I got a call from a friend with bad news.
My first reaction was horror. My second was panicked self interest.
"He wasn't... anglo... was he?"
I was afraid that some crazy Anglo rights wacko had gone off and killed at the Poly, an intitute of Université de Montreal. I was both wrong and right to be apprehensive.
Yes, the killer was politically motivated/misguided, a wacko, and a member of a what he thought to be an oppressed minority... but he wasn't killing for any linguistic reason.
It was worse.
He was killing because he was a guy.
...and he hated "feminists"
Now, 20 years later, I see the faces of the 14 women killed in the faces of my daughters. I wear the white ribbon and I see how far we've come, and how far the reactionary right is trying to push us back.
Courage, sisters and brothers. Today is my birthday, and also the birthday of my eldest daughter. Lepine and his kind belong to the past, a past that we are slowly and - yes - painfully leaving behind. But as we do, let us gently remember these women, these students, these engineers.
Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21;
Hélène Colgan, 23;
Nathalie Croteau, 23;
Barbara Daigneault, 22;
Anne-Marie Edward, 21;
Maud Haviernick, 29;
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31;
Maryse Leclair, 23;
Annie St.-Arneault, 23;
Michèle Richard, 21;
Maryse Laganière, 25;
Anne-Marie Lemay, 22;
Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
Annie Turcotte, aged 21.