An SUV rammed into a crowd of hundreds while the second annual Lapu Lapu day festival was wrapping up in Vancouver on April 26. Capitalism is horror without end, and this attack can be described as nothing less than horrific. At the time of writing, 11 people have been pronounced dead, including a child as young as five years old.
The driver, Kai-Ji Adam Lo, has been charged with eight counts of murder so far, with police and city hall stating that the “root cause” of the attack was mental illness.
As details roll out about Lo’s life, they paint a picture of a man in a downward spiral after the murder of his brother last year, his mother’s suicide attempt a few months later, and mounting debt—with the threat of losing his home. He was a known entity to police, he had a “significant history” of mental health crises, and one of his own family members called a hospital psych ward over Lo’s “deteriorating mental health” just hours before the attack.
The story emerging is that of an individual being pushed to the brink—with few resources to help him..
Numerous reports show that, among countries with universal healthcare, Canada ranks as one of the worst for availability of psychiatric care beds, number of psychiatrists per patient, and wait times for psychiatric care. The wait for psychiatric care is typically 25 weeks, a six-week increase since the early 2000s.
This is in a country where 50 per cent of all adults over 40 have experienced mental illness at some point in their lives. Compounding the problem, of course, is the ravaging opioid crisis. While very few ill people will commit attacks like this, the acute crisis of this sick society means that these sorts of tragedies will continue to happen.
The Lapu Lapu tragedy is not even the first violent outburst to occur in Vancouver in the past year. Just last September, Brendan McBride severed the hand of one man, and murdered another just 10 minutes later.
McBride suffered from addiction and severe mental health issues, and was on probation at the time for two attacks the previous year. It was reported that this man was unable to get an appointment with a public psychiatrist for months.
Vancouver’s Chief of Police claims that “we can’t predict one-offs.” But this is part of a wider phenomenon. As capitalism sinks deeper into crisis, more and more people violently lash out against others. School shootings, car rammings, and random attacks with no political motivations are becoming increasingly common—a symptom of a deeply sick society. The Lapu Lapu attack is the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
The “root cause” is not just in the mind of broken individuals. Their conditions are worsened by the soaring cost of living, skyrocketing housing prices, and critically underfunded mental healthcare. But more than that, a society that fosters individualism, distrust, alienation and atomization, also destroys the social bonds that hold society together—it breeds violence. Violent mental health crises in individuals like McBride and Lo are a product of the chronic crisis of capitalism.
Capitalism has no way of dealing with the problems it creates, and it certainly won’t be addressing an underfunded medical system or the cost of living while we’re staring down the barrel of a recession.
The trade war is already worsening inflation, 33,000 jobs were lost in March alone, and with the Liberals preparing austerity, conditions are going to continue to worsen for working-class people.
When the present capitalist crisis inevitably causes another tragedy, who will be forced to deal with the consequences? It’s the working class. Oftentimes it’s the most vulnerable and oppressed layers who are the victims, who have to rebuild their communities, and rally to support the victims and their families.
There is only one way to truly stop tragedies like the Lapu Lapu attack from ever happening again. By overthrowing capitalism, we can build in its place a socialist society run by and for the working class. We could fully fund mental healthcare, provide treatment to those who need it, and be rid of the social misery that turns mental illnesses into mass tragedies once and for all.
