Originally published Feb 13, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get weekly issues.
By STAFF
“The average man does not want to be free, he simply wants to be safe.” – H. L. Mencken
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” – Patrick Henry
- NOTE: This report was completed February 12, 2026. Any major breaking updates will be covered in our next MIA issue.
INTRODUCTION
Canada was struck with the news of a mass shooting that left 8 victims dead, and scores more injured. The dead included five students from the location of the second part of the mass shooting, Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, near Vancouver, Canada.
The shooter would then turn the gun on himself.
The motive for the shooting, so far, remains unclear. The shooter, Jesse van Rootselaar, was originally reported as a female shooter, but it would later be revealed “she” was a male presenting as a female.
It might turn out the motive for the shooting had nothing to do with the shooter’s transgenderism, but we suggest you could rightly assume it had something to do with it, though we would not recommend you make that conclusion until more information comes out (which might have by the time this report is published).
For this bellwether analysis, we want to look at this event in the context of Canada’s current governing spirit. We will bracket off the motive. What we want to consider is the promise Canada has offered to Canadians, that if they lay down their arms and shut their mouths in submission to the state orthodoxy, their lives will be safe from hate. Lose your guns, lose your tongues, and you will be safer.
They gave up Christ in the public square in part to protect the very person that murdered their children.
A. THE DETAILS
On February 10, 2026, 18-year-old Jesse van Rootselaar kicked off a killing spree in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. He killed his mother and his stepbrother at his residence, with a young female relative escaping. She ran to a neighbor to seek help, who then alerted the police. The shooting happened at 2:20PM. The police did not arrive until 15 minutes later.
While the police were going to the residence, Rootselaar was on his way to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, with a shotgun and a modified handgun. The school is a gun-free zone. There was no armed security. There were no armed teachers.
By the time the Rootselaar arrived at the school it was 2:30PM, just 10 minutes after he killed his mother and stepbrother. The shooting was reported at 2:32 PM, another team of officers arrived two minutes later. By the time the officers who were called to his residence arrived, he was already dead in the school.
Rootselaar would have just 4 minutes to do his worst. His victims were powerless to stop him. The police were also powerless to stop him. By the time they arrived, Rootselaar was already dead by suicide, but so were six others, one adult teacher and five students (three females and two males aged 12-17). Along with the dead were 27 more injured, mostly students.
The motivation for the killings is not clear, but Rootselaar has a years-long history of causing disturbances at his home, some of which involved firearms. At one point, law enforcement confiscated the weapons, but later returned them after a petition was started. The firearms do not appear to be owned by Rootselaar, however.
Rootselaar began the process of “transitioning” to a “female” four to six years ago (we have conflicting information on this point), at the age of 13. He was on anti-psychotic drugs, in addition to transitioning drugs at the time of the shooting. His transgendered status was concealed from the public as long as it could be by both the Canadian government and the international corporatist press.
While the motive is not clear, the presence of anti-psychotic drugs in the shooter has become a tragically well-earned trope of mass shootings that this event follows as well. His transgenderism as a factor is ambiguous, though one wonders if the transgender “solution” was masking a much deeper problem transitioning only made worse (as this writer suspects is happening a lot in the age of trans mania).
B. THE IMMEDIATE REPORTING
We asked Grok to give us the headlines that were immediately shared by the international corporatist press after the shooting, and Grok’s answer revealed these cherry-picked headlines:
- CBC News: “10 dead, including suspect, following shooting in Tumbler Ridge“
- The Globe and Mail: “Ten killed, including suspect, in mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.”
- Vancouver Sun: “LIVE: Nine dead, 27 injured in mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge”
- National Post: “Canada in shock after one of the country’s worst mass shootings”
- CTV News: “C. RCMP give an update in their investigation into a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge”
- BBC News: “At least seven dead after school shooting in British Columbia, Canada, police say”
- The Guardian: “Canada shooting: 10 dead including suspect in attack on Tumbler Ridge high school, police say”
All of these answers provided a pretty generic telling of the event, but what Grok gave me was not indicative of the REAL spirit international corporatist media chose to operate within.
After these headlines, Grok started listing headlines acknowledging the shooter was transgendered. Grok would leave one with the impression the international corporatist media acted responsibly, with no political agenda. However, that was not reality; we believe that was programming protecting the disenfranchised class over simply answering a question truthfully.
Here are some of the headlines we found when we did time-based searches:
- Collingwood Today – “‘Beyond devastating’: 10 dead, including female suspect, in B.C. school shooting”
- MSN – “10 dead, including female suspect, in ‘devastating’ shootings at BC school and home.”
- MSN – “Female Identified as Suspect in Worst Canada School Shooting in Decades That Killed 10 and Injured at Least 25”
- Reuters – “Ten dead, including female suspect, after Canada school shooting – as it happened”
A Royal Mounted Police officer at a press conference just after the shooting referred to the shooter as a “woman.”
