Montreal's Idiot Mayor

Living in the suburbs, I didn't have a vote in Montreal's last mayoral election, but if I did, I would have burned my ballot rather than vote for the motley crew of candidates led by the insufferable blowhard and eventual winner Denis Coderre.

The most dangerous of politicians are those who get into the game early in life, with little or no practical or life experience and who decide to make politics their life's calling. These are the politicians who are woefully detached from reality and usually end up with a cavalier attitude when it comes to the public purse.

As a teen and young man Coderre was what we Canadians refer to as a 'keener' joining every club and organization he could get into and participating in all manner of contests. Not only was he a member of the Knights of Columbus and the Optimist Club, he was also president of the Club Richelieu Henri-Bourassa, another fraternal organization in Montreal-Nord.  This habit of joining and participating in all manner of social, political and educational organizations has followed him into the mayor's office, but more on that  later.

Denis Coderre is a man of dogged determination, he had already lost four times before being elected as federal Liberal MP from Montreal in 1996. Up until then he had been a tireless liberal party hack and hadn't known a life outside politics. His election was the result of his never give-up determination and the fulfillment of his lifelong dream of elected office.
It's just too bad that determination and ego is just about all that that he excels at and as a politician, working on the image and legacy of Denis Coderre is more important to him than the job at hand.

Now one of the prerequisites for a good mayor whether a small town or giant metropolis is the ability to be a solid manager where the mayor's most important civic responsibilities are to provide for public security, public transportation, infrastructure, snow and garbage removal as well as the maintenance of parks and recreation facilitates and this at the most reasonable cost.
Unfortunately, it is a sad fact that Montreal's crooked city administrations actually ran the city better and at a lower cost than the out-of-touch dreamers like Denis Coderre who is the re-incarnation of Jean Drapeau, a mayor that tirelessly worked to make Montreal an international sensation, at a terrible cost to taxpayers.
A testament to Drapeau's ego, the infamous Olympic stadium stands as a sad reminder of what ego and incompetence can accomplish. Unfortunately for us, Coderre is fast erecting his monuments, a reminder to future generations of the sad Montreal tradition of idiot mayors whose motto can best be represented by that famous line supposedly uttered by Marie Antoinette ....."Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"(Let them eat cake) a line forever representative of a politician with zero understanding of what taxpayers need or want.
And so our present mayor is channelling Drapeau, dreaming of making Montreal an international sensation, massaging his own ego along the way, and ultimately sticking taxpayers with a bloated bill for what amounts to nothing tangible.

Now gentle reader, before you object that Coderre was duly elected and thus Montreal deserves what it gets, it is useful to remember that the municipal election that gave us Coderre had a bloated field of largely incompetent, immature and unloved candidates. Coderre was elected with just 32% of votes cast in an election that saw a voter turnout of 43%, meaning that less than 14% of eligible voters opted for him, not exactly a rousing endorsement. It's no wonder that Coderre was booed when presenting a trophy at the World Junior Hockey tournament at the Bell Centre.

 Panem et Circenses
 When Coderre was  first elected, he decided that Montrealers, disillusioned, fatigued and embarrassed by the Charbonneau Commission's revelations of widespread municipal corruption needed a cathartic and restorative ego boost and decided that the best way to accomplish this task was to throw an expensive civic party.
It's like having your parents throw you a party in order to help you forget the pain of flunking your mid-terms.
Does that sound like a plan to you?

And so Coderre decided to treat Montreal's 375th anniversary of its founding as an epic event, planning a year long celebration that will cost upwards of $200 million.
This in a city where potholes, rotten water pipes, aging tunnels, crumbling bridges and overpasses abound.
This nonsense is the very embodiment of the old Latin phrase of "Panem et Circenses" (Bread and Circuses)  defined as "extravagant entertainment, offered as an expedient means of pacifying discontent or diverting attention."

