Out of the Blue, by
Jan Wong, or what not to say when talking about a Montreal shooting
by Beverly Akerman
05.09.2012
If a mechanic replaces your winter tires and scrimps on tightening
the lug nuts, the consequences — a wheel popping off on the highway —
can be disastrous. If a doctor leaves a surgical instrument behind,
misreads a scan, or overlooks the follow-up test result, a patient can
wind up seriously injured, even dead. So what happens if a career
journalist confuses correlation and causation on a sensitive file of
national importance? And what if, to compound the error, her editor
fails to catch the mistake? And all this takes place during a
fast-breaking news story?
L’affaire Wong is what happens.
Out of the Blue is what happens.
I was a fan of Jan Wong’s for much of her career: her writing was
consistently interesting and often extremely personal, displayed warts
and all, especially her books about China and her tragic flirtation with
Maoism. Now there was teenage rebellion carried to the nth degree.
I enjoyed her work during Tiananmen, had a few problems with her
articles as an undercover domestic worker, munched (often somewhat
aghast) on the occasional “Lunch With” column, etc.
And then there was the 2006 Dawson College shooting and her infamous
Globe and Mail article on the subject. For me, that pretty much put the kibosh on Jan Wong’s appeal.
So I was intrigued by the hubbub surrounding her latest offering
Out
of the Blue, a book dubbed the first “workplace divorce memoir,” in
Macleans.
Triggering a spate of raised-eyebrow headlines, Wong’s publisher
Doubleday declined the book in the final steps before publication,
despite the text's having already been vetted by their legal team.
I began following the issue, was approached to write about, and was
loathe to. Mostly because I didn’t want any of my meagre earnings
transferred to Jan Wong’s bank account.
My son was at Dawson College on Sept. 13, 2006 — a date that “lives
in infamy” in my overloaded cranium, I’m afraid — and I’ve written about
it, too. But my concern was the necessity for more and better gun
control — Quebec’s infamous mass murderers Lepine, Fabrikant, and Gill
all managed to purchase their lethal weapons legally, and I continue to
wonder why our society allows guns to be so easily accessed (the
shootings at Club Metropolis, during Pauline Marois’ acceptance speech,
may raise the question anew).
Unlike Jan Wong, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the “why” of the
shootings — I remain convinced these men were seriously mentally ill. I
didn’t care whether Mr. Gill had been refused admission to Dawson (he
wasn’t) or was a bullied or abused child (who knows)? But nothing
excuses murder.
To me, all murder is hate crime. Unlike Wong, it never occurred to me
to ascribe the tragic actions of these men to “racism,” Quebec’s
supposed antagonism toward “les autres.” But curiosity finally got the
better of me, and I compromised by buying the Kindle version of Wong’s
book, about half the price of the paperback.
Several aspects must be considered in evaluating
Out of the Blue, the one-and-only (or is that the first?) self-published book to be
featured on CBC radio’s Sunday Edition.
There’s the W5 of Wong’s personal narrative: what happened to her,
how she felt about it, what she did about it, etc. Which, as might be
expected of a best-selling career journalist, is eminently readable and
engaging.
And then there’s the objective part: how did L’affaire Wong — the
Dawson article and the blowback from it — happen? Where does the
responsibility lie? And finally, what to think of the way
The Globe and
Mail treated what happened next?
I call the first of these considerations “herstory” versus “the
truth”– an over-simplification, perhaps, but rebuttals are welcome.
Out of the Blue’s premise is that the people of Quebec, and
the Canadian political class, exhibited a major over reaction to Wong’s
original article — the paper received a slew of angry letters, Wong
received mailed excrement and death threats; her publisher informed her
she had damaged the paper’s “brand”; Prime Minister Harper and Premier
Charest sent letters to the paper admonishing her, and the House of
Commons passed a motion demanding she apologize to the people of Quebec.
All this from several paragraphs of “analysis” inferring three Quebec
mass murders were a logical outcome of the province’s disdain of those
who are not
pure laine.
In the book, and in the clips and interviews where she discusses it,
Wong treats the uproar to her article as though it was provoked by an
innocuous single sentence in some 3,000 words. But she actually spent
over 400 words on this “analysis.” Her point was clearly that Quebec’s
emphasis on ethnic/racial purity is profoundly alienating and forms part
of the explanation for Kimveer Gill’s — and Marc Lepine’s, and Valery
Fabrikant’s — murderous rampages.
But those 400 words were not “analysis”: they were preposterous. Is
there a single journalist in Canada prepared to stand up on her hind
legs and ascribe, in public, Luka Magnotta’s (alleged) crimes to the
ethnic exclusivist nature of Quebec society? No. And that’s not simply
because Magnotta hadn’t lived in Quebec for very long. It’s because the
supposition is, for want of a better word (and with apologies to loons),
loony.
