What NOT to say about a Montreal shooting

Photo Credit/Caption: 

Richard Henry Bain, 62, is the PQ election shooting suspect. Canadian Press

Welcome to Montreal. Another decade, another nut with a gun shooting up the place. 

Sure takes our minds off the potholes. 

This time Canada’s headlines have been hijacked by an individual who (allegedly) attacked the venue where Quebec’s Premiere-elect, Pauline Marois, was making her acceptance speech. She’d just uttered her few well-rehearsed lines of English, promising to protect the rights of the English community (hoo-boy!), when a loud noise had her security contingent swoop in to hustle her offstage.

An announcement was made about an “incident,” a platitude heard regularly in our Metro during service interruptions due to suicide-by-subway, and the crowd asked to head for the exits in an orderly way.

In true Quebec fashion, no one moved. Were they flummoxed by the request to be orderly (what, no clanging pots?), or did they stand pat because they’d come for a party and weren’t leaving till they’d had one?

Mme. Marois reappeared onstage, clearly against the advice of her security guys (what’s the point of having security if you ignore their advice?), and reiterated the request to empty Club Metropolis.

Once again, a la mode inimitable du Québec, no one moved.

What if they gave an assassination attempt and nobody believed it?

Mme. Marois gave up, spoke a little more, invited her friends, family, and fellow candidates up on stage, and continued with the celebration of her historic achievement, being elected the first female Premier in the history of le territoire. Note: no one in Quebec officialdom dares refer to it any longer as a province.

Mme. Marois has since said she had no idea, at that point, that anyone had been killed, the implication being she’d never have carried on so merrily if she’d known. Which makes me wonder: what, exactly, did her security guards tell her, why didn't they tell her how serious things were, and, once again, how much we’re paying for advice that she chooses not to follow?

Not to mention why there didn’t appear to be police protection at every access point to the venue, including the alleyway behind the venue where the shooting occurred. Haven’t these guys ever watched The West Wing?

Shot dead was 48-year-old Denis Blanchette; seriously injured, apparently by the same bullet, is the coincidentally named Dave Courage. Both men were audio technicians working at the club.

Photo taken from Facebook by La Presse

The suspect, Richard Henry Bain, 62, is “a respected businessman with no criminal record,” according to The Toronto Sun (I guess they should have added “until now”). 

At the time of the shooting and subsequent firebombing, Mr. Bain shouted, in French, “The English are waking up!” and that it was “payback time.” He is bruited to be bipolar and was acting more unusually in recent years, according to reports in La Presse. The H1N1 outbreak, for example, seemed to have resulted in a near-survivalist mentality, Mr. Bain quitting the city to run a fishing lodge in La Conception, near Mont Tremblant.

Repercussions of this shooting continue to ripple through our political pond, reports citing “facts” that are quease-inducing. In an article about Mr. Bain, who was attempting to secure the right to exclusive use of the lake where his fishing lodge is located, there’s this:

“Lors de ses visites à l'hôtel de ville de La Conception, il se montrait pourtant courtois et n'exigeait pas d'être servi en anglais, même s'il s'exprimait avec un fort accent en français.” 

Which means ‘During his visits to La Conception city hall, he remained courteous and didn’t demand to be served in English, even though he spoke French with a strong [English] accent.’ 

Eww. Imagine what they’d have written if he had demanded to be served in English.

Meantime, our mayor, Gerald Tremblay, is on record as saying that Mr. Bain has ‘nothing to do with’ (“n’a rien a voir”) the English community. And, not that we usually pay any attention to them but now, apparently, the Société Saint Jean Baptiste is blaming the English media for Mr. Bain’s behaviour…really? How do you say “scapegoat” en français?

On Facebook, a photo is circulating of an intern at a Montreal radio station standing on the street with a sign exhorting “Embrasse un Anglo.” Meaning ‘embrace an Anglo’ and not ‘embarrass an Anglo.’

Apparently, Mr. Bain had 22 guns because he loved to shoot things…er, I mean hunt. 