The 375th anniversary celebration orgy of spending has been well-documented and perhaps those interested in an account of the nebulous and wasteful spending programs can read a well-written story in the Globe & Mail entitled Montreal’s $200M birthday spending spree

Now, of all his foolhardy projects nothing irks me more than the electric car race to be held in the streets of Montreal à la Monte Carlo. Formula E race cars will tool around the streets of Ville-Marie borough for absolutely no good reason with an attached cost to make the streets compatible with the race, almost $17 million and counting.  All this despite the fact that the city owns a scant-used world class race track where the Formula One race is held for just a few days each year and where the city is committed to spend $34 million in upgrades.

But the foolish spending spree isn't the only thing that qualifies our mayor as an idiot, although on its own it would certainly meet the threshold.
He is on a Don Quixote like mission to make Montreal great again (sound familiar?)
He has unsuccessfully begged the Pope for a visit to celebrate the 375th birthday party next year and created an Order of Montreal, to celebrate greatness in citizens. He is petitioning Ottawa to make a case at the UN to make Mount Royal a World Heritage site, without considering that even New York's Central Park doesn't qualify.

All of this is more important than enacting a simple city bylaw that would require snow removal dump trucks to install side panels in order to prevent pedestrian accidents that occur regularly during snow clearing operations. On this issue Coderre has decided to wait on Ottawa to create safety norms, he has more important things to do.

And of course our mayor thinks of the city as his own, a firm believer in the politics of France's Louis XVI, who told the royal court "L'etat c'est moi!"(I am the state) Casually referring to Montreal's top cop as "my police chief" Coderre thought nothing of siccing the police onto a reporter who asked an embarrassing question.

Coderre is a populist, a politician that puts his finger up in the air and decides policy based on what will make him more attractive.
He stands for more bike paths, choking an already impossible congested  traffic situation and is against any pipeline bringing western crude to Quebec because he is an environmentalist, even though he authorized the dumping of millions of litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence river.

Coderre chatting in Iran under the watchful portrait Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamani.

And off course there is his incessant globe-trotting, recently visiting Dakar, Shanghai, Mexico, Stockholm, Haiti, Argentina, Columbia, Beirut, France(5 visits) , Japan, Chile, China, Ecuador, Israel and Jordan.
He is celebrating the announcement of a new non-stop flight to  China by taking a round-trip visit just for the heck of it.

But the most stupid of visits was to Teheran where he went as president of some moronic fraternal mayoral organization. Link

Canada doesn't even have diplomatic relations with a country that discriminates openly against women, gays and where dissidents  routinely disappear, a country that is the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism.

But Coderre is undeterred, he accepts criticism like water off a duck's back.

Spending other people's money comes naturally to this utterly self-important bag of stupidity

I fervently hope for a good old crooked mayor to take over.
Perhaps Michael Applebaum will be out of jail in time to challenge Coderre and set Montreal finances in order, with just a small slice of payola for himself, a fair trade off, all things considered.

It reminds me of the old joke wherein a man said his credit card was stolen but he decided not to
report it because the thief was spending less than his wife did.

PQ Badly Damaged in Quebec City Shooting

Quebec humiliated by Mosque attack

In a recent post I reminded readers of the old quote that says that "it's an ill wind that blows nobody good" and so it is that the tragic mass shooting that occurred in the Quebec city mosque, might actually pay unintended dividends to the embattled Muslim minority and wreck immeasurable damage on the Parti Quebecois.

The mass killing has left Quebecers badly shaken and in some respect, deeply humiliated that one of their own, a Quebecois de souche (pure-blood) could perpetrate such a senseless act of violence not only upon his direct victims but in a larger sense, the entire  Quebec Muslim community.

Mass shooting and other terrorist acts seldom accomplish anything except wanton death, injury and destruction. The goal of theses barbaric acts is to frighten and somehow cow societies into falling into step with terrorist ideology.
In countries that suffer or have suffered long-term terrorism, like Israel and Northern Ireland, repeated acts of barbarism serve only to harden the resolve of the victims. In fact terrorism is the ultimate senseless act because it is almost always counter-productive.

Although we are unaware of the motive (at this point) of the Quebec City mosque shooter, if his goal was to somehow turn Quebec society away from Muslims, I cannot think of a stupider act of lunacy, because his actions will have 100% opposite effect.