C. THE BACKGROUND
We have created a special news tag in our aggregation process called “Canada Soviet” to tag all the stories that cover Canada’s lurch into authoritarianism. A trans person in Canada has more personal power as a normal private citizen than most people have in America today. A trans person in Canada cannot have their identity challenged. A trans person in Canada can destroy competition with a false accusation that won’t dare be challenged lest the challenger face hate speech charges.
You can call Christ the devil in public, but you can’t call abortion murder.
As for guns, Canada has effectively criminalized gun defense, along with most gun possessions. The shooter violated Canada’s gun laws, yet was able to accomplish his dark deed, nonetheless.
- LEGAL TRANS PRIVILEGE – In June of 2017 Canada introduced the now-famous bill C-16, which launched psychologist Jordan Peterson into the stratosphere as he stood as one of the few Canadians warning against the intolerance pregnant in this bill.
The bill was an amendment to Canada’s Orwellian-named Human Rights Act, which sought to limit liberty in the name of protecting the disenfranchised from being insulted in public. This amendment added “gender identity or expression” as a protected expression that ALL Canadians must comply with, regardless of whether they believed men could become women or not.
The Criminal Code already protected certain groups from what it calls “hate propaganda.” This bill added transgenders to that protected class. In other words, it de facto ennobled the transgender class as a protected class that should no longer be expected to hear opinions that invalidated their assertions that a man could become a woman, a woman could be a man, or that genders even existed at all. If they said it, you better parrot it, end stop.
In January 2022, a bill that was passed in 2021 took effect, Bill C-4. That bill made it illegal to attempt to persuade anyone, including children, that they should be heterosexual or “cis” gendered (a pejorative attempting to both vilify conventional binary gender constructions and invalidate them).
The fact that the bill included a phrase most humans would consider hate speech at this point, “cis gendered” shows the futility in allowing the state to define what “hate” is (as if hate, in and of itself, is a bad thing, unless you want to argue that hating murder is evil).
These are the two major acts, though provinces and local governments have their own “protections” for the ennobled trans class (except in the case of Alberta, which seems to be fighting back against the ennobled trans class).
ED. NOTE: While we join our readers in their concern over “trans mania,” we hold the view that some people might very well need transgender “therapy.” We also want to make it clear the evidence for the rise in trans violence is ambiguous. The majority of transgendered people should not be stigmatized by the minority ‘bad actors.’ We believe in individual justice, not social justice, and that applies to transgendered people as well.
2. ANTI-GUN LAWS – Canada has some of the strictest anti-gun laws in the nation. It began in 1995, one year before the UK began the process of surrendering their guns.
The Firearms Act of 1995 added a host of new requirements for gun ownership, which included licensing, background checks, safety training, and rules that effectively made it illegal to use your gun to defend yourself in your own home (outside of the most bizarre circumstances).
The only non-restricted weapons Canadians can currently own are bolt-action rifles and pump action shotguns. Any weapon capable of semi-automatic firing is highly restricted or prohibited altogether.
In 2022, Canada’s Bill C-21 took effect, which put a freeze on the sale, purchase, transfer, or import of handguns. It also ended ALL conceal carry for civilians, with some limited open carry allowances which basically allowed Canadians to hunt with their non-semi-automatic long guns.
While an unidentified adult in his household was legally able to possess the firearms the shooter used to kill 8 people, the shooter was not. The shooter violated multiple gun laws, appeared to use limited-action firearms (still unconfirmed), and was yet able to kill 8 people and himself in the span of 14 minutes, and that included the time it took him to get to the school from his residence.
- ANTI-SPEECH LAWS – During our research, we used Grok to search for Canada’s anti-speech laws. Grok began its results for me with this dystopian, unreal statement: “Freedom of expression in Canada is protected as a fundamental freedom under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (part of the Constitution Act, 1982). This includes freedom of thought, belief, opinion, expression, and the press and other media of communication.”
What followed next was a complete disconnect from that opening statement.
Grok would “clarify,” not realizing (or being allowed to realize) that this next statement wholly invalidates the first one and makes Grok read like an Orwellian propagandist delivering the new definitions of the day and the new list of friends and enemies.
Grok “clarified,” “However, these rights are not absolute. Section 1 of the Charter allows ‘reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.’ Courts apply the Oakes test to assess such limits, requiring the objective to be pressing/substantial, the means rationally connected and minimally impairing, and the benefits outweighing the harm.”
Grok also buried the lead. In 1985, C-46 was passed, which created a new Criminal Code called “Hate Propaganda and Related Offences.” This bill was challenged in the courts where it was “validated” by their Supreme Court on numerous cases, the two key ones being R. v. Keegstra (1990) and Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott (2013).
