The Montreal Massacre and the Con War on Women

In my sadness over the death of Nelson Mandela, and because I'm so tired, I forgot that Friday was the anniversary of a monumental Canadian tragedy.

That on a snowy day in Montreal twenty four years ago, an angry man with a gun stormed through an engineering school and killed fourteen young women. 

Fourteen young women who were killed in Canada’s worst mass shooting were remembered on Friday amid repeated calls for more to be done to eradicate violence against women.

And I feel really bad about that. Because some things simply cannot be forgotten. They mark the history of a country. And how we remember and react to them says a lot about the kind of people we are.  

But the sad truth is the years are taking their toll. The faces of the murdered women remain frozen in time...



But the story of their lives is fading into history. People forget what exactly happened to them on that snowy day in Montreal. 

So Stephen Harper can shed crocodile tears: 

“On Dec. 6, 1989, the lives of 14 innocent and promising young female students were taken in a depraved act of violence at l’Ecole polytechnique de Montreal, simply because they were women,” Harper said. “While we will never fully understand this atrocity, our government is committed to helping ensure that it does not happen again by making our streets and communities safe for women, girls and all Canadians.”

Without mentioning that he killed their most precious legacy the long-gun registry, to pleasure the deranged gun lobby.

Or that violence against women in his ghastly Harperland is out of control.

According to Statistics Canada, the rate of women being admitted to shelters is rising and most are seeking shelter from abuse. The United Nations has called Canada’s scar of missing and murdered aboriginal women a “disturbing phenomenon” in an understated but dangerous admission that aboriginal women can be abducted and killed with little recourse in Canada.

Women are the victims of violent crime more often than men, and that crime is often gendered. “Women were 11 times more likely than men to be a victim of sexual offences, and 3 times more likely to be the victim of criminal harassment,” the report from Statistics Canada reads. “The overall rate of intimate partner violence against women was … almost four times higher than the rate for men.”

Or that because he has opposed women's equality from the moment he came to power, he could never accept the REAL reason those fourteen women were killed.

Not just because they were women, but because their killer thought they were FEMINISTS.

So that first Marc Lepine separated the women from the men. Then he told the men to leave the room.

Then he unleashed his murderous male rage upon them...



And that's what really happened on that snowy day in Montreal, and no Canadian should ever forget it. Or the horror of gun violence.

Never forget or forgive how Stephen Harper destroyed their precious legacy. Or how he wouldn't let a massacre get in the way of his Con war on women.

Never forget why we must defeat him.

Never forget the women who are suffering today from male violence.

Never forget our precious martyrs...



Click here to recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers