National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — École Polytechnique Massacre

Polytechnique Montréalis a public research university, and the largest engineering school in Québec—third in Canada. Although the original goal of the university was to train engineers, its primary focus shifted to research in 1959, and today it is one of the leading Canadian research institutions in applied sciences.

On December 6th, 1989, a little after 4 p.m. a man named Marc Lépine entered the school. He had on him a semi-automatic rifle he had legally purchased and a hunting knife. At about 5:10 p.m. he entered a mechanical engineering classroom containing approximately sixty students. He ordered the men and women to stand on opposite sides of the room, firing a warning shot when they failed to comply. After separating the students, he ordered all the male students to leave the room and addressed the women, asking if they were aware of why they were there. He said he was fighting feminism, and a female student protested saying they were simply women studying engineering, and not feminists marching. It’s reported he screamed “You are all feminists.” while opening fire on them. He killed six women in that room and murdered three others.

Lépine injured three more students in the second-floor corridor before entering another room, where he tried twice to shoot a female student, only to discover his gun was empty. When he left the room to reload his weapon, the students locked him out.

He approached the financial services office and killed a woman through the window of the locked door. He killed three more women in the first-floor cafeteria. He finally entered a third-floor classroom where—similar to his first attack—he ordered the men to leave. He opened fire on the remaining women in the room, six women were killed by gunfire, and one woman—Maryse Leclair—was injured and attempting to call for help, when Lépine killed her with his knife. He then killed himself with a shot to the head—the attack had lasted for about twenty minutes and killed fourteen women.

In his suicide letter, Lépine listed nineteen Québec women he claimed were radical feminists he wanted to kill. He blamed feminists for ruining his life, and he wrote “Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men. (...) They are so opportunistic they [do not] neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus, the other day, I heard they were honouring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontline during the world wars. How can you explain [that since] women were not authorized to go to the frontline??? Will we hear of Caesar’s female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50% of the ranks of history, though they never existed.”

The attack contributed to the passing of The Firearms Act, which implemented stricter gun control laws in Canada, and in 1991, the Canadian parliament established the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women, in remembrance of the victims of this tragedy —these women are more than just a nameless statistic, they were bright, young students who had their entire lives ahead of them, and who had their futures stolen at the hands of one man in an act of violent misogyny.

The victims of this attack were mechanical engineering students Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Annie St-Arneault, material engineering students Maud Haviernick, Maryse Leclair, Michèle Richard, Annie Turcotte, civil engineering student Geneviève Bergeron, chemical engineering student Anne-Marie Edward, nursing student Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, and finance department budget clerk Maryse Leclair.