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'I thought everything we’d gained, we’d have it forever': Survivors of the Montreal Massacre on the vulnerability of progress

Nathalie Provost is shown following a news conference at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 2014. Photo from The Canadian Press
Nathalie Provost is shown following a news conference at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 2014. Photo from The Canadian Press

Most Montrealers remember where they were Dec. 6, 1989, says Francine Pelletier.

Like how people remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated or the first astronauts landed on the moon.

It was the day that marked one of the worst mass murders in Canadian history and Tuesday is its 27th anniversary.

Marc Lépine wandered the halls of Montreal engineering school Polytechnique, walked into a classroom, ordered the men to leave and shot the remaining nine women, killing six of them before killing another eight he targeted as he moved through corridors, the cafeteria and another classroom.

Fourteen women died that day, another ten women and four men were injured before the 25-year-old killed himself.

More from our series:
Remembering the 14 victims of the École Polytechnique massacre
Montreal Massacre left ‘indelible mark’ on an engineering community still striving for more women
Survivors, activists work to keep the lessons of the Montreal Massacre resonating with young Canadians
PHOTOS: 10 celebrities who spoke out on violence against women
VIDEO: How millennials are remembering the Montreal Massacre

Pelletier, a columnist for La Presse at the time and Le Devoir now, was home alone. “It was cold; it was dark,” she said, until a friend called to tell her the news.

As an outspoken feminist at the time, there was no doubt in Pelletier’s mind that killer Marc Lépine’s act — no matter how deranged — was a misogynistic act and therefore a political one.

But in the days and months that followed, a different narrative emerged in the media, she says.

Headlines and national broadcasts discussed the type of gun Lépine used, his movements through the building, his personal and family history.

Lépine had told the women in the engineering classroom where he’d ordered the men to leave: “I am fighting feminism,” before shooting them. But TV news anchors and newspaper articles mused about what could have led him to do it.

Pelletier believes it represented a push against women’s liberation in a modern society.

“The message he sent was that women who take up the space of men should be killed,” she said. “If that’s not a backlash (against women’s rights), I don’t know what it is.”

Nathalie Provost, one of the nine women Lépine singled out in that first classroom, responded to his tirade in what has become a well-known act of heroism and defiance in Quebec. “We’re just studying here, we’re not feminists” she’d tried to reason with him in French.

“But if you want to come to Polytechnique, I’m pretty sure there’s room.” She’d barely had time to finish before he started shooting, striking her with bullets in her forehead, arms and legs.

She survived the attack.

“When I said that at 23, it’s simply because in my 23-year-old mind, I thought everything we’d gained, we’d have it forever. I hadn’t realized the fragility of feminist achievements; I hadn’t realized there was still work to do,” Provost told Yahoo Canada News.

That’s why it’s important to her to remember the Polytechnique shooting as a collective.

As a person, though, it’s something she says is as much a part of her as the brown colour of her eyes. “It’s in my skin — physically, I see it on it. And then it’s something that shaped me … it’s my life.”

Reflecting on her own fragility, Provost says, “I hadn’t realized either that, battle or not, what I had gained could be destroyed.”

Eight of the 14 women slain at École Polytechnique, from top left: Anne Marie Lemay, Anne-Marie Edward, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Barbara Daigneault, Barbara Klucznik, Genevieve Bergeron and Helene Colgan. Photo from The Canadian Press
Eight of the 14 women slain at École Polytechnique, from top left: Anne Marie Lemay, Anne-Marie Edward, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Barbara Daigneault, Barbara Klucznik, Genevieve Bergeron and Helene Colgan. Photo from The Canadian Press

Pelletier was one of the 19 women Lépine listed in the bottom half of his suicide note. He said he would have liked to kill them, but did not have “time.”

It emboldened her to obtain the rest of the letter police wouldn’t release, she says.

“It seemed to me, I had the right to know, the public had a right to know, what had gone through his head.”

Pelletier spent six months filing access to information requests to obtain the note, but was eventually refused. Days before the shooting’s first anniversary, it was mailed to her door, anonymously, and published in La Presse soon after.

Despite the strides feminism had made in the two decades preceding the Montreal Massacre, Pelletier felt the denial of Lépine’s political reasons, his terrorism, marked a slowing down of that progress. She says a narrative that feminism was no longer necessary had emerged in the 1980s and was solidified after the massacre.

“Men couldn’t understand the fear women felt, and women couldn’t understand that men felt overreached, mishandled and generalised,” Pelletier says. “There was a sudden chill between men and women.”

Both she and Provost see parallels between that time and the weeks following this year’s American election. It reminds us of the vulnerability of progress in a way we can’t ignore, they say.

“Instead of electing a woman with experience, (the United States elected) a man who is not only ignorant, but a bully and a sexual predator … it shows how long it takes for attitudes to shift,” Pelletier says.

For Provost, Donald Trump’s election showed a rejection inclusive values — of diversity in general — and of a cause she’s fought for decades, gun control. (A series of laws controlling the sale of firearms in Quebec and Canada followed the 1989 shooting. Though some of those strides were stepped-back when the previous Conservative government abolished the long-gun registry.)

While Pelletier fought for straightforward media coverage from the inside, a 22-year-old Maureen Bradley fought for it on the streets, with other feminists like herself. And six years later, in 1995, released a 27-minute documentary she’d made on the Canadian media’s coverage of the event, called “Reframing the Montreal Massacre: A Media Interrogation.”

Bradley argued feminists were silenced by the media’s lack of coverage of them, its focus on Lépine’s troubles and his weapons, and describing the 14 women he killed as “daughters” instead of as capable young women making their way in careers they were underrepresented in.

“The discussion in Montreal, especially about this notion of an isolated incident, was very intense,” says Bradley, who now teaches at the University of Victoria. “(Feminists) were basically told to be quiet, that they were disrespectful, that they were hijacking this.”

Bradley, too, remembers that day vividly. She was a term away from finishing her undergraduate degree in media studies at Concordia University and was finishing a shift at the equipment loan counter around 5 p.m. when she started hearing the news.

“I was doing the same thing (as those women), just two kilometres away maybe,” Bradley says. “And I was a feminist, proudly and loudly, so I was his target as well, you know. So many of us were.”

It’s been 27 years. Bradley’s moved across the country, is raising a family and “I still marvel at the fact that I always find this time of year really hard,” she says, adding it’s a dark one for many, with mental health crises rising in the winter. “That always brings it home.”

As a teacher and filmmaker, Bradley says she’s seen a “huge shift” in feminist discussions, despite the fact some are reluctant to label themselves as one. It’s become the norm for men in her classrooms to believe in the equality between genders, she said, and social justice movements are making efforts towards being more inclusive and intersectional.

Pelletier agrees. She believes the chill and misunderstanding between men and women is dissolving with new waves of feminism. But it’s still “the thing that makes me cry every year,” she says.

Provost has a family of her own, too: four kids, who she says she tries to teach compassion. All know about Polytechnique. Since that day, she’s spoken of the importance of gun control and “getting back up.” She attributes her own resilience to a “strong will to survive” she got from her father and good old human nature.

Monday, she was at Polytechnique to hand a scholarship to a young female student, commemorating the events of 1989. “It’s a happy place for me because I finished my master’s here.” Like Dec. 6 itself, the school has taken on several meanings, and they’re not all bad.