Date:Sun, 5 Dec 1999 20:22:04 -0500
Reply-To:"Womens Studies, Science, Engineering Curriculum Project"
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From:"Donna M. Hughes" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:6 for December 6
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The Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 4, 1999
'When the snowflakes start to fall, we all remember'
DEC. 6, 1989
By Tu Thanh Ha and Ingrid Peritz
Shortly after 5 p.m. on the last day of classes before the Christmas
holidays, a frantic call was sent to 911 dispatchers from the University of
Montreal's engineering school, École Polytechnique.
A man with an assault weapon had entered the building. It was Marc Lépine,
a 25-year-old loner who had a physically abusive father and had failed in
his attempts to join the military and later to enroll at Polytechnique. He
arrived at the school at 4 p.m. and spent 40 minutes sitting silently in
the entrance to the registrar's office, occasionally rummaging through a
green bag. He then left the office and headed into the university hallways.
He entered a second-floor classroom, where he ordered the men to leave and
declared that he hated feminists. He shot six women dead. He left the
classroom and fired shots in the hallway, then passed an office and fired
through the window, killing a secretary working in the school finance
department. The gunman headed down to the cafeteria. He shot three more
women, two of whom tried to hide behind a screen. He climbed the stairs to
the third floor, entered another classroom and ordered everyone out.
Someone asked whether it was a joke, and he replied by firing a warning
shot. He then shot Maryse Leclair, who was making a presentation at the
front of the class. Everyone dove for cover beneath their desks. He shot
three more women.
As Ms. Leclair lay moaning, he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt and
stabbed her to death. He then sat down, said, "Oh shit," and fatally shot
himself. The final death toll was 13 female engineering students and one
office employee, with nine female and four male students wounded.
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 4, 1999
'I never saw men cry so openly'
When the shock finally subsided, male guilt and grief were all that
remained By Tu Thanh Ha and Ingrid Peritz
Stéphane Brochu was seated in classroom B311 listening to engineering
student Maryse Leclair give a presentation when a young man with a
semi-automatic rifle burst in and ordered everyone out.
"We thought it was a joke," he recalls. "It was the end of term. There are
lots of pranks." Of course, it soon became apparent that Marc Lépine was
deadly serious. As panic washed over the room and terrified students dove
for cover beneath their desks, Mr. Brochu did something he still cannot
explain. He got up, met the gunman's gaze and walked out. He left more than
a 23-year-old's innocence behind that day. Seated in the class was Michèle
Richard, the 21-year-old woman who was going to become his wife a few
months later.
He never saw her alive again. Moments after he left, Ms. Richard was shot
dead. "I've lost half of myself," he said a few days later.
Mr. Brochu said he could not come to terms with what had happened. In fact,
he had no reason to reproach himself. After leaving the classroom, he
rushed to get help. He told a professor to call the police, and returned to
the classroom with a fire extinguisher -- the only weapon he could find.
But the classroom door was shut. "I couldn't get back in." To him, what he
did will never be enough.
"What did it change? There were still 14 victims," he said. "The guy was
after women, not men. I felt powerless. It was a kind of guilt. I wasn't
able to do anything." In the past 10 years, men like Mr. Brochu have become
the overlooked casualties of the École Polytechnique shootings. In many
cases, they had two shocks: first when they endured the loss of friends,
spouses and classmates, then when they were blamed for what had happened
because they were men.
"Their schoolmates, lovers and friends died in that event," said Jane
Morneau, a female student who was at the school during the shootings. "But
one of the first reactions afterward was: 'It was because of you.' "I never
saw men cry so openly," Ms. Morneau recalled. "To be accused like that must
have been so horrible."
Mr. Brochu was visited by nightmares for six months after the massacre.
Night after tortuous night, the same chilling classroom scenario played
itself over and over in his dreams. The gunman would burst into the room
and Mr. Brochu would try to stop him. "I kept trying different things,"
said Mr. Brochu, who has since become an engineer, with a wife and child.
"I would always try to help, but in the end I couldn't. I always ended up
dying afterward." Even Sylvain Ouellette, the male student who should be
least likely to have a heavy conscience, remained troubled afterward. Mr.
Ouellette was awarded a Medal of Bravery in 1993 for helping evacuate the
engineering school. When he heard that a gunman was on a rampage, he
followed his trail from floor to floor, stopping other students from
heading the killer's way, urging them to leave, comforting the wounded
victims he stumbled upon. Yet Mr. Ouellette later felt he had failed to do
enough. He did not realize at the time that the killer was targeting female
students. "Now, I know that I could have stopped him. . . . I live with
that regret," he told Radio-Canada this week. Male responsibility in the
shootings remains a contentious point. The University of Montreal will
commemorate the tragedy on Monday with, among other things, a performance
of an oratorio by a choir of 14 voices. When the university decided that
the voices would be male, some people objected.
Still, the university decided to stick with its plans. "We wanted to let
men express themselves because we hear very little from them," said André
Labrie, co-ordinator of the university's committee on the status of women.
"They had this whole sense of guilt. It was important to exorcise it."
Serge St-Arneault, a missionary whose sister, Annie, perished in the
shootings, said he has a message for the male students: "You are as much
victims as those who died. . . . You are not responsible for the acts of an
unbalanced man."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 5, 1999 Kathy Shaidle
The sixth day of December, 1989
The hunter is dressed in blue, his hat says Montreal Tractor,
it is the last hour. - ``He Says Die,''
by Maggie Helwig
THE office radio at the Catholic New Times newspaper was always tuned to
CBC-FM so we could keep up with rapidly changing world events. (To my
chagrin as the youngest staff member, rapidly changing musical events were
clearly less important; the station's
relentless repertoire of creaky British music hall tunes inevitably
left me feeling trapped in a Dennis Potter miniseries.) But I don't
remember the radio. Or actually, maybe, something about shots and thinking,
as I always do: ``Stupid Americans.''
Ironic, if Dec. 6, 1989, were the only day in the newspaper's
history that our radio was turned off. I just don't remember.
But some things I do remember. I go home completely oblivious. Eat. Read.
Set the TV's timer so I can listen to The National in bed. So I won't hear
the noises on the stairs. The ones everyone assures me are ``all in my
head.'' I lie down. My digital alarm clock snaps to 10:00 p.m. A slash and
three red holes. ``Good evening,'' says the anchor, Knowlton Nash, if I
recall, his familiar voice seeping into my bedroom. As the story drones
on, I tell myself I'm drifting between wakefulness and dreaming. Happens
all the time. I open and
close my eyes a few times, then sit up and make myself listen.
This is real. I carefully lie back down, afraid for some reason of
making a sound. I pull the covers up to my eyes like a cartoon
baby. My cheeks are burning. I have to force myself to breathe.
Shut up shut up shut up.
I start shivering. Soon the bed is soaked with sweat. Must turn
off the television. Most important thing to do in the world right
now. Can't move. I distinctly remember squeaking, ``Help.''
I'm the first one at the office the next morning and soon realize I
no longer can quite remember how to lay out the paper. I scribble pointy
graffiti all over the blackboard and hide under my drafting table. I am
discovered soon enough by Noreen, who puts her arm
around me and wonders aloud about her sons, just a little younger than I
am, both in college. ``What if they'd been in that classroom? Would they
have left, too?'' She dutifully turns on the radio. All I remember are
dozens of women screaming at Peter Gzowski.
Protesters meet that night at the U of T campus, beside Almuth
Lutkenhaus-Lackey's hotly controversial statue of a crucified
woman. It's the coldest, darkest demo I've ever attended and, as it turns
out, one of my last. I avoid the eyes of other women, not sure why. I sort
of feel ashamed, just being alive. Luckily, I meet up with friend and
fellow poet Maggie Helwig - an indefatigable activist since her teens - who
will be speaking at the rally after the march. Maggie clutches some folded
paper. ``I wrote something,'' she shrugs, her voice even smaller than
usual. We all slog off, dozens of women squeezing candles in our mittened
hands,
candles that won't stay lit. Some sniffles, but mostly rigid silence.
Until we pass a frat house. Three young men lean out of a top floor
window. One bellows:``WE LOVE CHICKS! WHOOO-HOO!''
Maggie, who has walking beside me, her head down, turns on her heels and
slips on the ice. ``SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!'' she screams, waving her
arms helplessly, bent double, slipping again. I grab her flailing arms and
hustle her away, both of us skidding along the icy sidewalk. Charlie is
walking behind us. Pony-tailed Charlie, with his orange portage-style
backpack, is at every demonstration, even
this one. Few other men in our political circle are here, perhaps
thinking they wouldn't be welcome. Charlie stops in his tracks, shakes
his head. ``Can you, I mean, can you believe those guys? Sheesh! Jerks.''
And I don't know whether to kiss him or kill him. Which I guess is sort of
the point. Never one of those who'd reflexively click off the news upon
hearing the name ``Bernardo,'' I still can't read more than a paragraph or
two about Dec. 6.
Writing this piece, I have to try very hard to remember Marc
Lepine's name. And I certainly wouldn't recognize his picture.
I'm almost more angry at the male students who sheepishly
followed Lepine's orders to leave the classroom before he
slaughtered the women. There was, I am certain of it, a time and a place
where they would've been called cowards. I don't remember ever really
talking about the Montreal Massacre with my girlfriends.
Maybe we were afraid that if we started, we might never stop.
Or that we might get so mad we'd want our own guns. And we can't have that,
can we? ``I don't remember much about that time, either,'' says a friend
when I tell her what I'm writing. `Except Maggie's poem.'' Because Maggie
got it right.
They are not a bouquet of snapshots, tombstones.
They are not a number. Remember them rightly.
Call them the names that their mothers gave them:
The women are out in the darkness, we are
alone out here, he says /Die/ we must
keep on living if we can, my head
is split against the wall, we explode at a distance.