Watching the reaction of politicians, community activists and reading the many articles and posts on social media, it's plain to see that Quebec society is going through a painful bout of hand-wringing and humiliation where blame for the shooting is being attributed to a societal problem brought about by the painful and acrimonious debate over identity, the 'Charter of Values,' and assimilation, which polarized Quebec into pro and anti camps vis-a-vis the Muslim community.

In reaction to the mosque shooting  a vivid debate has unfolded in the French media with some commentators blaming others for allegedly instilling hatred, particularly on the talk radio scene in Quebec City known collectively as "Radio Poubelle" (Trash Radio.) Even the Premier got into the fray, chiding un-named media types for using harmful words in relation to Muslims.

But as I said, even tragedies have unforeseen benefits and so Mr. Couillard can shelve plans to give in to that portion of Quebec society who want some sort of limitations on religious expression in public life. It was a debate that the Liberals never really wanted but felt compelled to take some action on in order to counter the vocal nationalistic hounds of the PQ who sought to make identity politics a stepping stone to power.

Incredibly, it is also the Muslim community that will benefit from the tragic circumstances and it is the PQ that will be devastated by having the wedge issues of accommodations and secularism, in other words, Muslim-bashing, ripped from under their feet.
 
In one fell swoop this terrorist act has transformed the public debate away from the issue of the alleged cultural threat that Muslims pose to Quebec society to the issue of the threat to the Muslim minority by extremists egged on by the identity politics of the PQ.
Doubling down on a losing hand, a bewildered Jean François Lisée, leader of the PQ, told reporters in a news conference that the debate on secularism and identity remains legitimate, but if he and the PQ are hoping that the public will soon forget this tragic attack and return to business as usual of Muslim-bashing, they have another think coming. He further went on to say that he hoped nobody (Liberals) would take advantage of the tragedy.
HA! Like that's not going to happen.

Separatist apologists like Richard Martineau of the Journal de Montreal are blaming the shooting on the 'alt.right' movement, while others like Amir Khadir are blaming Donald Trump for the climate of fear, choosing to ignore the climate of hostility towards Muslims that exists in Quebec in the nationalistic and separatist constituencies.

And so the PQ  now finds itself between a rock, a rock and a hard place.
It  was forced to publicly shelve the idea of a referendum in the next election campaign because even the party stalwarts realize that it would be suicide. A recent poll has 70% of under-thirties against independence so time is not exactly on their side.
Since the economy is blossoming under the Couillard government with revenue up and unemployment way down, ( in fact Quebec added more new jobs last year than the other nine provinces combined) there is no economic argument for change that the PQ can make except perhaps to embrace a socialist anti-austerity position, an issue that appeals only to the unionists and students, those who have never voted Liberal anyways.

So the debate over accommodations and assimilation  is something that the PQ planned on building a electoral platform upon along with the only other issue that it can count on, protection of the French language. If the PQ goes ahead with its pursuit of identity politics, they will be crushed, the public is no longer in the mood for it.

The agony is not over, the upcoming trial which is months away will likely keep the story alive for quite a while and like a band-aid that repeatedly gets ripped off in a bad dream, the shooting is going to hurt the PQ day after day, as the party gets saddled as the scapegoat for engendering anti-Muslim sentiment in Quebec.
After all.... Somebody has to pay.

Will Trump Make Quebec Collateral Damage?

Sure as shooting, when rumours are swirling around the office and your manager or boss drops by your desk to tell you that your job is safe, it's probably time to polish up the old resumé.
So when a Donald Trump economic advisor, Stephen Schwarzman, said that Canada shouldn’t worry about the upcoming renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) it is perhaps time to worry just a tad.

Now truth be told, the $600 billion trade between Canada and the United States is fairly balanced, with Canada eking out a slight advantage of about $15 billion, an insignificant amount amounting to less than 2% and considering that a lot of what we export is oil products, on the manufacturing side, where the jobs are, America is ahead of the game vis-a-Canada.

Even Trump understands that his trade beef isn't with Canada, but that won't protect us from collateral damage when NAFTA is renegotiated.

Certainly poor Mexico seems to be in Trump's cross-hairs, not only over the border, but trade as well because of the $60 odd billion trade deficit in Mexico's favour.

