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Charest seeks Globe apology over notion culture a factor in school shootings
The Canadian Press
Published: Tuesday, September 19, 2006MONTREAL -- Premier Jean Charest wants an apology from the Globe and Mail over an article he labelled a “disgrace” for suggesting the Dawson College killer was marginalized in a Quebec society the story said values pure francophone culture.
In Saturday’s paper, Jan Wong said Quebec’s linguistic struggle has taken a toll on immigrants as well as longtime anglophones.
Wong wrote that Dawson killer Kimveer Gill, Ecole Polytechnique murderer Marc Lepine and Valery Fabrikant, a Concordia University professor who killed four colleagues in 1992, had “all been marginalized, in a society that valued `pure laine’<\!f>” - a term commonly used to describe someone who is francophone through and through.
“To be sure, the shootings in all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals,” Wong wrote in a two-page article billed as a reconstruction of Gill’s rampage, which left one person dead and 20 others injured.
“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.”
Wong noted that Gill was of Indian origin, Lepine was half-Algerian and that Fabrikant was an immigrant from Russia.
In a letter to the newspaper, Charest called Wong’s article a “disgrace.”
“It betrays an ignorance of Canadian values and a profound misunderstanding of Quebec,” he wrote.
“She should have the decency to apologize to all Quebecers.”
The office of Globe editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon said late Tuesday the newspaper would publish Charest’s letter in its Wednesday edition but there was no immediate word on whether there would be an apology.
Charest said Wong has “discredited” herself.
“I was shocked and disappointed by the narrow-minded analysis published…in which Ms Wong sought to identify the affirmation of French culture in Quebec as the deeper cause of the Dawson College shootings and the killings at the (Ecole) Polytechnique in 1989.”
The nationalist Societe St-Jean-Baptiste has filed a complaint with the Press Council of Quebec over Wong’s article.
“There is no obsession for racial purity in Quebec, definitely not,” president Jean Dorion told Global News. “The expression `pure laine’ is absolutely obsolete.”
The matter also surfaced in the Commons on Tuesday when Bloc Quebecois MP Maka Kotto denounced the article and called on the Conservative government and opposition parties to do the same.