Mr. Speaker, it saddens me to rise in the House today to recall the horror that we all felt the evening of December 6, 1989. The École polytechnique tragedy is and will always be part of the lives of the 14 families for whom the absence of a loved one is a constant reminder.
It saddens me all the more because the root causes of the massacre remain as real today as they were 26 years ago.
Violence against women is tenacious; it is borderless, and it is more often than not endemic. We have only to remember the missing and murdered indigenous women to realize that violence against us is still so often the norm.
All the statistics prove that vulnerable women are not the only victims of violence; women of all social classes, all backgrounds and all ages experience violence and intolerance just because they are women.
I want to invite everyone to take a moment to pay tribute to all of the victims—those from the École polytechnique and those who wonder, day after day, if they will wake up the next morning—and to spare a thought for Nathalie Croteau of Brossard, who died in 1989.