Now I'll remind readers that a while back when the PQ proposed its infamous Charter of Values, it called for a ban on religious paraphernalia for employees in the public service, para public service and public education domain.
The real target was the Muslim hijab which sorely offended the PQ's' and many Quebecer's secular and feminist leanings.
But in order to make the law seem fair, equal and so more palatable, things like the Jewish kippah, Sikh turbans and ostentatious Christian crosses were also to be banned, a joke because you couldn't find more than a few dozen of offenders wearing these items in the public service.
Of course these people weren't the real target of the law but were deemed by the drafters to be acceptable collateral damage, sacrificed to make the law acceptable to the public, after all a law banning Muslim dress exclusively would never have a chance at acceptability.

And so in Trump's quest to punish Mexico, Canada will have to accept a small level of pain in order for his trade sanctions on Mexico to pass the smell test.

According to CTV Quebec exports $59 billion to the U.S. annually and imports $34 billion, creating a $25-billion trade surplus.

Although Canada has a trade surplus of about $15 billion in trade with the United States, it is in fact Quebec with a $25 billion surplus which is the real big winner in the trans border trade.
Remove Quebec from the equation and Canada would in fact have a $10 billion trade deficit with the USA
Fully half of Quebec's manufacturing exports are sent to the USA, and considering that oil is an untouchable for Trump (who just okayed the Keystone XL pipeline that will carry Alberta crude to the USA,) any trade sanction would likely hurt Quebec the most.

So where will Trump inflict this Canadian pain?

Certainly the ongoing dispute over lumber will be resolved to America's satisfaction, but a new initiative against Canada (and Quebec in particular) is likely to be the grandfathered protection of the entrenched dairy industry in Canada.

Quebec's monopolistic marketing agency which controls dairy production must be quaking in its boots at the prospect of coming under the mire of Trump's trade negotiators.
Quebec controls 37% of the Canadian dairy market which effectively bars imports from the United States.
Any attack on the dairy cartel that controls Canadian and particularly Quebec  production would be devastating because quite simply we cannot compete with American producers.

Prices remain high  for a variety of reasons, most importantly is inefficiency due to monopolistic policies but perversely because of the quotas attached to production. In order to produce milk, a dairy farmer must own or acquire quota, the right to produce milk, which costs between $25,000 and $45,000 per cow. I'm not kidding.
This quota saddles dairy farmers with enormous debt rendering competition with American farmers impossible.
But targeting this Canadian dairy monopoly is a no-brainer for Trump and already American dairy producers are urging the President to act.

"U.S. dairy organizations and the state departments of agriculture across the country turned to President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday to combat Canada’s existing and soon-to-be-expanded protectionist policies designed to block imports from the United States.
Joining in the plea to Trump are The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC), the National Milk Producers Federation, and The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA).
In a letter the groups urge the president-elect and his key cabinet members to take immediate action."

Because of Quebec's disproportional percentage of the Canadian dairy market, it will be impacted to a much higher degree than other Canadian provinces and so conspiracy theorists might believe that Canadian anti-Quebec federal politicians will be inclined to give in because the pain will mostly be limited to Quebec.

I don't see any way out, so heeding Trump's henchmen telling us not to worry might not be wise, and in fact Quebec should probably worry a lot.

......Stay tuned.

Is Canadian Bilingualism Dead?

If you're wondering what the heck Prime Minister Trudeau was thinking when he answered in French, a question put to him in English, at a town hall meeting in Quebec, your aren't alone. Almost the entire media missed the point.

Justin responded to the Anglo questioner rather smarmily, telling her; “Thank you for using our country’s two official languages, but since we’re in Quebec I’ll respond in French,” ..Yikes!      Link
 One can only imagine Justin telling a Francophone, that he would respond in English to a French question because it was asked in Manitoba!

Justin's bizarre performance can actually be understood as he has been thoroughly roasted recently in a spate of articles in the French press for not protecting and promoting the French language in Ottawa and his reaction was nothing more than an ill-conceived and feeble attempt to reverse that perception.

