On Sept. 13, a 25-year-old gun-crazy loner with a hate for the world showed up at lunchtime in a downtown Montreal college. With a semi-automatic Beretta rifle he shot one student dead, wounded 20 others, then shot himself. This sent Canada into one of our orgies of self-recrimination and national psychoanalysis, occupying the media for a full week.
Why, everyone wondered, did Kimveer Gill do this? The question was plumbed by columnists, editorialists, bloggers, radio open-line hosts, television commentators, politicians, sociologists, criminologists and scores of letter writers. For three days running it commanded the top front-page headlines in both national newspapers. It dominated national television news.
The only discernible answer – because he was crazy – was never considered adequate. What made him go crazy? Was it his parents? His youthful acquaintances, of whom he had so few? The nutcase website on "Goth culture" that he loved watching? Was it perchance his fascination with firearms?
The answer seemed to be all of the above – plus the Harper government. The lib-left strained to blame the new Tory administration. Why was it trying to scrap Canada's gun control registry at a time like this? Because, came the customary reply, it demonstrably doesn't work. Indeed, since Gill's rifle was duly registered, and a prime purpose of the gun law is to prevent mass murder by lunatics, the Gill debacle would seem to further discredit it. This reply was rejected as "callous." The gun registry must remain, Quebec's premier argued. Prime Minister Stephen Harper held firm, however, in refusing to reconsider it.
Meanwhile the only answer that might make minimal sense was offered by Globe and Mail columnist Jan Wong, a Maoist turned pseudo-liberal who was prepared to say something that few people in the Canadian establishment want to hear. Her theory was denounced in print by an avalanche of letters to the editor, led by the prime minister himself.
Kimveer Gill did this, theorized Ms. Wong, for the simple reason that he was of Sikh heritage and lived in Quebec. Like everybody else who isn't 100 percent French Canadian, he wasn't wanted there, and they let him know it.
This was the third such slaughter in 17 years in a Quebec post-secondary institution, she observed. In 1989, Marc Lepine killed 14 women and wounded 13 others at the University of Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. True, he was French-Canadian, but only half. His mother was an Algerian Muslim, and his original name was Gamil Gharbi, which he had legally changed to sound more Quebecois.
In 1992, Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor from Russia, shot four colleagues at Concordia University and wounded a fifth because he had been refused tenure.
"To be sure, Mr. Lepine hated women, Mr. Fabrikant hated his engineering colleagues, and Mr. Gill hated everyone. But all of them had been marginalized in a society that valued 'pure laine.'" (The phrase, meaning "pure wool," is the Quebecois designation for undiluted French-Canadian ancestry.)
Typically, Ms. Wong added, when the director general of Dawson College held a press conference the day after the shootings there, he answered questions in French only. Dawson supposedly is an English-language institution, and not all the distressed parents spoke French. "Some people felt hurt by this."
"What many outsiders don't realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once cosmopolitan city [Montreal]. It hasn't just taken a toll on longtime Anglophones; it has affected immigrants, too. To be sure, all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals. But what is also true is that in all three cases the perpetrator was not pure laine. Elsewhere to talk of racial 'purity' is repugnant. Not in Quebec."
The indignant response that inundated the Globe was typically Canadian. "It should be obvious," said the one from Prime Minister Harper, "that the actions of one individual do not reflect on the public mindset of an entire community or an entire class of people."
Sounds reasonable, but is it? The blatant racism implicit in Quebec nationalism is one of the things polite English-Canadians must not discuss. Jan Wong broke the rules.
Moreover, her observations soon found ironic confirmation in another event, when Guy Fournier was abruptly dismissed as chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for jeering Quebec's considerable Lebanese immigrant community on a popular television show. It's OK if Lebanese men indulge in bestiality, Fournier had joked, unless the animal is male – in which case the penalty is execution. He, too, broke the rule: You can razz the English, but not the immigrants. So Ottawa fired him.
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