The sept. 13 shootings at Montreal’s Dawson College sent shock waves through the province and across Canada.

Kimveer Gill, the 25-year-old man who gunned down 18-year-old Dawson student Anastasia De Sousa, was legally in possession of his weapons. With a registered semi-automatic carbine, a handgun and shotgun, he wounded another 19 people before taking his own life.

Once again, a campus shooting has occurred in Montreal, where the 1989 massacre of 14 women at the École Polytechnique engineering school inspired Canada’s controversial gun registry. Conceived as a tool to control firearms, the registry was powerless against Gill, a man as determined as he was disturbed.

But even before De Sousa’s funeral, the story took a bizarre twist, overshadowing the debate on whether to abolish or fix the gun registry and pushing aside concern for the victims.

The Globe and Mail’s Jan Wong, herself a former Montrealer, linked Bill 101, Quebec’s charter of the French language, with this shooting, the 1989 massacre and the 1992 slaying of four men and the wounding of a woman at Montreal’s Concordia University.

All three gunmen were not full-fledged pure laine — old-stock Québécois — and, while admitting they were “mentally disturbed” and motivated by hate, “all of them had been marginalized in a society that valued ‘pure laine’,” Wong opined. “Elsewhere, to talk of racial ‘purity’ is repugnant. Not in Quebec.”

Instantly, Wong’s interpretation became the only topic among Quebec’s chattering classes.

Premier Jean Charest, with support from politicians of all stripes, wrote to the newspaper, calling Wong’s article “a disgrace,” and suggesting “she should have the decency to apologize to all Quebecers.”

There were elements of political correctness and opportunism in the outrage. But there was a larger message, too: Quebec is a French society but not a closed society.

When Bill 101 was adopted in 1977, it was viewed outside the Parti Québécois government and its supporters as draconian, ethnocentric and coercive. The Liberal Opposition of the day fought Bill 101 to the bitter end.

The bill states that French is Quebec’s official language and, as Camille Laurin, the chain-smoking psychiatrist who sponsored Bill 101 was fond of saying (erroneously so), the aim was to make Quebec as French as Ontario was English (Ontario is officially bilingual).

For many English-speaking Quebecers, educated in a school system that did not turn out graduates who could speak French — and accustomed to French-speaking Quebecers talking to them in English — the choice was clear: Bill 101 or Highway 401.

Many chose the 401, settling in Toronto and other parts of Canada. And, like other migrants whose mindset about the place they come from is often fixed in the past, members of the Anglo diaspora assumed Quebec is still back in the 1970s regarding language issues.

Not so.

On the all-news networks’ coverage the day of the shootings, at first French reporters would ask Dawson students if they could speak French. And, yes, they could. Many were francophones, enrolled in the English CÉGEP, or junior college. But even the English-speaking students could understand the French reporters’ questions and could answer with eloquence in French.

In 2006, Bill 101 — modified since 1977 to allow wider access to English schools and bilingual signs — has become the icon of Quebec’s “linguistic peace.”

On the Quebec Liberals’ return to power in 1985, they made Bill 101 their own — to the dismay of Anglos yearning for the old days. Their nostalgia is not shared by francophones, whose memory of “bilingualism” is of being forced to speak English.

The children of allophones — as Quebecers whose first language is neither French nor English are known — are streamed into French schools now, and even “old-stock” Anglos, who chose Bill 101 over the 401, are now sending their kids to French schools.

Quebec has changed. And it took the Dawson shootings to make that paradigm shift clear. IE