Statistics suggest as few as 20 per cent of Canada’s current residents were adults living in Canada on Dec. 6, 1989 — 35 years ago — when the country suffered a landmark injury.
That was the day 14 people were killed and another 14 injured by a gunman at École Polytechnique, a post-secondary engineering school in Montreal, in the so-called Montreal Massacre.
It became clear, sooner for some than others, that all of the dead and 10 of the injured were young women who were hunted down for being women in a place a young man didn’t want them, a prestigious engineering school once the domain of men but an achievement the gunman failed to attain.
No matter how sickening, sad and alarming the deadly attack was for people learning of it that evening, looking back on it now — from the vantage of our modern, troubled, digital world — Dec. 6, 1989, remains a historic red line but one that resonates with new-fashioned significance.
The gunman was the first incel terrorist long before we had that name for his brand of violence. His attack was the progenitor of a persistent crisis of rampaging school shootings, even for the United States. It remained the largest mass murder in Canada until 2020’s murders in Nova Scotia. The targeted shootings at the school forced attention on violence against women, the role of women in society, and Canada’s gun control laws.
Parliament designated Dec. 6 as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Memorials to the Polytechnique victims stand at many Canadian universities. The attack remains a vivid symbol.
In all of that, it cannot be said the massacre at École Polytechnique has been forgotten. But how well is it remembered?
Since the Montreal Massacre, mass shootings and hate-motivated attacks have become distressingly common. They unfold these days instantaneously in lurid images: livestreamed from witness phones and viral videos, a doom-scrolling montage of photos of perpetrators and victims culled from social media. It screams immediacy and intimacy in its repulsive attraction. Then comes in-house security video and disorienting footage from police body-worn cameras, all anatomizing the devastation. The images seem unforgettable.
None of that was the case with École Polytechnique.
What remains in the visual record are flickering, bleached newscasts; old newspaper stories; a few photos of the victims; and the face of the killer just a smudge of a picture from a government ID card, after his mother burned her photos of him as part of her response to the tragedy.
With this flimsy visual record, how has the passage of 35 years eroded public memory of this once galvanizing event? For those who were not yet born, or not yet living in Canada, how well do they understand the horror or the significance?
Does Canada, as a nation, still really know why Dec. 6 is a day to be marked?
Through contemporary documents and archival texts, let this remind us, or inform us, of what really happened on Dec. 6, 1989. (Added context is bolded and italicized.)
CORONER’S INVESTIGATION REPORT, 1991
During the day of Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine, born Oct. 26, 1964, in Montreal, was seen for the first time at École Polytechnique in the office of the registrar, Room A-201. He was seen there between approximately 16:00 and 16:40 …
On several occasions, he was seen rummaging in a green plastic bag that he had beside him, the contents of which he seemed to be hiding. He did not speak to anyone, and none of the students spoke to him. At one point, one of the employees working at the counter asked him whether she could help him. He did not answer and he left the premises …
At 17:10, Lépine entered Room C-230.4 and moved toward a student who was giving a presentation. Lépine was holding a rifle in both hands. He approached the student and said: “Everybody stop everything.”
On that day, there was a mechanical engineering class in the room, and according to the school’s computer file, there could have been 69 students and two professors in the room.
He suddenly fired a shot at the ceiling and said: “Separate — the girls on the left and the guys on the right.”
No one reacted to his order. He repeated the same words in a much more authoritarian tone. The students then separated, but in their nervousness, the girls and boys mixed together in a group. He pointed with his right hand to the right side of the classroom, the side near the door, and told the boys to go over there. He then indicated with his left hand the back left corner of the classroom and asked the girls to go over there.
After the groups had separated, he told them: “OK, the guys leave, the girls stay there.” They thought it was an end of session joke, and that the attacker was firing blanks.
During this time, Lépine moved a little closer to the group of nine girls who were standing together at the back of the classroom with no possible exit.
He said to them: “Do you know why you are there.” One of the girls answered “No”. He replied: “I am fighting feminism.” The student who had spoken added: “We are not feminists. I have never fought against men.”
He immediately started firing on the group, from left to right.
After having fired perhaps 30 shots, he left the premises, leaving behind nine victims, six of whom were among the victims who died.