Let’s apply Wong-style reasoning to the Robert Picton case in BC. Is
there a newspaper that would publish an article suggesting this savage
killer’s actions were linked to, say, British Columbia’s having accepted
too many Asian immigrants (after all, immigration from Asia increased,
and then Picton killed many women, so…)? I don’t think so. And not just
because it would be politically incorrect to do so.
It’s because B following A doesn’t mean A caused B. Or “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” as I learned from
The West Wing.
She describes how her brainwave arose:
On the car radio, a talk-show host was saying that all three of
Canada’s campus shootings had occurred in Montreal. That’s right, I
thought with surprise, but why?… ‘A lot of people are saying: why does
this always happen in Quebec?’ Jay [Bryan, of The Montreal Gazette]
said. ‘Three doesn’t mean anything. But three out of three in Quebec
means something.’…Like epidemiologists who look for patterns in the
outbreak and spread of diseases, reporters also seek meaning in
chaos—except we must do so on deadline. Three out of three was
statistically meaningless, but not in a business where we grasp for any
pattern. For journalists, three is a magic number: it’s a trend.
Here is how that trend was described in her 2006 article, “Get under the desk”:
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.
Okay, so in 2006, according to Jan Wong, Montreal is no longer
cosmopolitan, Quebec is racist, and Wong has no real understanding of
mental illness. Wong committed a cardinal sin of journalism: in the
absence of any tangible evidence, she confused correlation and
causation. Her article was marred by a breakdown in the professional
integrity journalists must be governed by.
There is trash journalism — of Geraldo or Fox News ilk — and there’s
serious journalism. Unfortunately — for us and for them — on that day in
September 2006, “under deadline” and in the thrall of a civic tragedy
cum sensational news story, Jan Wong and Edward Greenspon briefly seemed
unable to tell the difference. That neither of them works at
The Globe
and Mail any longer may not be a coincidence.
By the end of
Out of the Blue, Jan Wong still can’t accept
she was the author of her own misfortune. Instead, she writes, “like a
plot device in an Ian McEwan novel, one random occurrence had set off an
inexorable chain of events and everything changed.”
But the event wasn’t random. In my opinion, it was generated by Jan Wong’s poor judgement. And her editor’s.
But enough about L’affaire Wong. What about the rest of the book? Does Wong dish that “dish best served cold”?
Does she ever.
Wong commands our sympathy by launching her tale with a poignant
scene: the author cowering in her car outside her home, convinced that a
pickup truck parked nearby shelters a homicidal maniac–a Quebecer bent
on revenge for her Dawson article. This is a delusion, of course. But as
a literary device, it works.
Wong uses unnamed co-workers — and a dead woman — to establish that
The Globe and Mail’s was a toxic work environment. The late Val Ross,
Wong’s friend and colleague, along with two other women co-workers, “had
been sick from work-related stress. Val told me she had been taking
antidepressants for years…‘It’s the only way I can stand working here.’”
(Of course, the fact that a significant proportion of women in middle age are on antidepressants should also perhaps be noted.)
Wong’s descent into depression is recounted in excruciating detail.
And, despite her explanation of a journalist’s near-compulsive
note-taking, her behaviour demonstrates a degree of functioning still
hard to reconcile in one supposedly so overwhelmed with depression she
could no longer work.
Viewed from Wong’s point of view, the devastation that follows her
2006 article is understandable — extreme and total. But viewed from
The
Globe and Mail’s perspective: Wong maintained she was unable to work for
them, could not write for them, for years. On the other hand, she could
manage, contemporaneously, to polish off a 90,000 word manuscript while
on a couple of months of unpaid leave. And mount a successful tour in
support of the finished book.
Who can blame
The Globe for being a little tetchy about that, or
about the notion that her doctor-prescribed peregrinations to Europe and
China — what she calls “the geographic cure” — are a reasonable
treatment for depression? Of course, she might say, “But look, I got
better using the geographic cure.” In which case, one might reply, “Post
hoc ergo propter hoc.”
Finally,
Out of the Blue is, I am sorry to have to say,
poorly-researched. For example, this early clunker that I noticed
immediately, about that fateful day back at Dawson College:
Kimveer Gill had shot twenty people. It could have been much
worse, but two rookie police officers arrived by chance on a
drug-related tip three minutes after he began shooting. Veteran cops
might have waited for backup. The rookies drew their guns and rushed
into the cafeteria. Gill stopped shooting.
