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DECEMBER 6, 1989 - 2015
It was 26 years ago today, shortly after 4 o' clock in the afternoon, when a young man named Marc Lepine arrived at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, an engineering school affiliated with the University of Montreal. In a plastic bag he carried a rifle he had purchased two weeks earlier at a sports equipment store in Montreal, along with a hunting knife. He sat quietly in an outer office, rummaging through his bag, and then walked slowly around the building. Shortly after 5 o'clock, he entered a mechanical engineering classroom containing some 60 students. He asked everyone to stop what they were doing, and ordered the men and women to opposite sides of the classroom. No-one moved at first, believing it to be a joke, until he fired a shot into the ceiling.
He then ordered the men to leave the room, and spoke to the remaining 9 women. He asked them if they knew why they were there and when one student replied no, he answered "I am fighting feminism." One of them replied, "We are not feminists, we are just women studying engineering." Lepine replied, "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists." He then opened fire on the students from left to right, killing 6 and seriously wounding the other 3.
He moved along the corridor, shooting several women he met, another whom he saw through a door, and into the cafeteria where he killed two women hiding in a storage area. Moving to another classroom, he killed two women trying to escape and two more huddled in a corner, one of them by stabbing with a hunting knife after she asked for help from her gunshot wound. By this time he had killed 14 women in total -- 12 engineering students, one nursing student, and one university employee -- and wounded 14 more. After stabbing the wounded student, he wrapped his coat around his rifle, exclaimed "Ah shit" and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The attack lasted 20 minutes.
In the suicide letter found on his body, Lepine had listed 19 Quebec women whom he wished to kill because he considered them feminists. He was known to have an intense dislike for career women and women in traditionally male occupations, such as the police force. He was deeply disturbed, but intelligent; he had done well in several science and technology programs at community college, but dropped out before finishing them, and applied to the Ecole Polytechnique instead; he had almost completed the requirements for admission at the time of the shootings.
In the 26 years since December 6, 1989, it has become only too common to hear that a troubled young man, sometimes a political or religious fanatic, has gone on a mass shooting rampage -- in a dreadful coincidence, 14 people were again shot, this time in California, just a few days ago. But when the Montreal Massacre -- as it has come to be called -- happened in 1989, Canadians were profoundly shocked that such a horror could occur in our peaceable kingdom. And there were a number of specific changes made in our society after the massacre: most obviously, it became a major spur for the Canadian gun control movement. A special House of Commons sub-committee on the Status of Women was created, and December 6 continues to be marked as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women; national memorials have been created across the country, and an organization of which I am a committed member, The Canadian Federation of University Women, continues to hold annual services of commemoration.
On one level, of course this was an extreme example of violence against women, and that issue is well-discussed, if not so well-controlled, in Canadian society today. From another angle, this shooting could be said to exemplify the fierce opposition in some male-dominated cultures to education for women. That deep hostilitywas at work when Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzay was shot in the face by a member of the Taliban in 2012 because she insisted on going to school, and spoke publicly about the right of girls to do so.
But I think there is a deeper, and broader, cause at work here. If we fail to see people who are different from us as nevertheless truly our brothers and sisters, we can justify or perpetrate any violence. The German soldiers, the S.S. and the concentration camp staff who brutally murdered one million Jewish children during the Holocaust could only have been capable of doing so if they were conditioned to see these children not as humans at all, but animals like the cows and pigs we slaughter every day. The Islamic State today is utterly convinced that Muslims and only Muslims are Allah's chosen people, so any brutalities against infidels are fully justified. And the Christian crusaders who brought war and death to Islamic countriesduring the Middle Ages did so because they believed Muslims must convert to Christianity in order to be fully human.
After the recent Paris attacks, a Japanese-American actor and writer who was interned as a young child during World War II, wrote: There will be those who see immigrants and refugees as the enemy now, because they look like the perpetrators of the attacks, just as peaceful Japanese-Americans and Canadians were looked upon as the enemy after Pearl Harbour. But we must resist the urge to categorize and dehumanize, for that is the very impulse that fueled the insanity and violence in Paris.
Services of commemoration for the 14 young women murdered 26 years ago today usually end with a reading of the women's names, and I have asked my husband to do so now -- so that we remember they were not just a collection of nameless female engineering students who were categorized and dehumanized by Marc Lepine, they were individual human beings. Here are their names:
Genevieve Bergeron
Helene Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganiere
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michele Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz