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http://www.comefromchina.com/newbbs/showthread.php?s=&threadid=503209&forumid=56
ZT 加国总理PK华裔记者: 言论交锋枪击案[推荐]
无论在东方还是西方，言论自由都有个“度”的问题，不能想当然地满嘴跑骆驼。加拿大提倡文化多元不假，还堂而皇之地定为国策，但也不要过于天_地认为“知无不言，言者无罪”，一旦逾越出上面所提到的“度”，即便出於小记者之手，让总理不爽，也会“龙颜勃怒”的。
华裔记者黄明珍日前在供职的主流媒体《环球邮报》上，发表了有关道森校园枪杀案的长篇特写，没有人云亦云，而是通过自己的独立思考，提出尖锐的看法，认为之所以在魁北克省导致枪杀案连续发生，魁省文化难辞其咎。谈锋所向，对执政者无疑具有一定的杀伤力。结果在哈珀的直接“关照”下，其知名度迅速蹿红。
华裔女记者的一家之言
在加拿大，只有两份国家级的英文大报，一份是《国家邮报》（National Post），另一份就是《环球邮报》(Globe and Mail)了。所以能在这两份报纸上耍笔头子，应该是个有一定影响的活计，更何况作为一位华裔女士，不是想干就能干的。因此说，黄明珍(Jane Wong)能出任《环球邮报》的记者和专栏作家，想必也颇经过了一番努力，无论在文字写作上、还是新闻敏感上，都有独到的过人之处。不久前因道森学院 (Dawson College)枪击案发表专论，借题发挥抨击种族歧视，确实证明不是一个吃素的。
黄明珍的专稿标题是“Get under the desk”，通过对道森学院教师Pina Salvaggio等枪击案目击者的采访、对整个枪击事件的详细描写，引发了对这起枪击案评论。
在黄明珍的文章里，通过分析，指校园血案涉歧视移民，将枪手吉尔(Kimveer Gill)上周在道森学院(Dawson College)校园滥杀悲剧，归咎魁北克省民众没有善待移民。
《环球邮报》9月16日刊登了黄明珍的这篇文章，正是在这篇文章里她质疑说，蒙特利尔的居民们实在想不通，为何他们的城市17年来发生3宗校园枪击命案，包括1989年、1993年和2006年，这已经成为他们内心挥之不去的一个疑团。
黄明珍指出，在上述3次校园枪击命案中有一个共同的现象，主角枪手吉尔、莱皮纳(Marc Lepine)和法布里坎特(Valery Fabrikant)都不是纯法语人。这个现象被黄明珍敏感地抓到了，如此高的重复率不是偶然的。她因此推论，非法语裔觉得他们都在一个重视纯种（PURE LAINE ）的魁省社会被边缘化。据黄明珍的定义，“纯种”是指“纯正法裔”。
于是黄明珍这样写道：“许多局外人不知道，长达数十年的语言争拗──危害的不仅是英语裔老居民，也包括新移民，使这个曾经的国际化大都市孤立。不错，所有3宗枪击案出自精神有问题的人。但同样_实的是，这3宗案件的凶手，没有一人是纯法语裔。”
道森学院血案主嫌吉尔和其他两个凶犯一样，都不是土生土长的魁北克人，而是所谓“局外人”（outsider）。吉尔祖籍印度；1992年制造所谓“康考迪大学屠杀案”的法布里康（Valery Fabrikant），是来自前苏联的犹太移民，俄罗斯裔教授，他曾经多次申请终身职位被拒；1989年枪杀14名妇女后饮弹自尽的勒潘（Marc Lepine），原名加辟（Gamil Gharbi），是有阿尔及利亚血统的穆斯林青年，据说因为要求从军和报名大学工程系先后被拒绝，遂将自己的名字“法语化”。黄明珍认为，由于他们都不是正宗说法语人士，所以他们在生活中曾经遭受因为其宗源受到过不公平的对待。
“在世界其他地方，种族纯正的说法不上台面，但魁北克人却以此自豪。”黄明珍于是在该篇文章中暗示，魁独运动倡导语言和文化纯正，对这个地区规模不大的英语和移民人口造成负面影响。
哈珀动怒为哪般？
显然哈珀是个看书看报有学有术的联邦总理，几乎在第一时间就读到了黄明珍在《环球邮报》上发表的文章，看后非常不悦。
哈珀严厉批评道，黄明珍的言论显得有些“荒谬”，是“一派胡言无无根据”。
他上周三（20日）致函《环球邮报》，对黄明珍的“长篇大论”表示关注，指指责她将枪击事件与魁省省民对移民存在偏见相联系的言论偏颇、荒谬、不负责和无根据，对魁北克的判断充满个人偏见。
哈珀写道：“尽管作者有权表达她的意见，其言论显然荒谬、无根据。这不仅显示她完全不负责，如此归咎魁北克社会也是彻底的偏颇。”
哈珀说，上周校园枪击案件令所有魁北克人惊恐，吉尔走进道森学院，一路乱枪滥杀无辜，1名女学生迪苏莎(Anastasia De Sousa)死亡，另外20人受伤。他在信上表示：“这些行为应受无条件的道德谴责，不能假借社会与舆论的言词，掩饰偏见文字。”也就是说，人们应该无保留地谴责凶犯吉尔的犯罪行经，而不是利用这样一个事件，来推销所谓社会理论。
有学者分析说，黄明珍有关校园枪击案的言论之所以让哈珀不快，关键在于她把矛头指向魁省，而魁省现在则是联邦保守党冀望组建大多数政府的“命脉”。当然这种揣测有可能引起哈珀先生的再次动怒，所以特意加个引号。
国会要报馆道歉
国会中往往政见杂陈势力相左，为党派利益牵制在任政府。然而在对待小记者黄明珍的“失言”上，这次却罕见地表现出“步调一致”。
据悉，众议院所有政党无不支持哈珀的做法，都要求《环球邮报》道歉，并为此还通过一项有关动议。
9月19日，魁北克省长庄社理(Jean Charest)也致函《环球邮报》主编，称黄明珍的文章为“羞辱”，说她的议论“不成体统”和“有失体面”，为此感到“震惊和失望”。
在要求黄明珍向所有魁省人道歉之余，庄社理还写道，这篇文章“罔顾加拿大的美德及对魁省严重误解。”他还认为，这篇文章表露出对加拿大价值观的无知，以及对魁北克极端错误的理解。
不论统独倾向，各党派都不失时机地对黄明珍大加挞伐，魁北克政团（BLOC QUEBECOIS ）党魁杜锡也要求《环球邮报》道歉。魁人政团议员库图（Maka Kotto）本周一还在众院高声诵读了一则声明，严厉谴责和抨击黄明珍的文章，敦促保守党政府及其他反对党同心协力对付此事。
联邦自由党国会议员福科在众议院表态发言时，竟称黄明珍的文章是“垃圾”，此语一出，竟当场博得在座其他的自由党议员的击掌叫好。
蒙特利尔市圣占巴斯迪协会（SOCIETE ST. JEAN BAPTISTE DE MONTREAL ）已向魁省新闻管辖委会（QUEBEC PRESS COUNCIL ）入禀投诉黄明珍这篇文章。该协会主席多里安（J. DORION ）表示，“经历过上周三的枪击悲剧，在魁省的我们本应得到抚慰，并非面对这些不切实际的理论。环球邮报是加拿大最大及最有权威的报纸，省外及国外的人会以这文章来判断我们，教人怎能容忍。” 他的协会现在要求《环球邮报》和黄明珍道歉，并加以更正。
要有沟通渠道
其实自从联邦保守党执政以来，哈珀与媒体的关系一直紧绷，尤其对部长级阁员的采访上，先后有过多次规定，并且为此闹过不痛快。所以哈珀迁怒于报馆，不是自黄明珍始，也不会到黄明珍终。
《环球邮报》总编辑助理格里斯潘（Edward Greenspon）日前表示，该报不会在报纸上对事件发表正式评论，但在9月21日的内部社论上谈及该问题。
有关人士据此说，即便在信息化的时代，有时也需要及时沟通，因为沟通的缺失往往导致理解上的误会与摩擦。
族裔身份遭围剿
另有消息说，黄明珍在撰文分析魁省校园枪案之后，她收到不少email满纸秽语，有人甚至用种族歧视和性别歧视手法攻击她。
黄明珍还特别讲到蒙特利尔的法文报纸Le Devoir，该报近日刊登出一幅漫画，漫画中黄明珍被画成斜眼、戴眼镜，并一口爆牙，坐在中餐馆内打开幸运饼，里面有一句签语“小心101法案”，而那是魁省备受争议的语言法。
黄明珍就此表示，你可以攻击我的新闻风格或我的手法，但提到签饼，就是把我的种族扯进来。
但Le Devoir报社总编辑辩解说，黄明珍的父亲在蒙特利尔开过中餐馆，漫画只是提到她的家庭背景，并无任何种族歧视的意思，至于画中形象不过是漫画的夸张手法。
关于黄明珍
其实黄明珍对种族歧视的感觉由来已久，而且有著“切肤之痛”。
她的外祖父早年参与加拿大的铁路建设，是最早成为加拿大公民的中国人之一。几年前，黄明珍出国采访后回加拿大，海关的值班官员怀疑她所持的加拿大护照是伪造的，将她关在小屋内盘查了数小时。当海关官员最终允许她入境时，心情沮丧的黄明珍问了一句：“这一切都是因为我的肤色吗？”那位官员的回答是：“我不能回答这个问题。”黄明珍事后在《环球邮报》上写道：“很多人在离开祖国的时候伤感，而我是在进入加拿大国门的时候哭泣。”
作为华裔加拿大女记者，黄明珍著述颇丰。熟识黄明珍的人说她有幽默感，常能苦中作乐。
由于黄明珍在大陆生活过多年，所以她回大陆采访时，写出的东西常比西人记者更有独到视角。
环球邮报早于1950年代即在中国派驻记者，是北美报章中最早的一家。但今天的中国报道不再局限于当地新闻，因为中国的崛起已经成为一个全球现象。
去年10月她连续在大陆访问近一个月，将注意力集中于中国经济的发展和加中双边贸易关系。此行包括长江沿线的南京、武汉、重庆、扬州、杭州等城市，然后回到北京。当时她撰文指出，中国经济高速发展有三大优势：便宜的劳力、高技术水准的专业人员和港、台及海外华人强有力的投资。
黄明珍也是一个蛮有职业感的人。有朋友回忆说，2003年开春闹非典的时候，多伦多卫生医官发布命令，3月16日之后到过慈恩医院的民众，必须在家中严格隔离10天，也就是感染 SARS 的潜伏期，家庭成员都必须戴口罩，因为慈恩医院是非典“重灾区”。
由于黄明珍曾在3月18日去慈恩医院采访，在里面各处晃了一个多小时，于是落入“自动隔离”范围。当时报社里同事闻知都很紧张，有人甚至脸色发白地对她猛吼：“你整天都在对著我呼吸! ”另一名身怀六甲的同事更惊呼：“我刚和你吃完午餐！”她的上司则下令她立即回家，不过要由家中传稿。