But his desire to appear as the defender of the French language backfired in more ways than one, the first being the vicious backlash in the ROC (Rest of Canada) over his disrespect of an Anglo-Quebecer and the second and more serious consequence is that his unintentional action sent a message that his vision of Canada is a unilingually French Quebec and a unlingually English ROC.

So not surprisingly, the usual suspects of French language militants were largely silent over the issue because supporting the decision of the Prime Minister, to speak only French in Quebec weakens the argument of a bilingual federal government. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place, there seems no position that can satisfy their desire of a French only Quebec and a bilingual Ottawa.

His poor father, Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, father of the Official Languages Act and the policy of a bilingual Canada, must be spinning in his grave at Justin's stupidity.
Now to be fair, Trudeau 'light' probably did not understand the consequences of his maladroitness and as the song lyrics go;

“I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood ”

But the affair begs the question; is bilingualism going down the drain, the once vaunted idea of a bilingual Canada A Mari Usque Ad Mare?

Almost fifty years ago Trudeau senior enacted the Official Languages Act, legislation that enshrined the rights of Canadians to be served by the federal government and the courts in either English or French.
But more than that, the law which was generally well received set the table for a different Canada, one where French was treated equally to English.
While I say the law was generally well-received, not so in the civil service where the entrenched English majority held 91% of the jobs and were loathe to part with any one of them.
While there was some opposition, the law generally fostered an era of linguistic detente and the country embraced bilingualism much as we have embraced environmentalism today. French immersion schools were opened in Western Canada where parents chose to expose their children to the French language in order to afford them more opportunity in the future bilingual Canada.
But the success of the French immersion programs are dubious, about half the students move back to English classes and those who graduate have their French skills eroded due to lack of practice. Today only 10% of Canadians living outside of Quebec can hold a conversation in French and if you don't count francophones living outside Quebec, that  figure drops to about 6%, a pretty grim number.
While bilingualism is rising in Quebec, it is falling in the ROC.

What happened?
Well it boils down to a demographic shift and the negative reaction to French in the rest of Canada in response to the sovereignty movement

Firstly the population and indeed the influence of French in Canada declined through demographics, where an inspired immigration surge left French on the outside looking in. Today less than 20,000 of the 300,000 odd immigrants Canada receives each year end up adopting French as their language of assimilation. This language time bomb has been rightly criticized by French language defenders but there's little to be done about it.
Quebec will receive about 50,000 of the 300,000 immigrants coming to Canada in 2017, only about 17% of the total which is substantially lower than Quebec's 23.4% size relative to the Canadian population total. But worse than that, about 10,000 of those immigrants will skedaddle to other provinces and of the remaining, half will adopt English as the language of assimilation, meaning that of the 300,000 new immigrants Canada receives each year, less than 7% will adopt French, a paltry number indeed. (This assuming that all immigrants to other provinces adopt English.)
By my rough calculation, because of this immigration reality, the proportion of French in Canada will drop by 1% every eight years, bringing the French proportion to under 20% in about 25 years from today's 23.2%, a calamitous drop.

Secondly, separatist fervour took its toll as English Canadians grew tired of the never-ending bashing of their language and culture by separatist Quebec governments and interest in accommodation waned, perhaps not officially, but certainly among those who lived in the ROC.
And so the language scene has perhaps not turned full circle, but certainly reversed to a serious degree, with French returning to the back seat it occupied historically.

Now those of you who have read this blog for a while know that I come down hard on the French media for biased and inaccurate reporting, BUT...
I must say that the gloom and doom articles that I mentioned at the top of the blog are largely accurate.

Even the insufferable Mathieu Bock-Coté was more or less right in his complaint that the Trudeau cabinet is bereft of French speakers, where bilingual ministers are no longer the norm, a shocking development. He further complained that Trudeau has made common cause with Canada's minorities to the detriment of Francophones in general and Quebec in particular.
The idea of the two founding nations sharing control of the country reduced to a joke and highlighted as of late by the French language debate for the Conservative leadership, which was such a linguistic disaster that it was downright humiliating. That the English participants showed up with pigeon French was telling in that they weren't even embarrassed.

A non French-speaking leader for the Conservatives?

Now comes the unthinkable news that the unilingual Kevin O'Leary is running for the Conservatives and will in all likelihood win.