Wrong: charging in to confront a shooter had become standard
operating procedure for police by 2006, as a cursory Internet search
immediately reveals (I also remember reading about it back then). The
method had been developed following the Ecole Polytechnique shootings:
the then-established police practice–establishing a perimeter and
waiting for SWAT backup — was one of the reasons the Polytechnique toll
was so tragically high — 14 women murdered, 14 others injured.
In fact, Montreal police said the Dawson College incident was the
city’s first true test of its revamped emergency response plan.
Deputy police chief Jean-Guy Gagnon, the senior officer in charge
last Sept. 13 when Kimveer Gill killed one person and injured 20 others,
says…”We can see a big evolution from the Polytechnique event to the
Dawson event, the first responder applied exactly to our training
program,” Gagnon said…Since the rampage at the Ecole polytechnique in
1989, police officers were trained to identify the suspect or source of
danger and isolate it. For 18 harrowing minutes, five Montreal police
officers kept a trenchcoat-clad Gill pinned in a corner, allowing Dawson
students to escape unscathed. This is the reason we only have one death
on that day,” Gagnon said. (Canadian Press article from Sept. 12, 2007 “Montreal cops learning from Dawson and two other school shootings.”)
A front page article in Kitchener/Cambridge/Waterloo’s The Record
published the same day as Wong’s original piece, “Local police were
doing simulation of rampage,” carries similar information.
Then there is her unquestioning reliance on the report by Montreal
psychiatric researchers about the psychological impact of the event on
the school’s survivors, which she mentions in part to underline how she
isn’t the only person to have been traumatized by the Dawson shootings:
“The study found they suffered psychological damage at a rate two to
three times higher than that of the general population, and that the
trauma increased with proximity to the shooting.”
Logical, perhaps. But
unscientific in the extreme.
What neither Wong nor Dr. Warren Steiner, head of the McGill
University Health Centre’s psychiatric department and point man for the
study in the English press, come clean on is that the study analysed the
responses of 949 volunteer respondents; I know they were volunteers
because my son was approached to participate and refused.
Dawson College has some 7500 day students, another 2500 evening
students, and many hundreds of teachers and support staff. There were,
literally, thousands of students and staff present at the CEGEP on the
day of the Kimveer Gill shootings. Is it likely that the 949 people
studied represent a random selection of those exposed to the violent
events? Isn’t it reasonable to assume these self-selected respondents
are, in fact, probably much more likely than the average person present
to have been traumatized by the violence? Who knows how many of these
949 people were on the psychologically less copacetic end of the
spectrum even before the rampage of Sept. 13, 2006?
The bottom line on
Out of the Blue: Wong’s book-long
skewering
The Globe and Mail for firing her reminds me of the standard
definition of chutzpah: a young man who murders both his parents
throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.
Nothing justifies ethnic slurs, hate mail, or death threats, but
L’affaire Wong was the result of decisions made by Jan Wong and her
editor. Her remarks, which she neither takes back nor seems to regret,
revealed an appalling ignorance of and lack of respect for Quebec
society. Not to mention the sort of pseudo-intellectualizing that would
have been shot down in a CEGEP term paper.
Probably Wong’s editor Edward Greenspon should have borne the brunt
of Quebecers’ ire. Her writing crossed the line, and a tight deadline
doesn’t excuse a seasoned journalist’s provincial character
assassination. It was her editor’s job, though, to rein her in, to
correct her lapses. And his failure was epic.
That said, who could then deny that
The Globe and Mail had a duty to
support Wong for an illness contracted during her employment with them, a
result of said employment? No one. Which is, perhaps, why the paper
eventually settled with her. And yet it’s hard to blame
The Globe’s
insurer, Manulife Financial, for having a hard time accepting that she
was ill, and that “the geographic cure” — world travel — is a bona fide
medical treatment for depression.
Wong now spends part of her time in Fredericton, teaching journalism
at St. Thomas University. She also writes for the Halifax
Chronicle
Herald. A few years back,
that paper
laid off a quarter of its newsroom staff. In 2011, many of its
freelancers quit after they refused to sign a new, mandatory, all-rights
grabbing contract.
Beverly Akerman is a Montreal writer; her story collection, The
Meaning of Children, winner of the David Adams Richards Prize, was
recently published as an e-book.
This article originally published on The Rover
In 2003, a small group of Concordia University film buffs got together and
decided they wanted to see some alternative, non-commercial documentary
films. They started out in with small screenings every couple of weeks,
says Ezra Winton, BA 05, MA 07, co-founder and director of programming
for Cinema Politica (CP). 
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![[Image: 18iq9f.jpg]](http://i49.tinypic.com/18iq9f.jpg)