于是黄明珍由家中发稿，不可以外出。小儿子萨姆说她得了SARS，她戴著口罩告诉9岁的儿子，她不是SARS病患。至于大儿子班恩问她，口罩究竟要戴多久，她向儿子解释说，当时已是自己到慈恩医院采访第8天，根据10潜伏期要求，只不过再戴2天。
当时黄明珍已订了机票准备到香港和中国南部，采访SARS病源。最后还是接受医生劝告，退了机票，取消那趟香港之行。
(记者 萧元恺)
For your information, here are the two news clips in English on the Globe. I have always liked Jan Wong, and my hat off to her again this time. Enjoy. (BTB)
THE MONTREAL SHOOTINGS
National News
‘Get under the desk'; Last Wednesday was just like any other at Montreal's Dawson College. Then all hell broke loose. Kimveer Gill was walking the hallways, spraying students with gunfire. JAN WONG reconstructs the bloody siege.
JAN WONG
3243 words
16 September 2006
The Globe and Mail
A8
English
All material copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. or its licensors. All rights reserved.
MONTREAL -- At 12:35 p.m. on Wednesday, Pina Salvaggio got herself a cup of coffee, took out her bag lunch and sat down in her Dawson College office to correct some homework. “All of a sudden, I heard: bang, bang, bang. I immediately thought gunshots.”
Ms. Salvaggio looked out her office, and saw students milling around. “It's a joke,” one of them told her. She returned to her office and this time closed her door. Then she heard more shots, many this time, and she knew. She opened her door, saw two students standing in the hall, and yanked them into her office.
“Get under the desk,” she ordered. Ms. Salvaggio phoned Dawson security. No answer. And then she lost it. Like an extraordinary number of faculty at this university-preparatory college in Montreal, she had a child studying there, too.
“My son is out there,” she wailed, as tears streamed down her face.
At 12:45 p.m., Ms. Salvaggio's son, Alexander Matthew, was just getting out of class. He took the stairs down to ground level. He had his head phones on and was listening to Sound Garden, a rock band. That's why he was quite startled when four or five girls burst into the stairwell screaming and crying. One of them screamed, “I've been shot.”
“I thought they were joking,” said Alex, 19. “Then I noticed she was bleeding around the waist.”
The girls ran back into the hallway. Still not comprehending, Alex followed them. A staff member, whose office was across from the stairwell, heard the commotion and came out to scold them. “What the hell are you guys doing?”
“I've been shot,” the girl screamed. “Call an ambulance.”
Stunned, Alex began walking toward the atrium, inside the ground-floor cafeteria. Students were running from there as fast as they could. He inched closer.
“I saw two policemen,” he said. “They must have just arrived. They had their guns drawn.”
Cara Genest, 17, didn't hear anything either. She was standing near the atrium when other students stampeded past, shouting to get out. She ran outside, and saw someone lying in a pool of blood.
Upstairs, in another cafeteria, her friend, Erin Neilson, 18, heard the gunshots. “Somebody shouted, ‘Get out! Get out!' Everyone just got up and bolted for the door.”
This week, Montrealers were asking: Why us? Youths elsewhere in Canada are addicted to violent video games. Youths elsewhere in Canada live in soul-less suburbs. Youths elsewhere are alienated and into Goth culture. Yet while there have been similar high-school tragedies, all three rampages at Canadian postsecondary institutions occurred here, not in Toronto, or Vancouver or Halifax or Calgary.
“A lot of people are saying: Why does this always happen in Quebec?” says Jay Bryan, a business columnist for the Montreal Gazette, the city's only English-language daily. “Three doesn't mean anything. But three out of three in Quebec means something.”
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.
In 1989, Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 women and wounded 13 others at the University of Montreal's École Polytechnique. He was a francophone, but in the eyes of pure laine Quebeckers, he was not one of them, and would never be. He was only half French-Canadian. He was also half Algerian, a Muslim, and his name was Gamil Gharbi. Seven years earlier, after the Canadian Armed Forces rejected his application under that name, he legally changed his name to Marc Lepine.
Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor, was an immigrant from Russia. In 1992, he shot four colleagues and wounded one other at Concordia University's faculty of engineering after learning he would not be granted tenure.
This week's killer, Kimveer Gill, was, like Marc Lepine, Canadian-born and 25. On his blog, he described himself as of “Indian” origin. (In their press conference, however, the police repeatedly referred to Mr. Gill as of “Canadian” origin.)
It isn't known when Mr. Gill's family arrived in Canada. But he attended English elementary and high schools in Montreal. That means he wasn't a first-generation Canadian. Under the restrictions of Bill 101, the province's infamous language law, that means at least one of his parents must have been educated in English elementary or high schools in Canada.
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.
Mr. Gill, by all accounts a loner, was a high-school dropout who lived in his parent's basement in suburban Laval. He was 6 foot 1 with light skin, dark hair shaved at the sides and a penchant for all-black outfits. He had no job, but he owned a car, and he bought three expensive guns, including the Beretta, which retails for about $800 (U.S.).
In an on-line journal nine months earlier, he wrote that the day he planned to seek revenge would be grey. “A light drizzle will be starting up,” he wrote.
On Wednesday, it rained in Montreal. Mr. Gill donned black combat boots and a black Matrix-style trench coat, and drove his black Pontiac Sunfire downtown. He parked it on Wood Avenue, and pulled three guns from the trunk. He looked through the scope of one, and aimed it at a group of boys. They didn't run, and he didn't fire. Later, one of the teens said he didn't think the gun was real.
He walked past the Dawson daycare centre, which has 48 toddlers, and along de Maisonneuve. Students were smoking outside the main entrance. Mr. Gill, who did not smoke, shot two of them. Then he went inside, through a double set of glass doors, and straight ahead to the atrium. It was lunch time. He began shooting.
Richmond Lam, a photography student at Dawson, was eating a falafel sandwich at the Alexis-Nihon shopping plaza across from the college when students began running in. He went to the window, and saw people ducking for cover. He spotted someone bleeding on the ground.
Mr. Lam, who is 31, grabbed his cameras and ran to the street. He arrived just as the two police officers were running in. He took a few photographs before a Dawson staff member pushed him back. “Go back in the building!” the staffer ordered.
Maro Barcarolo and Denis Côté, the police officers, were at Dawson on a routine call, possibly drug-related. They followed Mr. Gill inside the cafeteria. He had been shooting a Beretta CX4 Storm 9 mm semi-automatic. In minutes, he had shot 18 people. One was a 48-year-old Dawson plant-facilities worker, who hasn't been identified, who was trying to shelter a student. Another was a student named Anastasia De Sousa.
Mr. Gill shot her. Stacy, as her friends call her, collapsed. James Santos, a fellow student and friend, tried to drag her behind a serving area. Stacy moaned. “Is she alive?” the killer asked James, who is 17.
“He said, ‘Today is the day she's going to die,” James told the French-language daily, Le Journal de Montreal. Then the killer pumped more bullets into her. Upstairs, Ms. Salvaggio heard the shots. Because the atrium allows noise to float to the top floors, she thought the killer was right outside her office. The female student had taken refuge under one desk. She was silent. The boy student sat, on the ground, his back against the door. He was apparently trying to protect the two females. If the killer tried to get in, he would hold the door shut.
Weeping, and sitting under her desk, Ms. Salvaggio feared she might not get through to 911. But she had faith in her office mate, a calm, efficient teacher whose son is now at the University of Ottawa. Ms. Salvaggio called her colleague at home. “They're shooting here!” she screamed. “Call the police! My son is in the building.”
Tears streaming down her face, she told the students they should call their parents. Then she opened her laptop and tried to figure out her son's Wednesday schedule. At 1:49 p.m., an e-mail popped up from one of her students. “Miss,” it read. “They're shooting. Do we still have the 2 p.m. class?”
Meanwhile, Ms. Salvaggio's colleague, who asked not to be named, dialled 911. At 12:51 p.m., 911 was jammed. She was put on hold for two minutes ― she knows because she watched the timer on her phone ― and then the operator transferred her ― and disconnected her. She redialled and screamed, “There's a gunman at Dawson College!” Then she called Ms. Salvaggio back and said, “Turn off the lights and close the blinds.”
Two floors below, Alex was craning his neck, trying to figure out why everyone was tearing out of the cafeteria. He saw officers Barcarolo and Côté train their guns on something. “That's when I decided it was a smart idea to move back from there.”
Someone slapped him on the back. “Hey,” said a classmate he knows only as Shane. He had just come out of the washroom, and was heading for the cafeteria. Teens have always tuned out the rest of the world, but now they have electronic help. The Dawson College shootings may be the first one in which many students remained clueless a painfully long time because they were listening to iPods.
Alex realized Shane was wearing his iPod, and hadn't heard a thing. He caught up with his classmate, and pulled him back. When other students stampeded past them, they ran, too. Everyone ended up in a computer lab where a class was in disarray.
It wasn't the wisest refuge. For security reasons ― security of the equipment that is ― the computer lab had three vast windows that looked onto the hall. All 50 or so students hit the floor, everyone that is, except for a couple of students who continued working at their computers. Were they Asian?
“Everyone asks me that,” says Alex laughing, much later, from the safety of his home. “One was a white guy who was writing an essay. The other was a black guy who was searching the Internet.”
His friend Shane had left several friends in the cafeteria. Still prone on the floor, he called his friend, Vince. “Dude, are you still there?” Shane asked. Alex didn't know what Vince said, but Shane replied, “Shit! Good luck!” And then, inexplicably, Shane left the relative safety of the computer room and went back to the atrium.
The two police officers had radioed for back-up before they went in. Now, with Mr. Gill trying to use Stacy's friend, James, as a human shield, Officer Barcarolo fired shots high, trying to draw the killer's attention. Mr. Gill hid behind some vending machines on the south side of the cafeteria. Then he pointed at two students, possibly planning to take them as hostages.
“He cried, ‘Come here, come here,' ” said one unnamed witness, quoted in Le Journal. “The police officer screamed, “No, no, don't go there.” Officer Côté, who was crouching on the ground, took advantage of the momentary distraction and fired several shots. One of them hit the killer in the right arm. Mr. Gill then pointed his own gun under his chin, and shot himself.
At 1:15 p.m., someone opened the door of the computer lab. A hand poked through, pointing a gun. Everyone screamed. Then they saw the blue uniform. “Go outside and down the hall,” the police officer ordered. “Don't run.”
Alex and the students, meek and obedient, walked as fast as they could without actually breaking into a run. Outside, the SWAT team was just arriving. “Go, go, go! Get out of here!” the police ordered. The students broke into the run of their lives. Once 15 blocks from Dawson, Alex tried to remember his mother's Wednesday schedule. He thought she was home. He called and left a message: “I'm fine. Don't go to school.”
Upstairs, Ms. Salvaggio called her colleague again. “Call the police!” she screamed. “They're on their way,” her colleague said. “Don't move.”
The young woman under the desk finally opened her mouth. “Miss, I think we should all be quiet. And I think he should move away from the door,” she said quietly, pointing at the boy student who was sitting with his back to the door.
The shooting continued. Suddenly there was silence. Ms. Salvaggio peeked out her door. She saw a policeman in the hall and stepped out.
