Sports columnist regrets ‘Montreal Massacre’ slip
By macleans.ca - Friday, December 30, 2011 - 0 Comments
ESPN writer Chris Jones says his use of the term ‘Montreal Massacre’ was inadvertent
Chris Jones, the back page columnist for ESPN Magazine, has apologized for what he says was the inadvertent use of the term “Montreal Massacre” to refer to a baseball boondoggle, according to the Globe and Mail. Jones, a writer from Port Hope, Ontario, has only recently begun writing for the U.S. magazine. His fourth column, which hit newsstands on Friday, discussed efforts by Jeffrey Loria, owner of the Florida Marlins, to build a stadium. Jones, referring to Loria’s past attempt to move the Montreal Expos from the Big O, said said such a move would be “Montreal Massacre II.” Loria is often blamed for the team’s eventual departure from the city. Jones, who was living in Australia at the time of the École Polytechnique slayings now widely known as the Montreal Massacre, says he never intended to refer to that incident, and that he immediately apologized via Twitter when he realized the connection.
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Gun control and the Toronto Star
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 2:41 PM - 0 Comments
“Tories delist sniper rifles, self-loading weapons,” says the front-page Toronto Star headline, followed by text in the body of the story claiming that such weapons will be “declassified” under the Conservatives’ bill to kill the long-gun registry.
It’s unclear exactly what the Star means here by “delist” and “declassify.” Currently, firearms in Canada are classified three ways: as non-restricted; restricted; or prohibited. Roughly speaking, most rifles and shotguns are non-restricted; restricted firearms include many handguns, and rifles or shotguns that are deemed to be too short; and prohibited firearms include automatic rifles, as well as some handguns. The Tories aren’t reshuffling how various firearms will be classified. A gun that was non-restricted previously will remain so. What’s changing is that gun-owners will no longer have to register non-restricted rifles.
The Star lists several examples of firearms its says will soon be “freed from the binding controls that now see them listed with the RCMP-run database.” It’s a little more complicated than that. Continue…
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Excusing the men who ran away
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 225 Comments
The new film ‘Polytechnique’ sidesteps the old norm of ‘women and children first’
On the annual commemoration of the “Montreal Massacre,” the Quebec broadcaster Marie-France Bazzo remarked how strange it was that, after all these years, nobody had made a work of art about what happened that day at the École Polytechnique.
I wonder, in the two decades since Dec. 6, 1989, how many novelists, playwrights, film directors have tried, and found themselves stumped at the first question: what is this story about?
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The first big film about . . . Dec. 6, 1989
By Martin Patriquin - Friday, January 16, 2009 at 6:25 PM - 0 Comments
‘Polytechnique,’ shot in both French and English, opens across the country on Feb. 6
It remains Quebec’s definitive tragedy, a day marked both by unspeakable carnage and the all-consuming hate of the man who begat it. Quebec society turned inward on itself in an attempt to explain it away: it was the fault of its gun laws, its passivism, its misogyny. Men were to blame, because they were inherently violent; feminists were faulted for stigmatizing and emasculating a generation of men. Misery became a vacuum filled by the musings of academics, pressure groups, pundits and journalists. Scattershot theories abound: a few years ago, a Globe and Mail columnist blamed Bill 101.
We know, or pretend to know, why it is that on Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine entered the Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique and murdered 14 women before taking his own life. Few, though, know exactly how he did it. It is this question, thorny as it is, that filmmaker Denis Villeneuve attempts to answer in Polytechnique, the first major film to deal with what happened on that snowy, wretched day nearly 20 years ago. Filmed simultaneously in English and French, it will open across the country on Feb. 6.
