“Where is your honour?”

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 23 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Prosecutors have told a jury in Kingston, Ont., that Mohammad Shafia was a tyrant of a father, an Afghan immigrant so obsessed with restoring the “honour” of his family that he drowned his own daughters because they wore make-up and dated boys and had dreams of their own. But during the opening moments of his post-arrest interrogation, broadcast in court for the first time on Wednesday, Shafia looks hardly the menace, slouched in a wooden chair and barely whispering his responses.

Wearing slacks and sandals, he tells the cop on the other side of the table that being slapped in cuffs was a “violation of his right,” that his life is “ruined,” and that the person who really killed his kids “should be found” and punished. Continue…

A question of honour

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 10:01 PM - 2 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Accused “honour killer” Mohammad Shafia returned to court this morning, nearly a week after being rushed from his prison cell to a hospital room with an undisclosed ailment. Dressed in a checkered sport coat and silver ankle chains, the 58-year-old was escorted to his reserved seat inside a bulletproof prisoner’s box. Within minutes, he was weeping. Continue…

The alleged ‘honour killing’ that took the lives of three sisters

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 8 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Yahya, and son, Hamed, allegedly committed unspeakable horrors. According to the police, the couple, along with their son, murdered their three daughters and Shafia’s first wife, Rona Mohammad, by forcing their car into the locks at Kingston Mills, drowning the four of them in three metres of water—an apparent bid to restore the family’s honour. The daughters dishonoured the family, it would appear, for having the gall to dress up, wear makeup and flirt with boys. “May the devil s–t on their graves,” Mohammad Shafia later told his wife in a conversation secretly taped by police.

All the more disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that the three daughters had themselves reached out for help from Quebec’s children’s services, yet suffered the terrible fate nonetheless. Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle told the Kingston, Ont., courtroom recently that child protection workers had visited 17-year-old Sahar in the month before she and her sisters, Zainab, 19, and Geeti, 13, drowned along with the woman they called “auntie.”

The social worker determined that Sahar’s case was genuine, yet was forced to close the file after Sahar clammed up, Lacelle said. The reason for the teenager’s sudden silence: child welfare authorities are required by law to report anything the child says to the parents. “We can’t keep that from them,” says Gerald Savoie, a staff consultant at Montreal’s Batshaw Youth and Family Services. “We have to validate, and confront them with the information.”

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The Commons: To believe

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 1:11 AM - 36 Comments

Just after midnight, at something like 39,000 feet—the reporters at the back of the plane, taken with the elation that comes as a long journey nears an end, having turned this cross-cross country flight into a giddy party—he danced to Aretha Franklin’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Eight hours later, having landed in Montreal six and a half hours earlier, Jack Layton boarded a bus that bears a gigantic likeness of his face and set off for a market downtown. Upon arrival he disembarked and was greeted by a man who proclaimed him the next prime minister of Canada and handed him two miniature flags. Strolling the scene, with Thomas Mulcair and the local candidate keeping close, he paused at a fruit stand and accepted a slice of watermelon. A woman stopped him and asked him to take a picture with her daughters and their dog. He cooed over an infant and purchased some dates. The proprietor of a cheese shop stepped outside to shake his hand.

Across the street then and into the middle of a mob that waited to hear him.

“You have an historic opportunity here,” he told them. Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Ignatieff throws out a suggestion.

On the second day of his summer-long cross-country tour, Ignatieff told people at a town hall meeting in Kingston that international experience is not something that should be frowned upon. It’s a direct rebuttal to the Conservative party’s efforts to paint Ignatieff — who spent more than two decades living and working in Britain and the United States — as someone who’s just visiting Canada.

“I don’t want Canadians to think the only good Canadian is someone who’s never left these shores,” Ignatieff said. He envisions a program in which the federal government would provide subsidized placements with Canadian institutions or partners overseas to “internationalize” an entire generation of young people.

Paul and me and one last song. About dying.