“Get back in, ma'am,” he told her. The police were going from room to room, evacuating each, one at a time. They weren't sure if Mr. Gill had any accomplices. When Ms. Salvaggio finally got the all-clear, she told the students, whose names she never got, to leave. Normally a chic woman, Ms. Salvaggio looked a wreck. She realized she should have been helping the students. Instead, they were helping her.
“Miss, do you want me to carry your purse?” the boy inquired as they were leaving her office.
“No, just run,” she said, wiping her tears.
If Montrealers are asking, why Montreal, then Dawson students and teachers are asking, why Dawson? The college offers the equivalent of what, in the rest of Canada, would be Grade 12 and 13. It is a 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.
Mr. Gill had no known connection to Dawson. But it was one of only five English CEGEPs in the Montreal area. And Dawson was the biggest and most famous, with 10,000 full- and part-time students and 1,500 faculty and other staff. Also, it was downtown, which was cool, physically straddling Montreal and that bastion of English Quebec, Westmount. Mr. Gill, who said he had been bullied at school, despised his peers. But a high school was no longer the right demographic for him.
Dawson probably looked tempting. Unlike McGill University or Concordia or the University of Montreal, it is housed in one massive, interconnected building, one million square feet in area. At noon, the students congregate in only two places, an upstairs cafeteria and the ground-floor one, conveniently located just off the main entrance.
Mr. Gill's rampage has resonated through the anglophone community. Although Montreal is a big city, English-speaking Montreal is not. It is more like a small town, where everyone knows everyone else. And because English-speaking high-school graduates must go through the CEGEP system before university, Dawson funnels anglophone kids from across the city into one institution.
“I went to Dawson,” said Nancy Essebag, a waitress at Mesquite, a restaurant in the largely anglophone district of N.D.G. She was serving lunch to Ms. Salvaggio and her office mate yesterday before they headed to the college for their first post-rampage meeting.
“I go to Dawson now,” said Jeremy Cantor, 19, who overheard Ms. Essebag. He was lunching at another table. He hadn't been at school that day, but his dining companion, Joel Suss, had. Mr. Suss, 19, attends another CEGEP, but had gone to Dawson to hang out with friends. Like Erin Neilson, he had been in the upstairs cafeteria when the shootings happened.
At the Montreal Gazette newspaper, the news didn't break the traditional way, through a tip. Reporters found out after the daughter of an employee in reader sales called in hysterics. A Gazette reporter, Susan Semenak, wrote a first-person story about how she panicked when her 17-year-old daughter phoned to say she was barricaded behind tables.
At Lower Canada College, an English private school in N.D.G., the headmaster announced the news and told the students that anyone with a connection to Dawson could make calls. The majority of the students did. “We talked about it in class. One of my Grade 5 students has a friend at Dawson who had a gun pointed at his head,” said Laura Mesthene, a teacher at Roslin Elementary School in Westmount.
All Dawson kids interviewed on French media seemed able to speak passable French.
Still, some people felt hurt when the director general of Dawson held a press conference the day after the shootings, and answered questions only in French. “It's an English-language CEGEP, and some of the parents don't understand French,” one Dawson teacher said crossly.
After he committed suicide, Mr. Gill's lifeless, bloodied body was dragged onto the street. Mr. Lam, the photography student, shot pictures through the glass window of the shopping plaza's food court. Stacy's body remained inside the cafeteria for hours. Other students were variously shot in the chest, leg, arm, abdomen and the head. Two remain in critical condition, including one who is in a coma.
Alex's friend, Shane, and his buddies in the atrium cafeteria, all got out safely. Ms. Salvaggio was allowed to return to her office yesterday. In the classroom opposite her office, the desks were piled against the door. Ms. Salvaggio dumped out her coffee and retrieved her laptop. When the phone rang, she couldn't find it at first. It was still under her desk.
Mr. Lam's photographs were published in the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post and the Gazette this week.
The day after the shootings, he was taking pictures of tearful students dropping off flowers and cards. Erin and Cara came with their friends, Rebecca Watkins, 19, and Carleigh Moore, 18, carrying bouquets of red carnations.
“One of the girls shot, Lisa Mezzacappa, was in a few of my classes. She was shot in the leg. She's fine. I saw her on the news.”
Rebecca wasn't fine, though. “We go here every day, and yesterday we weren't safe.” She began to cry. Erin cried, too. The girls hugged each other. Mr. Lam took their pictures.
Later, he said his parents were proud that he had gotten his photos published. But they had also been extremely worried. “They said, ‘Next time, don't worry about taking photos.'”
Mr. Lam isn't sure how he feels about going back. “As a photography student interested in photojournalism, I couldn't have been in a better place. But this is my school. I'm still trying to make sense of everything.”
Harper takes newspaper columnist to task for column about Quebec shootings
BY ALEXANDER PANETTA
CP
621 words
21 September 2006
02:45
The Canadian Press
English
(c) 2006 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
OTTAWA (CP) _ Stephen Harper has lambasted a newspaper columnist who linked last week's Montreal school shootings to Quebecers' alleged prejudice against immigrants.
In a letter to the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, the prime minister called columnist Jan Wong's argument prejudiced, absurd, irresponsible and without foundation.
``While the writer is entitled to her point of view, the argument is patently absurd and without foundation,'' Harper wrote.
``It is not only grossly irresponsible on her part, it is also completely prejudiced to lay blame on Quebec society in this manner.''
The House of Commons also condemned the piece by Wong and, in a motion supported by all political parties, demanded an apology from the newspaper.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest earlier sent his own letter of complaint to the article, which ran in the newspaper's Saturday edition.
Harper said all Quebecers were horrified by last week's events, in which gunman Kimveer Gill blasted his way into Dawson College, killing one student and wounding 20 others.
``These actions deserve our unqualified moral condemnation, not an excuse for printing prejudices masked in the language of social theory,'' Harper wrote.
Charest's letter called Wong's suggestion a ``disgrace.''
In the controversial story, Wong said Montrealers wondered why their city had seen three school shootings in 17 years _ 1989, 1993 and last week.
She noted that none of the shooters _ Marc Lepine (whose birth name was Gamil Gharbi), Valery Fabrikant, or Gill _ were old-stock francophones. Wong then appeared to offer an explanation.
``What many outsiders don't realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city,'' she wrote.
``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.''
The Globe published Harper's letter in Thursday's edition, but did not apologize.
The newspaper did publish an editorial in which it conceded there was no evidence to link the marginalization of Quebec immigrants and the violence at Dawson College, but defended the right to explore such issues.
``We must not ... ever lose sight of the need to ask hard questions and explore uncomfortable avenues. By the same token, it would be remiss to forget that today's Quebec is not the Quebec of yesteryear,'' the editorial read.
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said Wednesday he couldn't believe the newspaper hadn't already apologized.
Quebec federalists were just as indignant as their sovereigntist counterparts.
``The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of publishing such garbage,'' Raymonde Folco, head of the federal Liberals' Quebec caucus, told the Commons in remarks that drew applause from her peers.
Liberal MP Denis Coderre _ who tabled Wednesday's motion in the Commons _ called Quebec a ``model of integration.''
``There's a sort of trend,'' he said outside the Commons.
``There are two or three (journalists) who get carries away in their analysis, and enough's enough.
``We're not `Quebecistan'. We're not a society that ostracizes.''
Coderre was personally mentioned in a recent National Post column headlined `The Rise of Quebecistan,' which mentioned his appearance at a protest condemning the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.
The column by Barbara Kay, which also drew criticism in the province, called ``Quebec the most anti-Israel of the provinces, and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist terrorist sympathizers.''
