Church chases doc screening

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by Kristian Gravenor

An evening in Ottawa watching a mainstream old-timer's NFB documentary about Montreal might not sound like a recipe for excitement. But when octogenarian William Weintraub was invited to the ultra-repressed urban bastion of political correctness to show his 1993 The Rise and Fall of English Montreal last Saturday, preacher man Denis Forget found it all a little too spicy for his Gloucester Presbyterian Church. Forget accepted a $100 fee to allow William Johnson and other Montreal English-rights advocates to view the film and discuss anglo issues, but cancelled the engagement a day earlier.

"I phoned him and he was quite antagonistic and commented that there was no oppression of English people in Montreal," says organizer Margaret Ritchie, a former federal Justice Department lawyer who's been running the 1,000-member Human Rights Institute since 1974. "I had seen his movie and was very impressed by it. It's a low-key description of what happens when the politicians interfere with rights of people. It's not anti-French, it's pro-human rights," she says.

"It's censorship, it's ridiculous," says Weintraub, who reports that the documentary has been shown many times on various TV stations without issue. The meeting quickly reassembled at Ottawa's German Club where over 100 people are said to have attended.

It's the second time in under a year that Equality Party types have failed to find sanctuary in church. Last Sept. 20, another assemblage was also chased from an East End Montreal church after being vigorously protested by Raymond Villeneuve's forces.