Those killed in classroom C-230.4 were all mechanical engineering students: Hélène Colgan, 23; Nathalie Croteau, 23; Barbara Daigneault, 22; Anne-Marie Lemay, 22; Sonia Pelletier, 28, and Annie St-Arneault, 23.
CORONER’S REPORT: Lépine then headed into the corridor opposite Room C-229. He fired on some people who were in the photocopier room, about 30 feet away from him. A boy and a girl were hit first and wounded.
As he approached the two people who had been shot, he wounded another student whose path he crossed.
Lépine then backtracked and headed toward Room C-228. He went into that room and stood at the entrance. He looked at the people there and aimed at a female student at the back of the room, trying twice to shoot her, but his weapon was not functioning.
He then left that room and went toward an emergency staircase near the door of Room C-229.
There, Lépine seemed to reload his weapon. At the same time, a student coming down the emergency staircase from the second floor came face to face with him. He heard Lépine say; “Oh, shit, I’m out of bullets.” The student accidentally bumped into him and continued along the corridor toward the photocopiers.
Noticing three people lying on the ground, he turned back around and looked at Lépine, who was reloading his weapon. When he saw him lift his weapon again, he left at a run and got onto the escalators, heading for the cafeteria. He then heard a shot.
Lépine then went back to the door of Room C-228 and tried to go into the room. He fired three shots into the locked door, trying unsuccessfully to open it.
He then went along the second-floor corridor, passing by three wounded people, and when he reached the foyer he crossed paths with a female student who was coming from the escalator. Marc Lépine fired on her and wounded her.
After that victim fell, she got back up and went down the corridor, heading for the emergency staircase, and ultimately sought refuge on the fifth floor.
Lépine then headed toward a semicircle located in the foyer where one person was hiding behind a counter. After changing the magazine of his weapon, while leaning on the counter, Lépine moved toward the person who was hiding. When he had got within eight feet of that person, he aimed his weapon at the person and fired. Not having hit the person, he fired a second time, but again without success.
Lépine walked around a bit in the second-floor foyer and on the cafeteria terrace; he then went over near the financial services office (Room B-218), and ultimately moved opposite Room B-211, about 20 feet from the entrance to Room B-218.
At that moment, a young woman locked the door to Room B-218, and as she was doing that, Lépine came back at a run to stop her from closing the door, but without success. Through a window in the door, he saw the young woman moving away, and he fired on her directly through the window.
She died from the shot.
She was Maryse Laganière, 25, an employee in the finance department. She was the only victim who wasn’t a student.
CORONER’S REPORT: Lépine headed toward the foyer. He then took the escalator and went to the cafeteria on the first floor, which he entered by Door B-107 … This place has a capacity of about 400 persons, and at the time of the incident, there were about 100 there.
It was now 17:20.
When he arrived at the cafeteria entrance, he aimed and fired at a female student who was near the wall by the kitchens. She also died.
She was Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, a 31-year-old nursing student, the oldest of those killed.
CORONER’S REPORT: There were then about 100 people in the cafeteria when the first shots were fired and they almost all left the room. He moved slowly toward the other end of the cafeteria and fired several shots in various directions, wounding another person.
When he reached the other end of the cafeteria, a room called the “polyparty” — an unlocked storage area — he fired again on the two students who were there. They are both among the victims who died.
They were Geneviève Bergeron, 21, a mechanical engineering student, and Anne-Marie Edward, 21, a chemical engineering student.
CORONER’S REPORT: Lépine told a male student and a female student who were hiding under a table to get out from there, which they did without being shot.
Lépine then left the cafeteria by Door B-124 and went along the corridor leading to the supplies room. He was then seen near the foyer on the second floor, just before he got onto the escalator (not in operation) to go to the third floor.
Lépine arrived on the third floor. Several people were in the corridor, several shots were fired, and two male students and one female student were wounded. Lépine went down a small hallway and, after turning to the left, he came out about 15 feet farther away, in Room B-311 …
This is the room where, at the time of the incident, a materials engineering class was being held. According to the school’s computer record, there may have been 26 students and two instructors …
It was now about 17:25.