ZT 加国总理PK华裔记者: 言论交锋枪击案[推荐]
无论在东方还是西方，言论自由都有个“度”的问题，不能想当然地满嘴跑骆驼。加拿大提倡文化多元不假，还堂而皇之地定为国策，但也不要过于天_地认为“知无不言，言者无罪”，一旦逾越出上面所提到的“度”，即便出於小记者之手，让总理不爽，也会“龙颜勃怒”的。
华裔记者黄明珍日前在供职的主流媒体《环球邮报》上，发表了有关道森校园枪杀案的长篇特写，没有人云亦云，而是通过自己的独立思考，提出尖锐的看法，认为之所以在魁北克省导致枪杀案连续发生，魁省文化难辞其咎。谈锋所向，对执政者无疑具有一定的杀伤力。结果在哈珀的直接“关照”下，其知名度迅速蹿红。
华裔女记者的一家之言
在加拿大，只有两份国家级的英文大报，一份是《国家邮报》（National Post），另一份就是《环球邮报》(Globe and Mail)了。所以能在这两份报纸上耍笔头子，应该是个有一定影响的活计，更何况作为一位华裔女士，不是想干就能干的。因此说，黄明珍(Jane Wong)能出任《环球邮报》的记者和专栏作家，想必也颇经过了一番努力，无论在文字写作上、还是新闻敏感上，都有独到的过人之处。不久前因道森学院 (Dawson College)枪击案发表专论，借题发挥抨击种族歧视，确实证明不是一个吃素的。
黄明珍的专稿标题是“Get under the desk”，通过对道森学院教师Pina Salvaggio等枪击案目击者的采访、对整个枪击事件的详细描写，引发了对这起枪击案评论。
在黄明珍的文章里，通过分析，指校园血案涉歧视移民，将枪手吉尔(Kimveer Gill)上周在道森学院(Dawson College)校园滥杀悲剧，归咎魁北克省民众没有善待移民。
《环球邮报》9月16日刊登了黄明珍的这篇文章，正是在这篇文章里她质疑说，蒙特利尔的居民们实在想不通，为何他们的城市17年来发生3宗校园枪击命案，包括1989年、1993年和2006年，这已经成为他们内心挥之不去的一个疑团。
黄明珍指出，在上述3次校园枪击命案中有一个共同的现象，主角枪手吉尔、莱皮纳(Marc Lepine)和法布里坎特(Valery Fabrikant)都不是纯法语人。这个现象被黄明珍敏感地抓到了，如此高的重复率不是偶然的。她因此推论，非法语裔觉得他们都在一个重视纯种（PURE LAINE ）的魁省社会被边缘化。据黄明珍的定义，“纯种”是指“纯正法裔”。
于是黄明珍这样写道：“许多局外人不知道，长达数十年的语言争拗──危害的不仅是英语裔老居民，也包括新移民，使这个曾经的国际化大都市孤立。不错，所有3宗枪击案出自精神有问题的人。但同样_实的是，这3宗案件的凶手，没有一人是纯法语裔。”
道森学院血案主嫌吉尔和其他两个凶犯一样，都不是土生土长的魁北克人，而是所谓“局外人”（outsider）。吉尔祖籍印度；1992年制造所谓“康考迪大学屠杀案”的法布里康（Valery Fabrikant），是来自前苏联的犹太移民，俄罗斯裔教授，他曾经多次申请终身职位被拒；1989年枪杀14名妇女后饮弹自尽的勒潘（Marc Lepine），原名加辟（Gamil Gharbi），是有阿尔及利亚血统的穆斯林青年，据说因为要求从军和报名大学工程系先后被拒绝，遂将自己的名字“法语化”。黄明珍认为，由于他们都不是正宗说法语人士，所以他们在生活中曾经遭受因为其宗源受到过不公平的对待。
“在世界其他地方，种族纯正的说法不上台面，但魁北克人却以此自豪。”黄明珍于是在该篇文章中暗示，魁独运动倡导语言和文化纯正，对这个地区规模不大的英语和移民人口造成负面影响。
哈珀动怒为哪般？
显然哈珀是个看书看报有学有术的联邦总理，几乎在第一时间就读到了黄明珍在《环球邮报》上发表的文章，看后非常不悦。
哈珀严厉批评道，黄明珍的言论显得有些“荒谬”，是“一派胡言无无根据”。
他上周三（20日）致函《环球邮报》，对黄明珍的“长篇大论”表示关注，指指责她将枪击事件与魁省省民对移民存在偏见相联系的言论偏颇、荒谬、不负责和无根据，对魁北克的判断充满个人偏见。
哈珀写道：“尽管作者有权表达她的意见，其言论显然荒谬、无根据。这不仅显示她完全不负责，如此归咎魁北克社会也是彻底的偏颇。”
哈珀说，上周校园枪击案件令所有魁北克人惊恐，吉尔走进道森学院，一路乱枪滥杀无辜，1名女学生迪苏莎(Anastasia De Sousa)死亡，另外20人受伤。他在信上表示：“这些行为应受无条件的道德谴责，不能假借社会与舆论的言词，掩饰偏见文字。”也就是说，人们应该无保留地谴责凶犯吉尔的犯罪行经，而不是利用这样一个事件，来推销所谓社会理论。
有学者分析说，黄明珍有关校园枪击案的言论之所以让哈珀不快，关键在于她把矛头指向魁省，而魁省现在则是联邦保守党冀望组建大多数政府的“命脉”。当然这种揣测有可能引起哈珀先生的再次动怒，所以特意加个引号。
国会要报馆道歉
国会中往往政见杂陈势力相左，为党派利益牵制在任政府。然而在对待小记者黄明珍的“失言”上，这次却罕见地表现出“步调一致”。
据悉，众议院所有政党无不支持哈珀的做法，都要求《环球邮报》道歉，并为此还通过一项有关动议。
9月19日，魁北克省长庄社理(Jean Charest)也致函《环球邮报》主编，称黄明珍的文章为“羞辱”，说她的议论“不成体统”和“有失体面”，为此感到“震惊和失望”。
在要求黄明珍向所有魁省人道歉之余，庄社理还写道，这篇文章“罔顾加拿大的美德及对魁省严重误解。”他还认为，这篇文章表露出对加拿大价值观的无知，以及对魁北克极端错误的理解。
不论统独倾向，各党派都不失时机地对黄明珍大加挞伐，魁北克政团（BLOC QUEBECOIS ）党魁杜锡也要求《环球邮报》道歉。魁人政团议员库图（Maka Kotto）本周一还在众院高声诵读了一则声明，严厉谴责和抨击黄明珍的文章，敦促保守党政府及其他反对党同心协力对付此事。
联邦自由党国会议员福科在众议院表态发言时，竟称黄明珍的文章是“垃圾”，此语一出，竟当场博得在座其他的自由党议员的击掌叫好。
蒙特利尔市圣占巴斯迪协会（SOCIETE ST. JEAN BAPTISTE DE MONTREAL ）已向魁省新闻管辖委会（QUEBEC PRESS COUNCIL ）入禀投诉黄明珍这篇文章。该协会主席多里安（J. DORION ）表示，“经历过上周三的枪击悲剧，在魁省的我们本应得到抚慰，并非面对这些不切实际的理论。环球邮报是加拿大最大及最有权威的报纸，省外及国外的人会以这文章来判断我们，教人怎能容忍。” 他的协会现在要求《环球邮报》和黄明珍道歉，并加以更正。
要有沟通渠道
其实自从联邦保守党执政以来，哈珀与媒体的关系一直紧绷，尤其对部长级阁员的采访上，先后有过多次规定，并且为此闹过不痛快。所以哈珀迁怒于报馆，不是自黄明珍始，也不会到黄明珍终。
《环球邮报》总编辑助理格里斯潘（Edward Greenspon）日前表示，该报不会在报纸上对事件发表正式评论，但在9月21日的内部社论上谈及该问题。
有关人士据此说，即便在信息化的时代，有时也需要及时沟通，因为沟通的缺失往往导致理解上的误会与摩擦。
族裔身份遭围剿
另有消息说，黄明珍在撰文分析魁省校园枪案之后，她收到不少email满纸秽语，有人甚至用种族歧视和性别歧视手法攻击她。
黄明珍还特别讲到蒙特利尔的法文报纸Le Devoir，该报近日刊登出一幅漫画，漫画中黄明珍被画成斜眼、戴眼镜，并一口爆牙，坐在中餐馆内打开幸运饼，里面有一句签语“小心101法案”，而那是魁省备受争议的语言法。
黄明珍就此表示，你可以攻击我的新闻风格或我的手法，但提到签饼，就是把我的种族扯进来。
但Le Devoir报社总编辑辩解说，黄明珍的父亲在蒙特利尔开过中餐馆，漫画只是提到她的家庭背景，并无任何种族歧视的意思，至于画中形象不过是漫画的夸张手法。
关于黄明珍
其实黄明珍对种族歧视的感觉由来已久，而且有著“切肤之痛”。
她的外祖父早年参与加拿大的铁路建设，是最早成为加拿大公民的中国人之一。几年前，黄明珍出国采访后回加拿大，海关的值班官员怀疑她所持的加拿大护照是伪造的，将她关在小屋内盘查了数小时。当海关官员最终允许她入境时，心情沮丧的黄明珍问了一句：“这一切都是因为我的肤色吗？”那位官员的回答是：“我不能回答这个问题。”黄明珍事后在《环球邮报》上写道：“很多人在离开祖国的时候伤感，而我是在进入加拿大国门的时候哭泣。”
作为华裔加拿大女记者，黄明珍著述颇丰。熟识黄明珍的人说她有幽默感，常能苦中作乐。
由于黄明珍在大陆生活过多年，所以她回大陆采访时，写出的东西常比西人记者更有独到视角。
环球邮报早于1950年代即在中国派驻记者，是北美报章中最早的一家。但今天的中国报道不再局限于当地新闻，因为中国的崛起已经成为一个全球现象。
去年10月她连续在大陆访问近一个月，将注意力集中于中国经济的发展和加中双边贸易关系。此行包括长江沿线的南京、武汉、重庆、扬州、杭州等城市，然后回到北京。当时她撰文指出，中国经济高速发展有三大优势：便宜的劳力、高技术水准的专业人员和港、台及海外华人强有力的投资。
黄明珍也是一个蛮有职业感的人。有朋友回忆说，2003年开春闹非典的时候，多伦多卫生医官发布命令，3月16日之后到过慈恩医院的民众，必须在家中严格隔离10天，也就是感染 SARS 的潜伏期，家庭成员都必须戴口罩，因为慈恩医院是非典“重灾区”。
由于黄明珍曾在3月18日去慈恩医院采访，在里面各处晃了一个多小时，于是落入“自动隔离”范围。当时报社里同事闻知都很紧张，有人甚至脸色发白地对她猛吼：“你整天都在对著我呼吸! ”另一名身怀六甲的同事更惊呼：“我刚和你吃完午餐！”她的上司则下令她立即回家，不过要由家中传稿。
于是黄明珍由家中发稿，不可以外出。小儿子萨姆说她得了SARS，她戴著口罩告诉9岁的儿子，她不是SARS病患。至于大儿子班恩问她，口罩究竟要戴多久，她向儿子解释说，当时已是自己到慈恩医院采访第8天，根据10潜伏期要求，只不过再戴2天。