Even Maclean's magazine got into bilingualism bashing in running an article entitled: Canada’s prime minister shouldn’t need to be bilingual, where perhaps a more honest title should have read "Canada’s prime minister shouldn’t need to speak French." 
Would Maclean's be okay with a Prime Minister who could not speak English?

Perhaps the most telling story of the decline and fall of the French language in Canada is the story that emerged from the World Junior Hockey tournament played in Canada recently where the Canadian team (which included seven francophones) were told by coaches that all communication would be in English only and that included conversations between francophone players.
The cherry on the sundae was that the coaches making the rules were francophones!
The coach Dominique Ducharme, explained that the team needed to communicate in one language in order to foster team spirit and to have everyone on the same page, so to speak.

It is quite simply an allegorical tale of what is going on right now in Canada.

A Viewers Guide to Mass Shootings

Nope.......

There's an old adage that says that it's an ill wind that blows no good. In other words, events have to be pretty terrible if nobody is advantaged.  And so it is with terrorist or mass shooting attacks, where executives at all the major news channels wait impatiently (yet silently) for the next suicide bombing, mass shooting, bomb or runaway truck in order to take advantage of the public's gruesome interest, which can goose ratings by a factor of up to eight.

As in real estate, location, location, location is what counts. The closer to home the attack, the higher the interest and that fact even trumps the number of casualties.
Of course attacks in the United States are number one in ratings, but surprisingly Canada rates highly, even for American networks.
CNN went live with wall to wall coverage of the shooting run of the lone nut case in Ottawa, who led police on a merry chase across Parliament Hill after killing one soldier before being shot to death himself.
As attacks go, it was relatively tiny affair with just one victim, but the coverage was huge!
(By the way, I say the above with respect to the family of the victim, Corporal Nathan Cirillo, whose family certainly view the event differently)

And so North American incidents get huge coverage, Europe second, after which things fade rather quickly. Here is my impromptu list of importance in terms of media attention.

5 Stars; North America
4 Stars;. Western Europe/Australia/New Zealand
3 Stars; Israel/Russia/Turkey/China
2 Stars; India / Africa / Asia
0 Stars; Last and certainly of the least interest to the media is a terrorist act in any Muslim country where there are so many attacks that the media doesn't even consider it news.
In the few days following the Fort Lauderdale attack, over 100 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Muslim countries and not once did North American news channels deem it useful to cut to live reporting.

At any rate, here are things you might consider when tuning into coverage of the next terrorist or mass shooting incident on TV.
News anchors who seem eminently competent, clever and up to date when reading from teleprompters, melt into the blithering idiots that most of them are in real life, when faced with ad-libbing real time events.
I offer for example the dimmest of the dim, Wolf Blitzer of CNN who could probably not compete with high schoolers on Jeopardy.
On his two appearances on that quiz show he made quite the fool of himself unable to answer the simplest of questions. Watch this short video, cringe and remember that he is responsible for analyzing and telling what is going on in a mass shooting situation.
>

When it comes to providing us we fair and responsible reporting Wolf, along with Anderson Cooper (another Jeopardy failure)  and other talking heads fail miserably, their off the cuff commentary punctuated by wild speculation, false reports and information that turns out to be dead wrong, breaking just about every journalistic and broadcast standard.
For example, the last major mass shooting incident in Fort Lauderdale had every single network telling us that shooter arrived aboard a Canadian flight with a checked hand gun in his luggage.
REALLY.... ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????
A CHECKED HAND GUN  IN A CANADIAN AIRPLANE, PACKED BY AN AMERICAN TWENTY-SOMETHING????
I almost fell out of my sofa  laughing at the stupidity of the idea. Did anyone at any of the news organizations have a clue about Canadian gun laws?
This false reporting went on for hours, long after Canadian airlines vehemently denied that the shooter arrived on a Canadian flight or had any connection to Canada at all.
This type of nonsense reporting goes on all the time during live coverage of unfolding events, so as an informed viewer, it is prudent to ignore or at least view skeptically what is being said in the heat of the moment.

