Globe and Mail
> Saturday, September 16, 2006 - Page A8
(...)
> What many outsiders don't realize is how alienating the decades-long
> linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn't
> just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it's affected immigrants,
> too. To be sure, the shootings in 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, the argot for a "pure"
> francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial "purity" is repugnant. Not in
> Quebec.
> (...)
> 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. (...)
So Montreal is no longer a cosmopolitan city? 215,120 foreigners moved to the Montreal area in the 10 years preceding the 2001 Census. Language policies, that didn't apply to the latest shooter who went to English school, somehow resulted in mass murder (in an English language College)? What the... ?
For a newsgroup or a blog I suppose nonsense like this would be acceptable, but in a newspaper like the Globe and Mail? At best it is the Globe trying to appeal to it's mostly WASP readership, at worst it is an agenda of the WASP Globe leadership. Just like the National Post, the Globe and Mail apparently thinks it is OK to spread false information about Quebec as long as it is from a non-WASP writer.
The Globe and Mail writer goes on to say that "Although Montreal is a big city, English-speaking Montreal is not. It is more like a small town, where everyone knows everyone else."
There are over 10,000 English speaking students at Dawson! According to Stats Can, there are 408,185 people in the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area who have English as a first language. The vast majority of them are concentrated in the western part of the Island of Montreal, including the western two thirds of downtown (the location of Concordia, McGill and Dawson College). 408 thousand! Is that a small town?
Speaking of factually incorrect:
"CEGEP, which stands for Collège d'Enseignement Général et Professionel.
Unique to Quebec, they prepare those in their late teens and above for
university and technical schools. "
No. In CEGEP you have the choice between 2 years of university preparation or 3 years of technical training. Both are in the same institution, hence the "professionel" part of the name CEGEP. And by the way, CEGEPs are very similar to the college system in the UK. Not exactly a "unique" system.
Anyway, the Globe published this nonsense and refused to publish letters from either Jean Charest or Steven Harper. No retraction either.
So I guess we should boycott Bell Canada and CTV. To bad, I'll miss Corner Gas.
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Jan Left Wing Wong (en français) ;
From Paul Wells:
A reader asked what I, as distinct from Jean Charest and Stephen Harper (normally a pretty easy distinction to draw), thought about Jan Wong's analysis of the Dawson tragedy. The short answer is that I haven't read anything sillier in a very long time.
Robert Pickton, Clifford Olson, the puffed-up fools who killed Jane Creba on Boxing Day, and the 14-year-old shooter in the Taber school killing had all of absolutely nothing to do with alienation over Quebec's language laws when they went about their horrid business.
Neither did Denis Lortie, the inconvienently pure-laine nutbar who shot up Quebec's National Assembly in the 1980s and who was dismissed from Wong's analysis as a confounding variable that might have required her to think before she typed.
Finally, I am not the first to point out that Valery Fabrikant, the fabulously logorrheic psychopath who has written more about his murders than Dostoevsky wrote about squalor in Moscow, somehow seems to have forgotten ever to mention the Bill 101 angst that Wong intuits as his motive.
The question that launched Wong into her risible guesswork ? why three for three in Quebec? ? illustrates the old programmer's saw, "Garbage in, garbage out." Three for three? Lortie makes four. Biker gangs and assorted thugs make it many dozens more. Taber, Pickton, Olson, the Creba killers and others take the question out of its utterly arbitrary Quebec frame.
The Globe's editorial on the Wong controversy today is pretty sad. When the premier of Quebec and the prime minister of Canada write to complain, the paper has to reply. Finding its reporter's analysis indefensible, the editorialists hope instead to distract readers with a corked, stale history of Quebec nationalism, starting with Two Solitudes and ending with Michaëlle Jean. Ah. Your point is that you haven't a clue what your point is. I'm glad we cleared that up.
"Jan Wong is often quite controversial, but I like her. What she said about shooters generally being alienated from pure laine Quebecois society is not going to go down well with, erm, pure laine Quebecois, though! ..."
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