Mosque shootings a shock in peaceful Canada

The shocking news that two masked men entered a Quebec City mosque Sunday night, killing six people and wounding another eight, is deeply disturbing.
This shouldn't happen anywhere, but it seems particularly out of place in boring, peaceful Canada. It certainly proves that the events of the world as a whole can end up in our front yards when we least expect it.
That this happened in Quebec is only slightly less surprising. Quebec is a peaceful and quiet province for the most part, although racial and religious intolerance was fanned several years ago by the former Parti Quebecois government under Pauline Marois. It tried to introduce a charter of Quebec values. Some of those moves were foolishly followed up by campaign statements by the Conservative Party under former prime minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 federal election.
Interestingly, the only place in the country where the Conservatives gained seats in that election was in the Quebec City region.
This shooting came at the end of a weekend of global tension over an executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump which basically bans almost anyone from seven Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days. It's too early to say if the two are connected.
One more comment. It is a sad reflection on the sorry state of the Canadian news media in these days of cutbacks. Like many people, I wasn't watching newscasts or looking at Twitter on Sunday evening. I happened to turn on the nearest Fox station from Seattle shortly after 10 p.m., mainly to watch the excellent weather forecast from Walter Kelley. It was on that newscast that I first learned about the Quebec City shooting.
I checked both CTV and CBC news networks immediately. Neither had any live coverage of the event. The local CBC station was running The National news broadcast, recorded many hours earlier in Toronto and almost never updated for western viewers. It certainly wasn't updated on Sunday night.
The CBC National newscast did make a brief mention of the shooting near the end of the broadcast,. and it sounded like there had been some mention of it earlier. It was not up to date. The Globe and Mail website was, and that's where I got most of the current information.
As I post this, I'm waiting for the local Global newscast at 11 p.m. to begin. It will likely have some updated information.
 

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