CW: This post is a bit long and contains my reflections on the mass shooting at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal, December 6, 1989.

I was 19 and in my second year of university, working at The Gateway (the University of Alberta student newspaper), when I heard about the mass shooting at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal. Fourteen university students like me, my age, in Canada. Just on campus doing their thing, like I had been doing that day and every day. Shot and killed. For being women.

I couldn’t wrap my head around what had happened. In many ways, I still can’t.

People of my generation joke about how lucky we are that we didn’t have social media back then, to capture our youthful indiscretions for posterity, but some of us have actual media. For me it’s an opinion piece I wrote later that year for The Gateway, capturing my reaction to the very first vigil held to mourn those fourteen women murdered in Montreal. While I look back with compassion on the young man that I was, and still hold to be valid the feelings that he revealed in that article, I am also thankful that I have learned and grown from then. And as I always tell my kids, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.

The short version is that I was upset that I felt like I was being treated as the enemy at that vigil, for being a man, when to my mind then, I was, like everyone else at that vigil, on the side of the victims, of decency and humanity, of good. I wasn’t wrong, exactly, but neither were the people whose anger was directed, at least in part, at me.

The thing is that I wasn’t really the ally I thought myself to be then, because I didn’t really understand. I wasn’t wrong but I also completely missed the point. I wasn’t aware of the reality of being a woman in our society and in this world, and how truly different it was for me. We didn’t have a word for this back then, but we now call it male privilege, and rightly so. If you’d like to have a discussion about the truth of that concept, I’m happy to sit down with you.

Because if there was anything good that did come of that piece, it was the conversations that it sparked. I put my ego aside and I listened. I learned. And in the end, curiosity became knowledge, which became empathy and at least some understanding. And even more curiosity to learn more and do more.

Call me a social justice warrior and a feminist and a snowflake, but either you are trying to make things better or you’re willing to live with things the way they are. Honestly, “the way things are” works pretty well for me — see male privilege, above. But it doesn’t for everyone and that’s a problem.

Do I agree with the tactics every person has used in trying to address this problem? No. Have the things that I’ve done… or not done… always helped. No. But do I believe that there is a problem, a very complex but very real one, and that it needs addressing? Hell yeah.

So for me, today — our National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — is a day to remember.

But every day — EVERY DAY — is a day for action. And that action is within every action… in how you think, every word you speak, in the choices you make however big or small.

It means intentionally building a management team at your IT startup that is 50% female. It means bringing in consent training and workshops on dealing with reports of sexual assault at an arts non-profit. It means co-chairing a Male Allyship group in a university faculty not traditionally known for its diversity. It means having the hard conversations, when you are able.

It means taking a hard, close look at yourself every day because you might not be treating everyone as equally and respectfully as you think.

It means always trying to do better.

This is one of my actions for today, a public declaration that I will continue to do my part in this work.

And I remember:

Geneviève Bergeron, 21, Civil Engineering Student
Hélène Colgon, 23, Mechanical Engineering Student
Nathalie Croteau, 23, Mechanical Engineering Student
Barbara Daigneault, 23, Mechanical Engineering Student
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, Chemical Engineering Student
Maud Haviernick, 29, Environmental Design Student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31, Nursing Student
Maryse Laganière, 25, Polytechnique Montréal Employee
Maryse Leclair, 23, Mechanical Engineering Student
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, Mechanical Engineering Student
Sonia Pelletier, 28, Mechanical Engineering Student
Michèle Richard, 21, Mechanical Engineering Student
Annie St-Arneault, 23, Mechanical Engineering Student
Annie Turcotte, 21, Materials Engineering Student

Updated December 2021: Learn more about commemorative activities, including the Order of the White Rose, at https://www.polymtl.ca/december6/