Plug: If anyone is in the Montréal area, the Sexual Assault Centre of McGill Students' Society is hosting a memorial tonight.

The event will take place at MainLine Theatre (3997 St-Laurent) tonight from 5:00-7:00 pm. Presenters will include Professor Rentschler and Professor Deslauriers, both McGill professors associated with the women's studies program, Inertia Modern Dance Collective, Chesley Walsh (singer-songwriter), and others. Refreshments will follow.

I was 21 and in college when this happened. I remember being shocked at the hatred shown by the gunman - even though the clinic where I volunteered had been bombed to oblivion just a few months before. I'm not in Montreal, so light a candle for me CarmelizedMe.

Absolutely.

If anyone is in the Fredericton area, the UNB Women's Centre will be holding a memorial/poetry reading tonight at 6pm in the SUB (blue room, second floor).

Thanks for posting about this!

Wow, I had no idea that this had ever happened, so thank you very much for posting about it. As a female in engineering, this really hits home.

Hi there
I just got back from the Vigil held at my university, Bishop's University, a small english university just an hour and a half south of Montreal. We had various speakers, musical performances, and a candle lit ceremony to remember the 14 women murdered for simply being women and also for those in our community here in Lennoxville who have been victims of male violence against women. It has been 18 years and we need to keep this up! There have been many great changes but there is still so much to do!!

pedgehog, I'm stunned that as a female engineering student you never heard about this (this isn't a reflection on you - I'm just surprised that you didn't hear about it at your engineering school. It got a lot of attention even outside Canada, so I'm surprised and sad that it may be forgotten even by engineers.)

I was an 18-year-old physics student in Montreal in 1989. A handful of my friends, including a couple of women, studied engineering. None of us were at the University of Montreal. I was only a few blocks away from the University when it happened and saw the first few police cars arriving. Friends from out of town who weren't sure what school I went to started calling that evening to see if I was ok. So it really hit home - I was so similar to the women that were killed. I think it was the first time I realized that any woman can be a victim of misogyny and violence, that it didn't just happen to "other" people, and that some men might hate me or kill me just for studying what I wanted.

Not only did the gunman scream that he hated feminists, he left behind a note blaming feminists for all his failures in life and a hit list of 19 prominent Quebec women in male-dominated professions. The note reads like an MRA manifesto (and at least one lunatic has approvingly cited it as such.)

I've never forgotten that day. I don't know if those women would have called themselves feminists, but the simple fact that they were in engineering school was enough for Mark Lepine to decide they were. I think about this every time I hear someone say "I'm not a feminist, but..."

Going to light a candle now. peace.

Just wanted to point out that it was AJ, not me, that said they didn't know this ever happened.