December 6, 1989

On this day in 1989, a man who believed feminists had ruined his life, entered a mechanical engineering class at École Polytechnique in Montreal and ordered the 50 male students to leave. The killer then systematically shot all nine women remaining in the lecture hall. In the end, 14 women were dead and ten were injured. Four men were also injured.

We treat the Montreal Massacre like a sort of feminine Vimy Ridge. We chisel the names of the dead women into granite, we lower flags, and we make December 6^th a National Day of Remembrance. We behave as though the war is over and we have reached some sort of armistice.

The truth of the matter is that women are still being marked for death simply because we make the dangerous assumption that we belong in the world. The truth of the mat­ter is that despite over forty years of strenuous effort by powerful bodies such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Medical Association, male violence against women continues unabated. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called it a ‘global pandemic’. Former UN commander Major General Patrick Cammaert, has said ‘it is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier’. 

Three and a half years after the final report by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), little has been done to answer the 231 Calls to Justice contained therein even though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government accepts that the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls across Canada in recent decades amount to an act of genocide. Just last week, Winnipeg police announced the arrest of a man charged with the killing of five Indigenous women between March and May of 2022.

A lot of the second-wave feminists in my circle are wind­ing down like old watches. I despair that substantive change for women and girls will not come in my lifetime and I don’t know what to do.