our timing of these things. Don’t forget, this was in the immediate aftermath. When you find out what the situation is, that’s what I was concentrating on in any event. I’ll let other people explain what their words have meant.