Inevitably shortly after the shooting incident occurs and after the perpetrator is killed or captured, panicked bystanders will invariably report another sighting of a second or even third fictitious shooter, sending police into a frenzy and news channels into overdrive.
This happens every time, I mean it, every time, despite the fact that in the eight years of the Obama administration where there were about 200 mass shootings where more than four people died, only 13 were terrorist acts with only two of those involving two perpetrators (San Bernadino and the Boston marathon bombing.)
In the Ottawa attack, at least two other shooters were declared, long after the actual killer was taken down. At Dawson college up to five gunmen were reported. Of course there was only one as was the case in Fort Lauderdale and in just about every mass shooting in North America.

For this mistake you might blame panic and frayed nerves and sometimes even the actions of the police themselves. In Montreal's Dawson College attack plain clothed policemen with drawn guns running down the street were quite understandably confused and reported as bad guys.

Israel, much more familiar with terrorism and mass shooting have figured out a solution to the problem.
Plain-clothed police and security officers keep a fold-up hat in their pocket, which in times of need are popped on the head, clearly defining the wearer as good guys.
How's that for a two-dollar solution!

Another thing news coverage won't ever comment upon is the police reaction to the incident or lack thereof.
Now police react in a timely and efficient manner most of the time, but certainly not always. But when police do screw up, the media usually reacts with stony silence, for whatever reason which I cannot fathom.
Take for example the dismal performance of the Orlando police in the mass shooting incident that killed 50 and injured 53 at the Pulse nightclub last June.
In the best take down I've read, it is a humble blogger who best described the Orlando police incompetence or cowardice.
Read the aptly headlined: When seconds counted, the police were only three hours away.

It was the mass shooting at École Polytechnique  in Montreal in 1989 that has become the textbook example of what police should not do in a mass shooting.  Back then, when police arrived on the scene they set up a perimeter, waiting for SWAT to arrive while the killer was calmly shooting his victims inside the school.
It seemed that Orlando police followed that same protocol with disastrous effect.
At least the Montreal police learned their lesson and redeemed themselves at the Dawson college incident, seventeen years later where two passing patrol officers bravely rushed into the school pursued and confronted the shooter, effectively ending the rampage, when the shooter committed suicide rather than face the police. Sadly one student was killed but it was the superb reaction by police which averted a larger disaster.  BRAVO!

For those of you thinking that we amateurs can't judge police actions, I am reminded of the comedian who told a heckler that he didn't need a pilot's license to know that the pilot who crashed his helicopter into a tree, screwed up bigt ime.
A long tradition in mass shootings is the vast over-reaction by police. Long after the scene has been secured, the shooter captured or killed, police continue to lock down the scene for hours with hundreds of heavily armed police sequestering bystanders, an action akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

Terrorist versus Nutcase
With every mass shooting, news channels immediately raise the spectre of terrorism simply because it makes for much bigger ratings.
Of the 372 mass shootings (yes, more than one a day) in the United States in 2016, only four can be attributed to terrorism and of those terrorist acts , none included a second perpetrator.
In fact during Obama's entire eight year term only two of the fourteen terrorist acts included a second assailant.
It is important to understand that when an American Christian conducts a mass shooting, terrorism is never suggested, but when a Muslim is the shooter, terrorism and jihad is always evoked, even though motives are sometimes more complicated.
So when you flip the TV on in response to a mass shooting in America, it is safe to assume it is the act of a deranged person and not a terrorist, despite what the news channels are hinting at.

To sum up it might be convenient to remember a few things about mass shootings/ terror attacks.

1. If the shooting happens in North America, there's a 98% chance it is the act of a deranged individual.
2. If the shooting happens in North America, reports of mystery second shooters are almost always false. There is about  only about 1 chance in 90 that there is a second shooter.
3. Terrorists don't generally use guns. Real terrorists go for mass casualties.
4. Not all Muslim shooters are terrorists, some are just nut cases even when they invoke jihadi language.
5. The police will always over-react.
6. Early reports on CNN and other news channels will invariably contain a wealth of false information.

And with that, perhaps you can watch coverage of the next mass shooting with a practised and critical eye.
I would hope that you wouldn't have to put in practice what you might have learned here, but statistics predict that the next mass shooting is due tomorrow...