Posts with the Ecole Polytechnique tag

Barris Beat

Gender equality still three centuries away

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
The “marriage bar” forced women in Canadian schools to retire when married or pregnant. The Atlantic.

During a visit to Sarnia, on Monday, conversation around the dinner party table gravitated to the state of women’s rights past and present. One of the women I met at the partly recalled that back in the 1950s, an Ontario board of education had forced her mother, a teacher – the moment she got married – to resign from her position at the school.

My mother, an American immigrant to Canada at the time, expressed her disgust at such discriminatory rules at the time.

“What makes a wife or mother less effective as a teacher?” I remember my mother saying. (more…)

Barris Beat

Tell me, Prime Minister…

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson at a public- service event in 2020. Cdn Press photo.

On Sunday, April 19, after as excruciating a night of pursuit as any known to her force, I’m sure, RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson made the toughest decision of her life. She’d heard radio calls from a fellow constable nearby that he’d been shot by a murder suspect looking like an RCMP officer, driving what looked like an RCMP cruiser in Nova Scotia. She must have recognized the object of the all-night manhunt was taking deadly advantage of RCMP insignia to approach innocents and shoot them. She must have decided to at least try to take away that advantage. She spotted the impersonator and took drastic action.

“She rammed him,” Brian Sauvé of the National Police Federation told the Toronto Star, “and probably saved countless lives.”

Not, however, her own.

(more…)

Barris Beat

Youth versus Bullets

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Tank Man, 19-year-old Wang Weilin faces Chines tanks on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Wikipedia.

It’s an image that endures. It’s not old enough for us to call it historical yet. It only goes back about 30 years. But the frames of video taken by an amateur videographer show a man in a white shirt, dark pants, facing a column of military tanks. It was June 4, 1989. It was the final day of the student-organized, non-violence demonstration at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, just before China’s People’s Liberation Army gunned down hundreds of civilians for protesting government corruption and lack of free speech.

“Tank Man,” they called him. But the Sunday Express newspaper in Britain later claimed the man was Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, who’d joined the weeks-long protest, despite the threat of annihilation. (more…)