Ottawa vigil honours memories of Polytechnique shooting victims and female victims of homicide

“Today, it’s 33 years. This is crazy, just the amount of years that we’ve been talking about this. Is anybody listening to us?"

The 14 women killed by a gunman at École Polytechnique de Montréal on Dec. 6, 1989, were remembered at a vigil in Ottawa Tuesday evening.

Geneviève Bergeron, 21, Hélène Colgan, 23, Nathalie Croteau, 23, Barbara Daigneault, 22, Anne-Marie Edward, 21, Maud Haviernick, 29, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz​, 31, Maryse Laganière, 25, Maryse Leclair, 23, Anne-Marie Lemay, 22, Sonia Pelletier, 28, Michèle Richard, 21, Annie St-Arneault, 23, and Annie Turcotte, 20, were targeted solely because they were women.

Those 14 victims of an anti-feminist attack — killed in an incident that also saw 13 other people injured, who survived — weren’t first or last to be targeted by gender-based violence. There was a sense of simmering anger among the more than 200 people who attended the Ottawa Women’s Monument in Minto Park on Tuesday evening for a vigil marking the 33rd anniversary of the Montreal massacre.

They also heard the names of six women and one girl who together represent nearly one-half of 16 total homicide victims reported by the Ottawa Police Service in 2022.

Two of them were Anne-Marie Ready, 50, and her daughter, Jasmine Ready, 15, stabbed to death on June 27 by a male former neighbour, who was then shot to death in a confrontation with police. Husband/father Rafael with daughter/sister Catherine spoke briefly during Tuesday’s vigil.

Also on the list were Kieu Lam, 88, Yu Kun Xie, 78, Savanna Pikuyak, 22, Marie Gabriel, 24, and Sahur Yare, 20. In four of those five cases, the alleged killers were male. Two women were charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of their mother, Lam.

Then there was the case of Mary Papatsie, first listed as a missing person in 2017, whose body was found on a construction site in Vanier in September, more than five years after her disappearance.

“We are looking for answers and frustrated,” niece Tracy Sarazin told the gathering. “We have little faith that her case will be prioritized because, while she was missing, it was not prioritized.”

Papatsie was among more than a dozen Indigenous women who have been killed or gone missing in the national capital since 1994, their names displayed on a blanket-sized poster held up for all in attendance to see on Tuesday. Recent disclosures about a series of alleged murders of four Indigenous women by a man in Winnipeg — Rebecca Contois, 24, Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26, and an otherwise unidentified victim to be known as Buffalo Woman — enhanced the collective grief, and recognition of that troubling, continuing trend added a significant focus to the vigil.

“It’s very triggering for any family,” Bridget Tolley, a 62-year-old great-grandmother from Kitigan Zibi First Nation in west Quebec, said in an interview after addressing the crowd.

“Even me, 20 years, I should be so used to this talk, but it’s hard because there’s different families, new families. What’s good about this, the only thing that I loved, was meeting families. The families are so nice and they’re trying so hard to get information or anything, talk to police, or anything about their cases.

“And this is why they continue to fight. Nobody’s got answers.”

Tolley’s mother, Gladys Tolley, died after being struck by a Sûreté du Québec vehicle on Kitigan Zibi in 2001, but Tuesday’s vigil wasn’t just about that case, or the 14 women killed by a gunman in a Montreal engineering faculty building in 1989, or the six women and the one girl killed in Ottawa in 2022.

For Bridget Tolley, it was about all of them, plus granddaughter Cassandra and great-granddaughter Ava, who accompanied her to the Ottawa vigil.

“Today, it’s 33 years. This is crazy, just the amount of years that we’ve been talking about this. Is anybody listening to us?” Tolley said.

“I’m always thanking people for coming because we’re always telling the same stories. Our stories don’t change, and we’re saying the same things for 20 years, and the same people are coming, but the government’s not listening. There’s still no accountability for anybody.”

Tuesday’s event also featured Indigenous singers/drummers, candles for all those who wanted to hold them and innumerable posters, some with pointed messages and others bearing photos of victims and their identities. The implication: remember their names.

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