I was living in Montreal at the time of the implementing “The War measures Act”‘
even as a young teen I felt the surreal nature of armed guards in the blocked streets and serious curfews on all walking – pedestrian – traffic…

Michael H. of Now mag fame wrote the recent cabaret of Village of small huts –
called ‘Trudeau & the FLQ’ which showed not at The cameron where all the others did but at the new Soul Pepper home in the Distillery district. That was a great piece of theatre.

I had actually forgotten about the St. Pius rampage, but right now remember it quite vividly, the inky yearbook photos of each of the victims printed on the front page of Citizen and/or Journal. Ottawa has always felt like my backyard to me, just the most familiar and understood terrain, and watching things unfold in a way that was simultaneously explosive and uncertain, was really personal and upsetting to me. It really did feel like something had changed, maybe it was just me, though, but maybe not.

I, of course, was experiencing the shooting through social media, which is kind of like experiencing an explosion of every possibility and emotion all at once. Such a thing can likely both distort and distill one’s response to an event, but mine was a decidedly personal one. At a distance, both physically and through time, I was separate, watching the landscape I knew and loved being cast into terror, and I think, changing. If not the culture of the city, than at least the way I experience the city was changing. It was, in a way writ large, like watching a favourite place being torn down and replaced by something tawdry and horrible, something you would never relate to.

I don’t personally remember the FLQ crisis, and I don’t doubt you, but I guess for me the shooting on Wednesday was kind of like my personal FLQ crisis, maybe even a mid-life crisis,