This is all we can say -
that we say
that we say
that we say
Genevieve Bergeron
Helene Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Barbara Maria Klueznick
Maryse Laganiere
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michelle Richard
Annie St. Arneault
Annie Turcotte
- flashpoint -
Kathy Shaidle's latest book is ``God Rides A Yamaha''
(Northstone).
The complete text of Maggie Helwig's ``He Says Die'' appears
in her book, ``Eating Glass'' (Quarry Press, 1994).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 4, 1999
JAN WONG'S LAST WORD
Now and then, my six-year-old son will say, 'I hate girls.' That's when we
stop everything By Jan Wong
Montreal police are trying to figure out why a lone gunman killed 14 women
at a university in Montreal. -- from a CBC national radio broadcast on Dec.
7, 1989. A day later, they didn't know why? Every woman I know did. On
that day 10 years ago, I was on assignment in Hong Kong. At breakfast in
the hotel, the two men at the table next to mine couldn't stop talking
about the killings in my hometown. The men seemed so unmoved, so loud. Or
maybe it was because I had just endured a massacre at Tiananmen Square. But
the tears rolled down my face onto the front page of the South China
Morning Post.
For many women, that grey day in December was a wake-up call. After decades
of feminism, we thought we could aspire to any job, any life, any dream. So
did Marc Lépine. But when he failed, he blamed decades of feminism. He had
been rejected by the army. He couldn't get into engineering school. But he
didn't go shoot up a bunch of soldiers. Instead, he walked into a classroom
at Canada's largest engineering school. Armed with a semi-automatic assault
rifle, he ordered the 51 men to leave. That left nine women.
"You're women," he said. "You're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch
of feminists. I hate feminists."
Nathalie Provost, then 21, replied, "Look, we are just women studying
engineering." He shot her in the leg and grazed her head. He shot all the
other women too. In all that day, he shot 23 women and four men. Fourteen
women died. It was the bloodiest massacre in our unbloody Canadian history.
As he walked into Montreal's École Polytechnique, Mr. Lépine hid his gun in
a garbage bag. He went from floor to floor. Among the women killed was a
secretary who managed to lock herself inside her office. He shot her
through the glass slit in the door. On the third floor, one of his victims
was crying for help. He had one bullet left. So he stabbed her. Then he
turned the gun on himself. People said there had been no warning signs.
Indeed, Mr. Lépine's lack of a criminal record enabled him to legally buy
the assault rifle two weeks earlier. He spent $600 of his dwindling
unemployment-insurance money on it.
Mr. Lépine had been a good shot since he was 11. An uncle had taught him to
hunt. A high-school friend remembered him shooting pigeons in the back yard
with an air rifle. He would nail the birds in mid-flight. He was
meticulous. The day of the massacre, he wrote to a former roommate,
advising him that the phone was still in his name. He also wrote a suicide
note and tucked it into his pocket. He didn't want anybody, such as the
police, to miss his point.
In his note, Mr. Lépine wrote: "Feminists have ruined my life." The third
page was a hit list of 19 prominent women. They included union leaders,
journalists and the entire female volleyball team of police officers who
had had the audacity to beat their male colleagues a few weeks earlier. "I
was at home," recalled Francine Pelletier, then a freelance columnist at La
Presse. "My immediate superior called and said, 'That list on Lépine's
body? You're on it.' "
Asked how she felt at the time, Ms. Pelletier said: "He was dead. It was
not like those women who faced his gun." Now a correspondent at the CBC's
the fifth estate, she spent months working on an hour-long documentary on
the Montreal massacre that aired this week. Called Legacy of Pain, it looks
at the families of the victims -- and at the life and death of their killer.
In a strange way, Mr. Lépine helped to advance the careers of women
engineers. In the aftermath, the Canadian Engineers Memorial Foundation was
formed in memory of the 14 young women who died. Each year, five
scholarships of $5,000 apiece are awarded to outstanding women entering
their first year of engineering. Another scholarship of $15,000 goes
annually to a woman entering an engineering program at the PhD level. Last
year, women accounted for 20 per cent of undergraduate engineering
enrolment. Ten years ago, it was 13 per cent. And in 1970, Dee
Parkinson-Marcoux was one of only two women to graduate in her engineering
class of 360 at Queen's University.
Ms. Parkinson-Marcoux, now an oil-company executive who heads the memorial
foundation, remembers the campus engineering newspaper well. "There was a
certain anatomical fascination better suited to the medical profession,"
she says. On Monday, the 10th anniversary of the massacre, she will present
an award to the University of Calgary for having done the most in the past
year to create a woman-friendly atmosphere on campus.
Nathalie Provost, who spoke up that day 10 years ago, survived her gunshot
wounds. She is an engineer and a mother now. She was among dozens that Ms.
Pelletier interviewed. "The first time her little boy went bang-bang to
her, she said she went white," the journalist recalls. "She took him by the
arm and said, 'Don't you ever do that to me. Because mommy's been there.' "
The battle of the sexes seems to be hardwired. Every now and then, my
six-year-old son will say, apropos of nothing: "I hate girls."
That's when we stop everything. "I'm a girl," I tell him. He gives me a hug
and says I'm different. I give him a hug and I tell him I'm not.
