Montreal massacre calls us to do better, three decades later
In a way, it has become our 9/11.
It has been 29 years since 14 young women were murdered in a hate-fuelled orgy of violence at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.
Had they been allowed to live, some of them might be grandmothers today.
Yet the story still stays with us, seared into our national consciousness. It still has the power to make us weep, and think, and try to do better.
At the University of Waterloo Thursday, Susan Tighe’s eyes filled with tears as she remembered Dec. 6, 1989.
Today, she is an engineering professor, deputy provost and associate vice-president of integrated planning and budgeting at the university.
But back on that terrible day, she was an engineering student herself at Queen’s University in Kingston.
She was studying in the library at Queen’s, unaware that Marc Lépine, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, had walked into an engineering classroom in Montreal and ordered the men to leave the room.
“You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists,” he shouted to the terrified women as he opened fire, killing 13 engineering students and one administrator.
This happened before there was social media and a cellphone in every hand. For hours, Tighe had no idea what had happened. She went out for something to eat and back to the library.
Meanwhile, her aunt in California had heard that there had been a mass shooting of female engineering students in Canada, and called Tighe’s mother. When Tighe finally got home that night, her mother had been phoning, frantic with worry.
As she told the story on Thursday, Tighe
remembered the terror and then relief in her mother’s voice when she finally reached her.
She never forgot that awful moment in history.
“What I’ve come to realize now, as the mother of two girls, is how dangerous life can be,” she said.
Every year, a ceremony is held on Dec. 6 in one of the sleek new engineering buildings at the University of Waterloo, where 30 per cent of the incoming engineering students each year are female.
Almost 200 people attended on Thursday. The vast majority were students who were not even born when the Montreal massacre happened.
But these students still pinned on their white ribbons. They listened as the names of the 14 victims were read aloud.
They were not part of the history, but they are part of the response to the history.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States profoundly changed the way we saw the world.
The Montreal Massacre galvanized Canadians, too. We understood that the world was a more dangerous place than we thought. Many people worked to make it more peaceful and equitable.
Over time at the University of Waterloo there developed a huge push to bring more women into engineering classrooms and into leadership positions.
Under the leadership of president Feridun Hamdullahpur, the university has engaged with a United Nations initiative to boost female participation in science and engineering programs, and increase the number of women in leadership roles and as professors at Waterloo.
Since starting its initiative, called HeForShe, in 2015 the university has surpassed its gender-equity goals.
It employed a series of strategies including pay equity, scholarships and support from the top in removing what Hamdullahpur called “conscious and unconscious biases.”
Waterloo is committed to increasing the number of women and girls in its science, math, engineering and technology outreach programs to 33 per cent by 2020. It’s currently at 32 per cent.
It has already surpassed the 2020 goal of 30 per cent female faculty in these fields.
And it has 32 per cent female representation in senior leadership across the university.
Hamdullahpur has said he looks forward to the time when women’s integration is so natural and obvious that even imposing targets will seem meaningless.
Women are still killed, mutilated, enslaved and oppressed all over the world, in part because they have less power in society than men do. Paradoxically, as we have demanded real equality, some men have been so threatened that they tried to harm us.
“Never again,” we might say to ourselves as we consider those 14 doomed women, their lives cruelly thwarted, and the bright hopes they represent. How can we not try to take those hopes and turn them into something better for the next generation?