Here are some of the vaguer, and thus more disturbing parts of the criminal code (from Grok):
Section 319(1): Public incitement of hatred – Communicating statements in a public place that incite hatred against an identifiable group where likely to lead to a breach of the peace (up to 2 years).
Section 319(2): Wilful promotion of hatred – Communicating statements (other than in private conversation) that wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group (up to 2 years). Defences include truth, public interest discussion, good faith religious opinion (under subsection 319(3)(b)), and good faith belief on religious grounds.
Section 319(2.1): Wilful promotion of antisemitism – Specifically condoning, denying, or downplaying the Holocaust (added in recent amendments; up to 2 years).
Had the shooter lived, he might “enjoy” the “extra” protections his ennobled class might soon receive should Bill C-9 pass. This bill hopes to remove religious exemptions from speech restrictions, as well as add new offenses for displaying hate symbols. It also seeks to eliminate the need for the Attorney General to consent to speech violation prosecutions. In other words, they want more people to be subject to their thought control, and they want to make it EASIER to prosecute them.
D. BELLWETHER ANALYSIS
- NOTE: This is a new feature we have created. Unlike a PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS, this type of analysis is about understanding the context of the “present,” not predicting what might come next. Unlike a SUMMARY, it is not simply a synthesis of the facts as a review, it is an analysis of the spirit of the whole event as a bellwether.
A somewhat simplistic, but mostly accurate timeline of events will show the kernel of Wokeness was most closely created by the Frankfurt School starting in the early 20s. The kernel of wokeness was born in Europe.
Under the label, “critical theory,” the notion of social justice over economic justice began to emerge. By the 60s, American leftists decided to exploit that path, having realized capitalism wasn’t going to collapse anytime soon, and, unlike their predictions, was continuing to offer greater prosperity to more people in society than communism ever did (or would).
Wokeness, long before we used the term, was infiltrating American academia, which in turn spread its wokeness to other nations. As it infiltrated direct government power, the American state began to export wokeness to the rest of the world. They offered cash to the compliant and interference (to put it mildly) to the non-compliant.
Unfortunately for Canada, they got our wokeness in spades. As our next-door neighbor, Canada was most affected by the U.S.’s new woke promotions.
In America, the battle for the spirit of the land continues, with wokeness currently taking major hits (but hardly dead). In other countries like Canada, the UK, and Australia, wokeness has ended their status as a traditional Western “democratic” power. There is no free speech in any of these lands.
Wokeness may have started in Europe, but America gave it international strength, poisoning the rest of the world with an ideology that hates its citizens. Yet, America is still holding out while the others seem to have fallen (at least for now).
Why is that? It is because America’s right to rule is based on the premise that we are endowed by an authority outside the state with certain rights, rights that enable us to define and choose our own paths to happiness and prosperity.
Canada and Australia are no longer directly under the rule of the British crown, so the monarchy does not justify their rule. For these two countries, the right to rule is from “popular sovereignty,” the approval of the people, which is just mob rule with extra steps if that is your own right to rule principle.
In Britian, the monarch is the final authority, not God, so there are no absolute restrictions on government power.
Canada, Australia, and Britain all quickly gutted the public of guns starting around the same time, the late 90s, as it became apparent that technology was beginning to advantage small-scale resistance over large-scale conquest.
After the guns fell, the tongue followed behind, in all three countries, with Canada and the UK fighting neck-and-neck to be the most Soviet western nation of them all.
Now, here Canadians sit, having been promised security in exchange for surrendering dangerous freedom but getting neither. They sit in a world in which the press and the government must lie about the basic facts of a shooter to protect a special class of people from free tongues, enslaving all, including the special class (which are now desperately dependent on the state to protect them from mean thoughts, a protection they’ve been propagandized to militantly expect).
The “security” through disarming your neighbors’ guns and tongues has made Canada fundamentally less safe than it was before. A madman grew up among them, indulged by the system, protected from reality (you have a mental illness, you’re not a girl), and medically conditioned to be predisposed to even greater psychotic breaks with reality.
While children’s bodies were yet cold, the “authorities” were doubling down on the toxic lie that this boy was a girl. They were probably more frightened of the authorities sending them to jail for violating the psychotic safe space of transgendered people than they were of anything that happened at that school.
This bellwether event shows what happens when a government is too afraid of its citizens to let them have the tools to defend their children from a 4-minute execution by a mentally ill child indulged by the same system that took Canadians’ guns away. They created the beast and they disarmed its victims.
For we Americans, this should compel us even more to resist any effort to confiscate our guns. Vast swathes of American land are occupied by Progmerican overlords who seek to do to us what Canada has done to its citizens, disarm us while they raise beasts to kill us.
FURTHER RESOURCES:
The Origins of Woke – Rochard Hanania
Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology – Jon Mills
Woke Ideology Critique and Counter Proposal – Frank Kaufman, David Burgess, Christ Kenedy