Since Canada’s gun lobby achieved the destruction of our long gun registry partly by demanding to be shown which crimes the registry prevented, I’d like to underline the sloppiness of that reasoning by calling on Prime Minister Harper to strike down our murder laws because they clearly failed to prevent the death of Mr. Blanchette.


May he rest in peace.

Yellow tape and police cars surrounded an upended red sports car;stuck in an enormous pothole in a road in downtown Montreal. The scene was an elaborate hoax as part of a campaign to launch the website potholeseason.ca.

Read it on Global News: Global News | Car upended in Montreal pothole in an elaborate publicity stunt

The Solution is Simple: No More Guns

(To mark the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, still in critical condition--and the murder of 6 others, with 13 more injured--here is a re-issue of the first article on gun control I wrote, published in The Montreal Gazette, Sept. 19, 2006, following the murderous rampage/suicide of Kimveer Gill the previous week):

I am the mother of a Dawson College student, was friendly with a beloved husband and father killed at Concordia University 14 years ago, and worked in a non-traditional occupation - molecular genetics research - when the Ecole Polytechnique massacre took place. My husband, Russell Copeman, is a provincial politician who spends much of the year at the National Assembly in Quebec City, where three were killed and 13 wounded by a deranged Canadian soldier in 1984. And so I feel myself uniquely placed to respond to the events of Sept. 13.

My response is not to launch a fruitless inquiry into the "root causes" of this catastrophic occurrence. I couldn't care a whit whether the perpetrator of last Wednesday's atrocities was refused academic admission to Dawson College, whether he was bullied as a child, either in school or at home. I think it's irrelevant if he grew up with a chip on his shoulder because of some imagined slight, or even if he or his family suffered in the past from some form of persecution, be it real or imagined, in Canada or elsewhere.

To me, there can be no mitigating factors for murder, whether the locus of attack is a college campus in downtown Montreal, a nightclub in Tel Aviv, a skyscraper in New York City, or some parched crossroads among the rubble of Afghanistan. Murder is murder is murder. Each one should fall under the rubric of "hate crime."

When 14 young Montrealers, full of hope, ambition and promise, had their lives snuffed out because they had earned the privilege of studying engineering while another could not, many people I knew, especially women, insisted the "root cause" of this crime was our society's oppression of women, an opinion at which I scoffed.

When gun control was trumpeted as the panacea to these horrible killings, I was skeptical. I bought the argument that gun control penalized the law-abiding, rather than the criminals. I was sensitive to the position that people living rural lifestyles needed firearms as part of their daily lives, a situation unimaginable to me, given my urban existence.

Well, I am skeptical and sensitive no more. Last Wednesday was the drop that made the glass overflow, as we say in Quebec. The balance has shifted. I realize more clearly now that my choice must be to care more for the potential victims than the potential perpetrators.

So that's my response to the Dawson killings: No more guns. It's as simple as that. Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to explode in bloody slaughter, I believe that guns should be unavailable to the public.

I don't trust psychiatrists - much less gun-registry officials - to ferret out what lies deep in the hearts of men. After all, Concordia administrators, some of whom had equipped their own offices with locks and panic buttons because of Valery Fabrikant's continued harassment, consulted a psychiatrist about the demented professor before his murderous rampage. I saw the same psychiatrist on television last week, hovering in the background following the Dawson shootings.

According to journalist Morris Wolfe, the psychiatrist had deemed it "unlikely" that Fabrikant, a professor repeatedly denied tenure, would become violent (www.grubstreetbooks.ca /essays/fabrikant.html).

So if a trained psychiatrist with an abiding interest in severe and chronic psychotic illness, confronted with a man he himself has diagnosed as having "a personality disorder" cannot foresee the coming explosion of rage, all the administrative screening in the world won't be able to keep legal guns out of the hands of loonies. The solution that's clearest to me is to make guns - both legal and illegal - impossible to get.

And so, as a mother, a woman, and a sentient human being, I'm telling Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the entire government of Canada to wake up and smell the coffee: If you persist in your intended dismantling of the gun registry instead of making it harder for people to own guns, there will be hundreds of thousands of us marching in the streets of Montreal. I guarantee it.