In that room, he took several steps toward the dais, and said to the three students who were giving a presentation: “Get out, get out.” He immediately fired on a student who was on the platform.
He turned around and fired again on the students sitting in the first rows of the class.
Two female students who then tried to get away through the front door of the room were wounded. Those students are also among the victims who died. However, a number of students did succeed in getting away through the back door of the room.
Killed were two metallurgical engineering students, Maud Haviernick, 29, and Michèle Richard, 21.
CORONER’S REPORT: He then went down the aisle of the classroom, located near the corridor, and fired on several people hiding between the rows of desks. Four people were hit. These four people included one of the deceased victims.
She was Annie Turcotte, 20, a metallurgical engineering student.
CORONER’S REPORT: Lépine then moved back and forth in the classroom several times. He again replaced the magazine of his weapon and got up on one of the desks at the back of the classroom.
He then went back to the front, and again fired shots, more or less in every direction.
The student on the platform, the first one who was hit by Lépine when he entered the classroom, asked for help. Lépine joined her on the dais and, using a knife (a dagger), struck her three times.
She is also one of the deceased victims.
This was Maryse Leclair, a 23-year-old metallurgical engineering student. Her father was a Montreal police officer who responded to the shooting call and found his daughter’s body. Ten other women and four men had been injured.
CORONER’S REPORT: Lépine … put down his knife on the instructor’s desk, along with two boxes of 20 bullets each, and his cap. He then sat down on the dais.
He took his coat off and put it around the barrel of his weapon, and after speaking the words, “Oh shit,” he killed himself by firing the last bullet in the magazine at his head.
Another full box of 20 bullets was found on a chair at the front of the classroom near the entrance door.
It was now about 17:28 or 17:29 …
Lépine had 60 unused bullets. He was not pinned down or surrounded. There was no police tactical team approaching. He was not in danger — he hadn’t even been confronted by security or witnesses. For whatever reason, after 19 minutes, he decided it was enough.
News of a shooting spread quickly that evening. Officers arrived at the school but waited for backup before going in, amid rumours of more than one gunman. Ambulances and doctors came but were held back by police, who were unsure of the danger.
Students milled anxiously outside in the snow, watching and waiting. Journalists joined them, as did worried parents who heard of a shooting on the radio. When witnesses and victims scrambled out of the building, some told reporters what they saw.
MONTREAL GAZETTE, Dec. 6, 1989
“What we saw is indescribable. There was blood everywhere,” said an Urgences Santé doctor, one of the first on the scene.
The mass killings, unparalleled in Canadian history, turned the normally tranquil engineering school, known as the École Polytechnique, into a house of horrors.
An electrical engineering student, Reda Boulos, heard the shots and saw the gunman in the hall. “It must be a joke,” Boulos said to the student standing next to him. The gunman pulled the trigger, and the student fell. Boulos ran. “I saw him bleeding,” Boulos said. “Everyone was screaming and crying and trying to run away.”
“I heard the gunman say: ‘I want the women!’” said student Francois Bordeleau. “It was a human hunt. We were the quarry,” the thin, shaken Bordeleau said. He said the man was aiming mainly at women.
“I was on the fourth floor when I heard people shouting, ‘Hide in your class, he’s shooting at everyone,’” recounted student Simon Hamel, who later came across one of the victims … Student Stephane Morand said no one knew what was happening. “He was wandering all over the place. I laid down and played dead,” said Morand, who waited until the killer had passed before hiding in a nearby classroom …
Parents rushed to the scene to see if their children had been hurt, while police urged students to call home. Parents, many in tears, tried to push their way through the crowd of reporters and onlookers.
“My daughter’s in there and I’ve heard many people have been killed,” said a woman who was accompanied by another mother.
Two days after the shooting, one of the injured women, Nathalie Provost, who had been shot four times, was wheeled on her hospital bed into a makeshift news conference. Provost was the woman who spoke out when Lépine confronted the first group of women at gunpoint.
NEWS ACCOUNTS, Dec. 8, 1989
“Bonjour. I find myself very lucky to be here,” she said to reporters.
She said that after the males left the classroom, the gunman pointed his rifle at the women and asked if they knew why he had them stay.
