December 6, 1989. Memories come flying of that night five years ago. I remember it very well. I remember it was cold and there was a lot of snow in Ottawa.
I remember the night particularly because the then Leader of the Opposition, the then member for Vancouver Quadra had a party at Stornoway for members of the Liberal caucus. I remember the fellowship, the Christmas cheer.
I remember a number of us going out for dinner after the party at Stornoway. I remember in particular there were more than a dozen of us in a downtown Ottawa restaurant waiting for the member for Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, now the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. We were wondering what was keeping him and why he was holding up our evening. I can remember. So many memories like this are etched in our minds. I can see the hon. member standing ashen faced in the restaurant doorway coming to tell us he had just heard the news on the radio of the 14 young women at l'École polytechnique.
I remember many things and forget others. Hon. members know the hon. member for Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke has sat for many years in this House and is one of its senior members. He was sitting next to me and he said things like that do not happen in Canada. They are not supposed to happen.
I remember later that night back in my apartment the member for Saint-Laurent-Cartierville and I were riveted to the television set watching Ian MacDonald of CBC report from l'École polytechnique. I remember the flowers in the snow. In particular I remember a beautiful young student talking about her fateful meeting with Marc Lépine in one of the corridors at l'École polytechnique. She described how she saw him and she crouched down and how he pointed the gun at her and fired twice. Both times through chance and the incredible grace of God it misfired. She kept saying she did not know why she was alive and the others were not.
I remember most particularly from first hearing the news to today five years later realizing that in this instance women were culled from the crowd. They were singled out. They were stood against a wall and they were executed.
They were executed because in that diseased mind, and there is no question of that, they had raised themselves above the trench, if you will. They had taken a step away from the norm. They had gone into a non-traditional profession for women. They had dared to do something that in that diseased mind women were not supposed to do.
I want to say a very special word about two of my former colleagues in this House. I want to pay tribute most particularly to Dawn Black, the former New Democratic Party critic on the status of women. Through her efforts on a private member's bill she sponsored this day has become the day of remembrance and action.
I remember being in this House many times speaking and supporting Dawn and being supported by the other women I would like to pay tribute to today. There is the Hon. Mary Collins who was then the Minister responsible for the status of women. I also want to pay tribute to our colleague from Saint-Hubert from the Bloc Quebecois who also supported us very much on that.
I remember these things and I want all of us to remember these things. I remember the people I met when this terrible tragedy focused the debate and the battle against violence against women. One person I will never forget and to whom I would also like to pay tribute today is Suzanne Laplante-Edward, the mother of Anne Marie Edward, one of the victims. She would probably not want to be singled out. She would talk about herself as a parent and an activist but she has become a symbol as well. She would probably have preferred to remain the mother of an engineer.
What happened on that cold December night in Montreal galvanized all of us to a degree but we still have much farther to go. It is very true that violence against men and against children exists in our society. However it is not sensible to refuse to recognize that violence against women is a particular problem that exists in every cultural group, in every society, east, west, north, south, in every racial background. It is a tragedy and a horror, but it is there. Asking what about men and what about children does not take away from the fact that there is the peculiar and particular problem that in far too many cases women wake up in their own houses and are afraid. When we talk about fighting this problem it does not mean that we think less of the victims of other forms of violence. It does mean that we underline this problem as a special one, as one that needs special responses and special protections. I mentioned journalists before and I spoke about Ian MacDonald from the CBC. I want to say a word about Stevie Cameron. I doubt there is a woman who read the Globe and Mail that week that does not remember Stevie Cameron's incredible column that was entitled ``What do we tell our bright and shining daughters?'' She spoke for all of us, those who are the mothers of daughters and those who are not but who have a responsibility to all the daughters. She talked about issues of safety. She talked about bringing up young women so that they do not have to be afraid. She talked about the way we all worry about our young, whether they are ours personally or ours generically. I will always remember her words.
Just yesterday I looked at a plaque in my office with the pictures of those 14 young women. I think the average age was 22. There was one I remember looking at and saying: "Gosh she was quite old. She was 29". I think of the terrible waste that took place in Montreal that night. Those young women would have made such a contribution to their profession, to their own families, to their communities, to their province, to their country, to all of us.
Madam Edwards mentioned in her interview in the Montreal Gazette this morning that what was lost there was not just all that beauty, talent, youth and enthusiasm. As a country we lost some of our innocence and our naivete because, as my colleague from Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke said, this is not supposed to happen in Canada and suddenly it had happened.
We have many spirited debates about the question of gun control, about questions of violence, about how to deal with and how to make sure that what happened in Montreal will never happen again. If we are lucky never again will we see a mass murder like that. We all pray that we will not. The tragedy is that we do see this violence against women every day.
There is a badge that some of us are wearing today that says: "Never again, December 6, 1989". The tragedy is that it is still going on. The tragedy is that we have not yet come to grips with how to deal with the question of violence against women. The tragedy is that every six days a woman is killed in this country with a firearm. I did not make up that statistic. It is not false. It is there. The tragedy is that women are beaten, brutalized and abused.
Yes, others are beaten, brutalized and abused but on a continuum-I underline this and repeat this-there is a particular, horrible and deep-rooted problem in our society, right here in Canada, whether in British Columbia, Yukon, Nova Scotia, southern Ontario, whether in a city or on a farm, it can and does happen in every single one of our ridings. To a degree we are all frightened and struck by our helplessness in the face of this ghastly and unacceptable situation.
We are legislators. We are all here, every one of us, no matter what our political belief or background, because we want to do what is best for our constituents and for the people of our
country. We have to legislate in the way we see fit. We have to understand that to root out this kind of horrible growth in our society, sometimes the surgery that has to be undertaken is radical.
If it means intervening and removing certain rights, whether it is the right to privacy, the right to have certain things in our possession, then I have to say that every single one of us has to understand that the problem is so severe and so ongoing and so all-pervasive that I fear we will all be judged very harshly if we do not take the steps necessary to cure it.
A year and a half ago the blue ribbon panel on violence against women reported. It was the summer before the election and part of my job at that time was to respond. I now think that to some degree my response was harsh. It was an expensive panel. As the hon. member for Yukon mentioned, it spent almost $11 million. To this day I have reservations about some of its responses.
However, one thing I did not make enough of at the time and I need to make something of today, and I know other speakers will also, is the committee very clearly stated the acceptance by the general population of the deep-seated problem of violence against women. I call it what it is, violence against women. It is not domestic violence, not spousal violence. Do not try to hide it behind words. It is violence against women. It is something that too many people in our society still do not accept. They think that it belongs to some strange subculture. There are some even in the House, and again I impute no motives but is just a lack of awareness, who think it is provoked, who think that there are reasons in a victimology that creates violence against women.
We all have to ensure that we understand the issue, and that we understand that to hit another person is wrong. It is a criminal offence. It does not deserve to be put in a special category because it happened in the home, because it was between husband a wife, because it was between two people who share a bed and a history that it is somehow different. It is violence. It is always a crime. It is never acceptable. There are too many dead bodies. There are too many injured women. There are too many scarred children.
This is Canada. The member for Renfrew-Pembroke-Nipissing said it five years ago tonight: "This kind of thing does not happen here". This kind of thing should not happen here. But we have a responsibility to do everything in our power as legislators to ensure that it does not.