By Dan Hill - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 6 Comments

Paul Quarrington and I are driving to Kingston to do readings at a prestigious book event. Close friends since 1965, we are an odd pair on this brilliantly sunny morning in the spring of 2008. Paul has this nagging cough, and a hoarse voice, which I assume to be singer’s anxiety, as we were both slated to buttress our book readings with a handful of original songs. While I am physically healthy, I’m an emotional train wreck: going through what can kindly be described as an intensely manic period, talking faster than Howard Stern on speed. Leaving Toronto, Paul asks me a question about a certain bestselling female author’s sexual proclivities. I enthusiastically venture an opinion. Or rather a soliloquy. I’m still talking, three hours later, as Kingston looms ahead. And no closer to answering.

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'They're black and you don't want them in'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 4:08 PM - 17 Comments

Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis gets accusatory at a meeting of the immigration committee.

“What happened in Kingston, Jamaica? … I’ll tell you what happened. They’re black and you don’t want them in.”

That set off a chorus of condemnation… and a point of order by Conservative MP Terence Young who called Karygiannis’s behaviour embarrassing. Karygiannis apologized for his choice of words (said he should have used the word ‘African’), but not his point.

"It's unbelievable, the gratitude and relief"

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 6:16 PM - 6 Comments

On a cool morning last March, Kingston-based artist Sally Milne went on a local radio show to plead for her husband’s life. Suffering from a liver disease that was getting progressively worse, Christopher Mueller, a breast cancer researcher at Queen’s University, desperately needed a liver transplant; Milne, who’d already approached friends and family with no success, found herself on K-Rock‘s morning show, hoping to find a suitable donor. “They asked what Chris means to me,” Milne recalls. “I said, ‘We’ve been married for 22 years.’ ”

Sherrie Edmunds had never met Milne or her husband. But, months later, it was her liver donation that saved Mueller’s life.

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‘Canada has been lucky’

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 6 Comments

It could be months before it can be said with certainty whether or not Zainab, Shari and Geeti Shafia, and Rona Amir Mohammed, can be counted among the victims of so-called “honour killings” in Canada. But police in Kingston, Ont., where the bodies of the four women—aged 19, 17, 13, and 52—were discovered in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal locks on June 30, broadly hinted that is the case when they charged the Shafia sisters’ father, Mohammad, 56, brother Hamad Mohammad, 18, and mother Tooba Yahya, 39, with four counts each of first degree murder in late July. Relatives of Rona Mohammed—originally said to be a cousin, but now believed to be the Shafia patriarch’s first wife—are alleging the girls were killed because their family, originally from Afghanistan, disapproved of their “Canadian” lifestyles, and blamed Rona for encouraging them.

Regardless of what the courts ultimately decide, those who study honour killings say it is time for Canadian authorities to start taking concrete steps to protect young immigrant women, or risk seeing such crimes become all too commonplace. “Canada has been very lucky so far. We’ve had very few,” says Aysan Sev’er, a University of Toronto sociologist who is preparing a book on the subject. “But we’re not looking at this as seriously as we should be.” Continue…

Living with Oedipus for 15 years

By Alex Shimo - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Many great writers from Sophocles to Voltaire have tackled the Oedipus myth. More contemporary interpretations include a film with Christopher Plummer, an opera by Stravinsky, even a pop song by New York singer Regina Spektor. None has the ambition of a new version by Kingston, Ont.-based playwright Ned Dickens, who is currently staging the family history of Oedipus, which takes place over 150 years.

Dickens’s production is a logistical challenge (some might say nightmare). The epic involves seven plays, each based on a character in the story. The seven plays have been divided up and are being staged locally by Canadian theatre students at Memorial, York, Concordia and Simon Fraser universities, George Brown and Humber colleges in Toronto, and Langara College in Vancouver. The student actors will then fly to Toronto to put on the whole series, called City of Wine. The shows will be staged over three days and the complete cycle will run twice, back to back, from May 5 to May 9.

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