“Obviously, we said no,” Provost told reporters. “He started yelling that we were all feminists, that he hated feminists. I argued with him.
“’We are not feminists, just women who want to make a living in engineering. We are not women who go out into the public square to try to prove that we are better than men. We were only women in engineering who wanted to live a normal life,’” Provost said.
“I think I still hadn’t realized what was happening. He didn’t answer me. He just started shooting.
“I can’t understand that there are still men who think like that.”
Addressing survivor guilt by those who did not try to stop the gunman, she said: “Everybody did their best; that’s the essential thing. There’s only one culprit and he’s dead.
“To all the young women in Quebec who were thinking about studying engineering, I’m asking you to consider this career with as much enthusiasm as you did before Wednesday. Engineering is a great profession.
“The gang has to get back together stronger than ever.”
MONTREAL GAZETTE, Dec. 8, 1989
Thousands of mourners streamed onto the Université de Montréal campus last night to walk in silent vigil for the victims of Wednesday’s massacre at the École Polytechnique.
The glow of a thousand flickering candles transformed the access road which winds from Edouard Montpetit Blvd. to the mountaintop site of the engineering school into a ribbon of light.
“I am here because I don’t know what else to do,” said Annie Girard, 24. “How are you supposed to react to something like this? Nothing prepares you for such savagery.”
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney paid his condolences to teachers and students at the school while the vigil was going on. “This is a national tragedy,” he said. “We are all horrified by what has happened. I extend my heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the victims and wish the students here courage.”
WASHINGTON POST, Dec. 9, 1989
For students at the university, their teachers, families, and the people of this city and province, Wednesday’s violence is not yet over.
“I think it has no end,” said Alain-Xavier Turgeon, a student at the École Polytechnique, the university’s engineering school where the attack took place. “We will always think about it. I think we will be 60-year-old engineers and we will still think, ‘A guy came in the classroom and started shooting everyone.’”
Along with learning about the victims, a perplexed public learned about the gunman and, importantly, his motivation.
CORONER’S REPORT: A handwritten three-page letter was found in the inside pocket of the jacket Lépine wore during the shootings, and two letters addressed to friends were subsequently recovered. They were all written by Marc Lépine and dated Dec. 6, 1989 …
In two documents, Marc Lépine identified feminists, women, as the enemy, the bad thing to be destroyed. He regarded them as invested with negative characteristics, based on a projective mode of thinking: all the evil was on their side.
Marc Lépine defined suicide as the primary motivation for what he did. He then described that suicide very specifically. He characterized the multiple homicide situation as an extended suicide …
Lépine’s letter was written in French, but for a few Latin phrases. Police refused to release it. Quebec journalist Francine Pelletier lobbied for it to be made public but was repeatedly denied. As the first anniversary of the massacre drew near, a copy of the letter was sent to her anonymously. It was published in La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, in December 1990.
LETTER OF MARC LÉPINE
Please note that if I commit suicide today 89/12/06 it is not for economic reasons (because I waited until I had exhausted all my financial means, even refusing employment) but for political reasons. Because I decided to send Ad Patres the feminists who have always ruined my life. For seven years that life has not brought me any joy and being totally jaded, I decided to put spokes in the wheels of these viragos …
Even if the epithet Mad Shooter will be attributed to me in the media, I consider myself a rational scholar who only the arrival of the Reaper has forced to commit extremist acts.
For why persevere to exist if it is only to please the government.Being rather backward-looking (with the exception of science) by nature, feminists have always had the gift of making me angry …
He attached a list of 19 names — his fantasy hit list. All of them were Quebec women he considered “radical feminists.” It included several police officers, a politician, a union leader, a television personality, and journalist Francine Pelletier.
LÉPINE’S LETTER: They nearly died today. The lack of time (because I started too late) allowed these radical feminists to survive.
CORONER’S REPORT: Marc Lépine was 25 years old and of medium size (5-foot-10, 154 pounds). He was described by people who knew him, including his family, as a not very social and not very communicative person, except when he was talking about computers.
It was very difficult to get to know him. He was described as closed, showing no emotion even about important things.