当时黄明珍已订了机票准备到香港和中国南部，采访SARS病源。最后还是接受医生劝告，退了机票，取消那趟香港之行。
(记者 萧元恺)
For your information, here are the two news clips in English on the Globe. I have always liked Jan Wong, and my hat off to her again this time. Enjoy. (BTB)
THE MONTREAL SHOOTINGS
National News
‘Get under the desk'; Last Wednesday was just like any other at Montreal's Dawson College. Then all hell broke loose. Kimveer Gill was walking the hallways, spraying students with gunfire. JAN WONG reconstructs the bloody siege.
JAN WONG
3243 words
16 September 2006
The Globe and Mail
A8
English
All material copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. or its licensors. All rights reserved.
MONTREAL -- At 12:35 p.m. on Wednesday, Pina Salvaggio got herself a cup of coffee, took out her bag lunch and sat down in her Dawson College office to correct some homework. “All of a sudden, I heard: bang, bang, bang. I immediately thought gunshots.”
Ms. Salvaggio looked out her office, and saw students milling around. “It's a joke,” one of them told her. She returned to her office and this time closed her door. Then she heard more shots, many this time, and she knew. She opened her door, saw two students standing in the hall, and yanked them into her office.
“Get under the desk,” she ordered. Ms. Salvaggio phoned Dawson security. No answer. And then she lost it. Like an extraordinary number of faculty at this university-preparatory college in Montreal, she had a child studying there, too.
“My son is out there,” she wailed, as tears streamed down her face.
At 12:45 p.m., Ms. Salvaggio's son, Alexander Matthew, was just getting out of class. He took the stairs down to ground level. He had his head phones on and was listening to Sound Garden, a rock band. That's why he was quite startled when four or five girls burst into the stairwell screaming and crying. One of them screamed, “I've been shot.”
“I thought they were joking,” said Alex, 19. “Then I noticed she was bleeding around the waist.”
The girls ran back into the hallway. Still not comprehending, Alex followed them. A staff member, whose office was across from the stairwell, heard the commotion and came out to scold them. “What the hell are you guys doing?”
“I've been shot,” the girl screamed. “Call an ambulance.”
Stunned, Alex began walking toward the atrium, inside the ground-floor cafeteria. Students were running from there as fast as they could. He inched closer.
“I saw two policemen,” he said. “They must have just arrived. They had their guns drawn.”
Cara Genest, 17, didn't hear anything either. She was standing near the atrium when other students stampeded past, shouting to get out. She ran outside, and saw someone lying in a pool of blood.
Upstairs, in another cafeteria, her friend, Erin Neilson, 18, heard the gunshots. “Somebody shouted, ‘Get out! Get out!' Everyone just got up and bolted for the door.”
This week, Montrealers were asking: Why us? Youths elsewhere in Canada are addicted to violent video games. Youths elsewhere in Canada live in soul-less suburbs. Youths elsewhere are alienated and into Goth culture. Yet while there have been similar high-school tragedies, all three rampages at Canadian postsecondary institutions occurred here, not in Toronto, or Vancouver or Halifax or Calgary.
“A lot of people are saying: Why does this always happen in Quebec?” says Jay Bryan, a business columnist for the Montreal Gazette, the city's only English-language daily. “Three doesn't mean anything. But three out of three in Quebec means something.”
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.
In 1989, Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 women and wounded 13 others at the University of Montreal's École Polytechnique. He was a francophone, but in the eyes of pure laine Quebeckers, he was not one of them, and would never be. He was only half French-Canadian. He was also half Algerian, a Muslim, and his name was Gamil Gharbi. Seven years earlier, after the Canadian Armed Forces rejected his application under that name, he legally changed his name to Marc Lepine.
Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor, was an immigrant from Russia. In 1992, he shot four colleagues and wounded one other at Concordia University's faculty of engineering after learning he would not be granted tenure.
This week's killer, Kimveer Gill, was, like Marc Lepine, Canadian-born and 25. On his blog, he described himself as of “Indian” origin. (In their press conference, however, the police repeatedly referred to Mr. Gill as of “Canadian” origin.)
It isn't known when Mr. Gill's family arrived in Canada. But he attended English elementary and high schools in Montreal. That means he wasn't a first-generation Canadian. Under the restrictions of Bill 101, the province's infamous language law, that means at least one of his parents must have been educated in English elementary or high schools in Canada.
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.
Mr. Gill, by all accounts a loner, was a high-school dropout who lived in his parent's basement in suburban Laval. He was 6 foot 1 with light skin, dark hair shaved at the sides and a penchant for all-black outfits. He had no job, but he owned a car, and he bought three expensive guns, including the Beretta, which retails for about $800 (U.S.).
In an on-line journal nine months earlier, he wrote that the day he planned to seek revenge would be grey. “A light drizzle will be starting up,” he wrote.
On Wednesday, it rained in Montreal. Mr. Gill donned black combat boots and a black Matrix-style trench coat, and drove his black Pontiac Sunfire downtown. He parked it on Wood Avenue, and pulled three guns from the trunk. He looked through the scope of one, and aimed it at a group of boys. They didn't run, and he didn't fire. Later, one of the teens said he didn't think the gun was real.
He walked past the Dawson daycare centre, which has 48 toddlers, and along de Maisonneuve. Students were smoking outside the main entrance. Mr. Gill, who did not smoke, shot two of them. Then he went inside, through a double set of glass doors, and straight ahead to the atrium. It was lunch time. He began shooting.
Richmond Lam, a photography student at Dawson, was eating a falafel sandwich at the Alexis-Nihon shopping plaza across from the college when students began running in. He went to the window, and saw people ducking for cover. He spotted someone bleeding on the ground.
Mr. Lam, who is 31, grabbed his cameras and ran to the street. He arrived just as the two police officers were running in. He took a few photographs before a Dawson staff member pushed him back. “Go back in the building!” the staffer ordered.
Maro Barcarolo and Denis Côté, the police officers, were at Dawson on a routine call, possibly drug-related. They followed Mr. Gill inside the cafeteria. He had been shooting a Beretta CX4 Storm 9 mm semi-automatic. In minutes, he had shot 18 people. One was a 48-year-old Dawson plant-facilities worker, who hasn't been identified, who was trying to shelter a student. Another was a student named Anastasia De Sousa.
Mr. Gill shot her. Stacy, as her friends call her, collapsed. James Santos, a fellow student and friend, tried to drag her behind a serving area. Stacy moaned. “Is she alive?” the killer asked James, who is 17.
“He said, ‘Today is the day she's going to die,” James told the French-language daily, Le Journal de Montreal. Then the killer pumped more bullets into her. Upstairs, Ms. Salvaggio heard the shots. Because the atrium allows noise to float to the top floors, she thought the killer was right outside her office. The female student had taken refuge under one desk. She was silent. The boy student sat, on the ground, his back against the door. He was apparently trying to protect the two females. If the killer tried to get in, he would hold the door shut.
Weeping, and sitting under her desk, Ms. Salvaggio feared she might not get through to 911. But she had faith in her office mate, a calm, efficient teacher whose son is now at the University of Ottawa. Ms. Salvaggio called her colleague at home. “They're shooting here!” she screamed. “Call the police! My son is in the building.”
Tears streaming down her face, she told the students they should call their parents. Then she opened her laptop and tried to figure out her son's Wednesday schedule. At 1:49 p.m., an e-mail popped up from one of her students. “Miss,” it read. “They're shooting. Do we still have the 2 p.m. class?”
Meanwhile, Ms. Salvaggio's colleague, who asked not to be named, dialled 911. At 12:51 p.m., 911 was jammed. She was put on hold for two minutes ― she knows because she watched the timer on her phone ― and then the operator transferred her ― and disconnected her. She redialled and screamed, “There's a gunman at Dawson College!” Then she called Ms. Salvaggio back and said, “Turn off the lights and close the blinds.”
Two floors below, Alex was craning his neck, trying to figure out why everyone was tearing out of the cafeteria. He saw officers Barcarolo and Côté train their guns on something. “That's when I decided it was a smart idea to move back from there.”
Someone slapped him on the back. “Hey,” said a classmate he knows only as Shane. He had just come out of the washroom, and was heading for the cafeteria. Teens have always tuned out the rest of the world, but now they have electronic help. The Dawson College shootings may be the first one in which many students remained clueless a painfully long time because they were listening to iPods.
Alex realized Shane was wearing his iPod, and hadn't heard a thing. He caught up with his classmate, and pulled him back. When other students stampeded past them, they ran, too. Everyone ended up in a computer lab where a class was in disarray.
It wasn't the wisest refuge. For security reasons ― security of the equipment that is ― the computer lab had three vast windows that looked onto the hall. All 50 or so students hit the floor, everyone that is, except for a couple of students who continued working at their computers. Were they Asian?
“Everyone asks me that,” says Alex laughing, much later, from the safety of his home. “One was a white guy who was writing an essay. The other was a black guy who was searching the Internet.”
His friend Shane had left several friends in the cafeteria. Still prone on the floor, he called his friend, Vince. “Dude, are you still there?” Shane asked. Alex didn't know what Vince said, but Shane replied, “Shit! Good luck!” And then, inexplicably, Shane left the relative safety of the computer room and went back to the atrium.
The two police officers had radioed for back-up before they went in. Now, with Mr. Gill trying to use Stacy's friend, James, as a human shield, Officer Barcarolo fired shots high, trying to draw the killer's attention. Mr. Gill hid behind some vending machines on the south side of the cafeteria. Then he pointed at two students, possibly planning to take them as hostages.
“He cried, ‘Come here, come here,' ” said one unnamed witness, quoted in Le Journal. “The police officer screamed, “No, no, don't go there.” Officer Côté, who was crouching on the ground, took advantage of the momentary distraction and fired several shots. One of them hit the killer in the right arm. Mr. Gill then pointed his own gun under his chin, and shot himself.
At 1:15 p.m., someone opened the door of the computer lab. A hand poked through, pointing a gun. Everyone screamed. Then they saw the blue uniform. “Go outside and down the hall,” the police officer ordered. “Don't run.”
Alex and the students, meek and obedient, walked as fast as they could without actually breaking into a run. Outside, the SWAT team was just arriving. “Go, go, go! Get out of here!” the police ordered. The students broke into the run of their lives. Once 15 blocks from Dawson, Alex tried to remember his mother's Wednesday schedule. He thought she was home. He called and left a message: “I'm fine. Don't go to school.”
Upstairs, Ms. Salvaggio called her colleague again. “Call the police!” she screamed. “They're on their way,” her colleague said. “Don't move.”
The young woman under the desk finally opened her mouth. “Miss, I think we should all be quiet. And I think he should move away from the door,” she said quietly, pointing at the boy student who was sitting with his back to the door.
The shooting continued. Suddenly there was silence. Ms. Salvaggio peeked out her door. She saw a policeman in the hall and stepped out.
