Mr. Speaker, on behalf of my colleagues, on behalf of the Bloc Québécois, I too want to recognize this difficult anniversary, the Polytechnique massacre.
Year after year, a kind of fog sets in when we think about the young women we lost in that tragedy. Those young women would perhaps be mothers today; they would be the ones now moving Quebec forward. Time always creates this fog. I therefore invite all my colleagues in the House and on Zoom to join me for a moment as we close our eyes and walk through this fog of time together. Let's close our eyes.
Now let's imagine that we are at École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. It is 5:05 p.m., and the day is almost over. It is already dark outside. There we are. We are walking down the hall. We go into a classroom on the second floor. There are about 60 students in the class listening to one of their own discuss mechanical engineering. The class is of course primarily made up of young men, but still, there are nine women who are also listening. It is 5:09 p.m. and a student is speaking.
Let's keep our eyes closed. Imagine a young man giving a talk about mechanical engineering. Imagine that we are students, young men and women, looking forward to the end of the presentation and the end of the day so we can go home.
Then, all of a sudden, someone enters abruptly, unannounced; we can feel a lot of stress. He goes up to the student giving the presentation and tells him to shut up. “Stop everything”, he shouts. We hear him and understand that something is seriously wrong. We stop. It is not as though we have a choice.
“Guys on one side, girls on the other”, he says. There is some nervous laughing, no one moves, it is a joke. Do my colleagues still have their eyes closed? Bang! A shot is fired into the floor, not in the air. It is awful. This is not a joke; something serious really is happening.
Just imagine. The women are separated from the men, and the men are told to leave; they leave, almost relieved but feeling guilty. Imagine that we are one of those men. We can feel the uneasiness, right? We also feel relieved. We tell ourselves that we have to go get help, but we no longer know what is happening in that classroom.
The man is there, in the classroom, talking to the nine young women. “You know why you're here,” he says. One of the young women says, “No.” Then he says, “I am fighting feminism.” One of the young women speaks, and when she does, everyone senses the fear and the hope that it will all stop. She says, “ Look, we're just women studying engineering. We're not necessarily feminists about to march in the streets in a tirade against men. We're just students trying to live normal lives.”
It is all for naught. The man has already made up his mind, and he says, “You're women; you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.” Then he fires on them from left to right, like reading words on a page, and they fall from left to right, like reading words on a page. He leaves the classroom.
Let's keep our eyes closed. It is safer that way because he does not stop there, and if we open our eyes, we will see blood, despair and fear. More carnage ensues as he makes his way to the cafeteria on the first floor. Then he returns to the third floor and enters one last classroom.
Everywhere he goes, from the mechanical engineering class to the very last classroom where he will take his own life, he leaves a trail of blood, despair and fear. Thirteen people are wounded and 14 women have been murdered because of their killer's hatred for feminists. Let's close our eyes one last time and think of Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault and Annie Turcotte.
Now, let's open our eyes. We must not let the memory of the women of École Polytechnique fade over time. We need to keep their memory alive, keep them alive in our memories in some way. Yes, let's open our eyes and continue our fight against violence against women, our fight against misogyny and our fight for better gun control.
Mr. Speaker, I remember the women of École Polytechnique.