December 6, 1989

December 6th is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. The Canadian government established this day to fight violence against women, and in commemoration of the 14 women who were shot dead in the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal on December 6, 1989. Among those women was a young lady I had the privilege to know for a brief while, Anne-Marie Edward. When Marc Lépine killed her she was 21 years old.

The Ecole Polytechnique is part of the Université de Montréal. The women were murdered by a man who had applied to the university and been refused. He was angry that women were, as he felt, taking places in the university's engineering school that rightly belonged to men. He called them feminists and he went on a rampage through the school, separating the men from the women and then killing the women before he turned his gun on himself.