Montréal shooting

The shooting at Dawson College in Montréal on Wednesday has led to this question. Yes, there aren't many shootings of this kind in Canada, but why do they seem to happen in Quebec.

After all, a number of people were shot at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and nobody makes an association with Pittsburgh.

The shooter, who killed a woman and wounded 19, noted in his blog that he hated humanity and wanted to die young in a hail of bullets.

But a number of people point out the alienation of the linguistic struggle. The infamous Bill 101 forces students into either English or French, depending on the circumstances. In a city where French reigns supreme, learning in English schools can put you behind in the society.

This week's killer, Kimveer Gill, attended English elementary and high schools in Montréal.

In 1989, Marc Lepine killed 14 women and wounded 13 at the University of Montréal's École Polytechnique. Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor, was an immigrant from Russia who in 1992, shot four colleagues and wounded one other at Concordia University's faculty of engineering.

While Gill, Lepine, and Fabrikant were clearly mentally unstable, they were also immigrants. And for a long time, immigrant issues have been ignored in Quebec.

Many of the French-language issues and bills stemmed around the threat of English overtaking French in Quebec. The so-called "language police" while mocked, are a significant voice in Quebec society; especially in Montréal, where English has more dominance than any other Quebec city.

However, many immigrants to Quebec are not anglophones from the rest of Canada or even the United States, but those from other countries, where English is not their native language. If you speak Italian or Arabic, imagine yourself being forced into a language that, while technically one of the two official languages in your new country, is not the dominant one where you live.

Perhaps there isn't a direct correlation between these events, but the immigrant issue needs to be dealt with in Quebec. And so does the issue of taking guns in crowded colleges and shooting at random.