He did not accept authority, and this was said to have caused him problems both at work and while he was a student. In addition, again according to people who knew him well, Marc Lépine left nothing to chance. Everything he did was planned down to the smallest detail …
Marc Lépine had a stable job for several years, until September 1988.
In the fall of 1986, while he was employed in that job, he applied to the Faculté Polytechnique at the Université de Montréal. He was admitted on the condition that he complete two essential courses, including the course in solution chemistry.
He subsequently drew unemployment insurance benefits for a period of time, ending on Nov. 10, 1988 … In the winter of 1989, Lépine registered in and completed the solution chemistry course at the CEGEP du Vieux Montréal.
In addition, Marc Lépine applied to the Sûreté du Québec, on September 1989, for a firearms acquisition permit, which he was granted. He purchased the firearm used in the shootings on Nov. 21, 1989, in Montréal …
The weapon used by Lépine in the shootings was a Sturm Ruger brand rifle, mini-14 model, .223-calibre Rem., serial No. 185-34626, 5-, 20- or 30- cartridge capacity, with a barrel length of 470 mm and overall length of 943 mm.
After the incident, the following items were found at the scene, in Room B-311, near the rifle: a five-bullet capacity magazine, empty, and, on the first chair in the third row, a 30-bullet capacity magazine, also empty. As well, a second 30-bullet capacity magazine, also empty, was found in the second-floor corridor.
The knife was a hunting knife (dagger) with a handle about four inches long and a blade six inches long …
The study showed that all the deaths occurred by reason of the severity of the injuries suffered and that none of the victims could have survived, the injuries suffered by the survivors being significantly less serious than those of the non-survivors.
The anniversary of the massacre is marked each year. It took until the 30th anniversary, in 2019, for the plaque in a memorial park in Montreal dedicated to the victims of the massacre to be changed to recognize the specific nature of the attack. The sign was changed from calling it a “tragic event” to an “anti-feminist attack.”
The 25th anniversary, always a noted milestone, drew particular public attention to the survivors. Provost, the woman who was shot after confronting Lépine, reflected on the passage of time.
NEWS ACCOUNTS, Dec. 6, 2014
“It’s incredible to me, too,” Provost said with a laugh about her attempt to reason with Lépine before he opened fire. “I was brought up in a family where we speak our mind. It isn’t always easy, it isn’t always pretty, but we speak up. So that was just everyday Nathalie. Maybe it was extraordinary. But at the time, I was just doing what came naturally.
“There’s a lot of tenderness for the young woman I was then, for her naïveté,” said Provost, now a 48-year-old mother of four who works as a senior manager for the Quebec government.
“It was a huge cataclysm. The wounds to your body, you see right away. For the wounds to your soul, it takes longer. You don’t understand them right away. It took me years to grasp what I had lived through.
“I remember when I saw the eyes of one of my classmates. She closed her eyes and I knew she was dead. I remember this image. It’s clear in my memory.
“Marc Lépine lived in a different world. He didn’t live in a world of social media, he didn’t live in a world where fundamentalist ideologies took up a lot of space, but he resembles them a lot. He found the world unjust, he wasn’t able to make a place for himself in it, so he had the impression there was no future for him, and he felt like screaming it loud and clear.
“It’s abominable that he took people’s lives, but yes, I have a lot of compassion. To kill 14 people is inhuman, it’s foreign to our human reflexes. To get to that point, he must have been in unbelievable pain.”
Provost, contrary to what she said when confronting the gunman, said she is a feminist.
“I’m much more aware that in my daily behaviour, I uphold feminist values,” she said. “What I know today, which I didn’t know 25 years ago, is how fragile all that is. We can’t take it for granted.”
The school has renamed itself Polytechnique Montréal. In addition to a large plaque naming the victims on its outside wall, the school has a website of memorial events and tributes.
POLYTECHNIQUE MONTRÉAL, 2024
Each Dec. 6 since the tragedy in 1989, Polytechnique solemnly remembers the 14 women who were murdered on that date, as well as the additional victims and their families.
This event also serves as an occasion to reaffirm our enduring hope for and belief in the future. While time cannot fully heal so great a wound, life is sacred and it is important that we honour it, even with our pain.
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