“Get back in, ma'am,” he told her. The police were going from room to room, evacuating each, one at a time. They weren't sure if Mr. Gill had any accomplices. When Ms. Salvaggio finally got the all-clear, she told the students, whose names she never got, to leave. Normally a chic woman, Ms. Salvaggio looked a wreck. She realized she should have been helping the students. Instead, they were helping her.
“Miss, do you want me to carry your purse?” the boy inquired as they were leaving her office.
“No, just run,” she said, wiping her tears.
If Montrealers are asking, why Montreal, then Dawson students and teachers are asking, why Dawson? The college offers the equivalent of what, in the rest of Canada, would be Grade 12 and 13. It is a 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.
Mr. Gill had no known connection to Dawson. But it was one of only five English CEGEPs in the Montreal area. And Dawson was the biggest and most famous, with 10,000 full- and part-time students and 1,500 faculty and other staff. Also, it was downtown, which was cool, physically straddling Montreal and that bastion of English Quebec, Westmount. Mr. Gill, who said he had been bullied at school, despised his peers. But a high school was no longer the right demographic for him.
Dawson probably looked tempting. Unlike McGill University or Concordia or the University of Montreal, it is housed in one massive, interconnected building, one million square feet in area. At noon, the students congregate in only two places, an upstairs cafeteria and the ground-floor one, conveniently located just off the main entrance.
Mr. Gill's rampage has resonated through the anglophone community. Although Montreal is a big city, English-speaking Montreal is not. It is more like a small town, where everyone knows everyone else. And because English-speaking high-school graduates must go through the CEGEP system before university, Dawson funnels anglophone kids from across the city into one institution.
“I went to Dawson,” said Nancy Essebag, a waitress at Mesquite, a restaurant in the largely anglophone district of N.D.G. She was serving lunch to Ms. Salvaggio and her office mate yesterday before they headed to the college for their first post-rampage meeting.
“I go to Dawson now,” said Jeremy Cantor, 19, who overheard Ms. Essebag. He was lunching at another table. He hadn't been at school that day, but his dining companion, Joel Suss, had. Mr. Suss, 19, attends another CEGEP, but had gone to Dawson to hang out with friends. Like Erin Neilson, he had been in the upstairs cafeteria when the shootings happened.
At the Montreal Gazette newspaper, the news didn't break the traditional way, through a tip. Reporters found out after the daughter of an employee in reader sales called in hysterics. A Gazette reporter, Susan Semenak, wrote a first-person story about how she panicked when her 17-year-old daughter phoned to say she was barricaded behind tables.
At Lower Canada College, an English private school in N.D.G., the headmaster announced the news and told the students that anyone with a connection to Dawson could make calls. The majority of the students did. “We talked about it in class. One of my Grade 5 students has a friend at Dawson who had a gun pointed at his head,” said Laura Mesthene, a teacher at Roslin Elementary School in Westmount.
All Dawson kids interviewed on French media seemed able to speak passable French.
Still, some people felt hurt when the director general of Dawson held a press conference the day after the shootings, and answered questions only in French. “It's an English-language CEGEP, and some of the parents don't understand French,” one Dawson teacher said crossly.
After he committed suicide, Mr. Gill's lifeless, bloodied body was dragged onto the street. Mr. Lam, the photography student, shot pictures through the glass window of the shopping plaza's food court. Stacy's body remained inside the cafeteria for hours. Other students were variously shot in the chest, leg, arm, abdomen and the head. Two remain in critical condition, including one who is in a coma.
Alex's friend, Shane, and his buddies in the atrium cafeteria, all got out safely. Ms. Salvaggio was allowed to return to her office yesterday. In the classroom opposite her office, the desks were piled against the door. Ms. Salvaggio dumped out her coffee and retrieved her laptop. When the phone rang, she couldn't find it at first. It was still under her desk.
Mr. Lam's photographs were published in the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post and the Gazette this week.
The day after the shootings, he was taking pictures of tearful students dropping off flowers and cards. Erin and Cara came with their friends, Rebecca Watkins, 19, and Carleigh Moore, 18, carrying bouquets of red carnations.
“One of the girls shot, Lisa Mezzacappa, was in a few of my classes. She was shot in the leg. She's fine. I saw her on the news.”
Rebecca wasn't fine, though. “We go here every day, and yesterday we weren't safe.” She began to cry. Erin cried, too. The girls hugged each other. Mr. Lam took their pictures.
Later, he said his parents were proud that he had gotten his photos published. But they had also been extremely worried. “They said, ‘Next time, don't worry about taking photos.'”
Mr. Lam isn't sure how he feels about going back. “As a photography student interested in photojournalism, I couldn't have been in a better place. But this is my school. I'm still trying to make sense of everything.”
Harper takes newspaper columnist to task for column about Quebec shootings
BY ALEXANDER PANETTA
CP
621 words
21 September 2006
02:45
The Canadian Press
English
(c) 2006 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
OTTAWA (CP) _ Stephen Harper has lambasted a newspaper columnist who linked last week's Montreal school shootings to Quebecers' alleged prejudice against immigrants.
In a letter to the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, the prime minister called columnist Jan Wong's argument prejudiced, absurd, irresponsible and without foundation.
``While the writer is entitled to her point of view, the argument is patently absurd and without foundation,'' Harper wrote.
``It is not only grossly irresponsible on her part, it is also completely prejudiced to lay blame on Quebec society in this manner.''
The House of Commons also condemned the piece by Wong and, in a motion supported by all political parties, demanded an apology from the newspaper.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest earlier sent his own letter of complaint to the article, which ran in the newspaper's Saturday edition.
Harper said all Quebecers were horrified by last week's events, in which gunman Kimveer Gill blasted his way into Dawson College, killing one student and wounding 20 others.
``These actions deserve our unqualified moral condemnation, not an excuse for printing prejudices masked in the language of social theory,'' Harper wrote.
Charest's letter called Wong's suggestion a ``disgrace.''
In the controversial story, Wong said Montrealers wondered why their city had seen three school shootings in 17 years _ 1989, 1993 and last week.
She noted that none of the shooters _ Marc Lepine (whose birth name was Gamil Gharbi), Valery Fabrikant, or Gill _ were old-stock francophones. Wong then appeared to offer an explanation.
``What many outsiders don't realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city,'' she wrote.
``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.''
The Globe published Harper's letter in Thursday's edition, but did not apologize.
The newspaper did publish an editorial in which it conceded there was no evidence to link the marginalization of Quebec immigrants and the violence at Dawson College, but defended the right to explore such issues.
``We must not ... ever lose sight of the need to ask hard questions and explore uncomfortable avenues. By the same token, it would be remiss to forget that today's Quebec is not the Quebec of yesteryear,'' the editorial read.
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said Wednesday he couldn't believe the newspaper hadn't already apologized.
Quebec federalists were just as indignant as their sovereigntist counterparts.
``The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of publishing such garbage,'' Raymonde Folco, head of the federal Liberals' Quebec caucus, told the Commons in remarks that drew applause from her peers.
Liberal MP Denis Coderre _ who tabled Wednesday's motion in the Commons _ called Quebec a ``model of integration.''
``There's a sort of trend,'' he said outside the Commons.
``There are two or three (journalists) who get carries away in their analysis, and enough's enough.
``We're not `Quebecistan'. We're not a society that ostracizes.''
Coderre was personally mentioned in a recent National Post column headlined `The Rise of Quebecistan,' which mentioned his appearance at a protest condemning the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.
The column by Barbara Kay, which also drew criticism in the province, called ``Quebec the most anti-Israel of the provinces, and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist terrorist sympathizers.''
