Mr. Speaker, we are gathered here today in the memory of 14 young women who should be getting ready to celebrate a new millennium with us. They should be feeling the pride of building promising careers. They should be starting new families. But they will be enjoying none of these personal milestones.
Why? Because fate, tragically, chose otherwise. Because they were women, and because they were in the wrong place on December 6, 1989, at the École Polytechnique de Montréal.
Time stood still in Canada on that day. For the families and friends of the 14 who were taken by this act of insane rage it has never fully started again.
It is true that we learned something from this horror. We had to acknowledge that these murders revealed, as never before in Canada, the terrible reality of violence against women. And we took action with one of the toughest gun control laws in the world and by making the justice system more responsive to the needs of women who experience violence.
But the cold fact is that nothing we have done, or will do, can ever bring back those young lives. That is why my thoughts today are first and foremost with their families and loved ones who have graciously allowed us to share in their private grief in this very public way. Today we join them in reflecting what might have been but never will be.