Quebec mosque shooter shakes Canada’s sense of identity
QUEBEC CITY — When Alexandre Bissonnette learned of Justin Trudeau’s now-famous tweet welcoming refugees to Canada, the waiflike 28-yearold political science student told police he snapped.
Just hours after watching a television report suggesting Canada would accept immigrants spurned by U.S. President Donald Trump, Bissonnette packed his Glock handgun and rifle, picked up a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and trudged the snow-covered streets of Quebec to a nearby Islamic Cultural Center.
As 53 men were finishing evening prayers, he unloaded 48 rounds. Six people were killed — several of them by shots to the head — and 19 were injured, one paralyzed for life.
These details surfaced during a three-week sentencing hearing that ended late last month. Bissonnette faces up to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and is expected to be sentenced in the coming months.
The hearing was a grim reminder that more than a year after the Jan. 29, 2017, rampage, Canada is still grappling with Bissonnette’s crime. It shocked the nation and underlined the perils of Islamophobia and the far right in a country that prides itself on its multiculturalism and tolerance.
Herman Deparice-Okomba, director of the Montreal-based Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, said the sheer obscenity of someone gunning people down in a place of worship in peace-loving Canada had convulsed the country because it shattered Canadians’ image of themselves as the ultimate humanistic, open nation.
“Canada sees itself as a nation of immigrants, and people thought that such a thing was impossible here,” DepariceOkomba said. “Bissonnette’s crime wasn’t just against a community. It was against Canada’s collective vision of itself. We are all wounded.”
During the often chilling hearing, prosecutors, survivors, prison psychologists and people who knew Bissonnette painted a portrait of a socially isolated but intelligent young man who developed an obsession with the far right, mass killers, Trump and Muslims.
Sometimes it felt as if Islamophobia was on trial. Bissonnette was not charged with terrorism, prompting outcries from Muslim groups that if his name had been Muhammad the charges would have been different.
Under the Canadian Criminal Code, the burden of proving terrorist intent is high, and legal experts said prosecutors likely concluded that securing a firstdegree murder conviction would be less risky.
Some survivors testified they were too afraid to return to the mosque. In a strictly secular province that recently passed a law banning people wearing face-coverings from giving or receiving public services, the court allowed Muslim witnesses to swear on a Quran.
Acting alone, Bissonnette also raised a difficult question: How did a mousy and soft-spoken chessobsessed student from a middleclass family become a killer?
In the month before his rampage, he trawled the internet 819 times for posts related to Trump, reading his Twitter feed daily and homing in on the American president’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. He kept a cache of guns underneath his bed at his parents’ house.