The École Polytechnique massacre (French: tuerie de l'École polytechnique), also known as the Montreal massacre, was a mass shooting that occurred on December 6, 1989, at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Fourteen women were fatally shot in the misogynistic, antifeminist attack; another ten women and four men were injured. Among the wounded was the eventual gun control advocate and politician Nathalie Provost. It is the deadliest school shooting in Canada’s history.
On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine, armed with a legally-obtained semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, entered a mechanical engineering class at the École Polytechnique. He ordered the women to one side of the classroom, and instructed the men to leave. After claiming that he was "fighting feminism," he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. The shooter then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot for just under 20 minutes. He killed a further eight women before shooting and killing himself with his rifle. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Canada until the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks.
After the attack, Canadians debated various interpretations of the events, their significance, and the shooter’s motives. The massacre is now widely regarded as an anti-feminist attack and representative of wider societal violence against women; the anniversary of the massacre is commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.
The incident led to more stringent gun control laws in Canada, and increased action to end violence against women. It also resulted in changes in emergency services protocols to shootings, including immediate, active intervention by police. These changes were later credited with minimizing casualties during incidents in Montreal and elsewhere.
Timeline
Sometime after 4 p.m. on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine arrived at the building housing the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, armed with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife. He had legally purchased the gun less than a month earlier on November 21 in a Checkmate Sports store in Montreal, saying that he was going to hunt small game. Investigators learned that he had been in and around the École Polytechnique building at least seven times in the weeks leading up to December 6.
The gunman first sat in the office of the registrar on the second floor, where he was seen rummaging through a plastic bag. He did not speak to anyone, even when a staff member asked if she could help him. He left the office and was seen in other parts of the building before he entered a second-floor mechanical engineering class of about sixty students at about 5:10 p.m. After approaching the student giving a presentation, he asked everyone to stop everything and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. No one moved at first, believing it to be a joke, until he fired a shot into the ceiling.
After separating the students, Lépine ordered the estimated fifty men to leave the room. He asked the women whether they knew why they were there; instead of replying, a student asked who he was. He said that he was fighting feminism. One of the students, Nathalie Provost, protested that they were women studying engineering, not feminists fighting against men or marching to prove that they were better. He responded by opening fire on the students from left to right, killing six—Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie St-Arneault—and wounding three others, including Provost. Before leaving the room, he wrote the word "shit" twice on a student project.
The gunman continued into the second-floor corridor and wounded three students before entering another room where he twice attempted to shoot a female student. When his weapon failed to fire, he entered the emergency staircase where he was seen reloading his gun. He tried to return to the room he had just left, but the students had locked the door. He failed to open it although he fired three shots into the door. Moving along the corridor, he shot at others, wounding one, and approached the financial services office. There he shot and killed Maryse Laganière through the window of the door she had just locked.
The gunman went down to the first-floor cafeteria, in which about 100 people were gathered. He shot nursing student Barbara Maria Klucznick near the kitchens and wounded another student, and the crowd scattered. Entering an unlocked storage area at the end of the cafeteria, the gunman shot and killed Anne-Marie Edward and Geneviève Bergeron, who were hiding. He told a male and female student to come out from under a table; they complied and were not shot.
The shooter walked up an escalator to the third floor, where he shot and wounded one female and two male students in the hallway. He entered another classroom and told the men to "get out", shooting and wounding Maryse Leclair, who was giving a presentation on a low platform at the front of the classroom. He then fired on students in the front row, killing Maud Haviernick and Michèle Richard, who were trying to escape the room. Other students dove under their desks. The killer moved towards some of the female students, wounding three of them and killing Annie Turcotte. He changed the magazine in his weapon and moved to the front of the class, shooting in all directions. The wounded Leclair asked for help; the gunman stabbed her three times with his hunting knife, killing her. He took off his cap, wrapped his coat around his rifle, said, "Oh shit", and killed himself with a single shot to the head. The attack had taken about 20 minutes; the shooter had fired about 100 rounds and approximately 60 unfired cartridges remained in the boxes he carried.
After briefing reporters outside, Montreal Police director of public relations Pierre Leclair entered the building and found his daughter Maryse's stabbed body.
The Quebec and Montreal governments declared three days of mourning. A joint funeral for nine of the women was held at Notre-Dame Basilica on December 11, 1989, and was attended by Governor General Jeanne Sauvé, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, and Montreal mayor Jean Doré, along with thousands of other mourners.
Victims
Lépine killed fourteen women (twelve engineering students, one nursing student, and one employee of the university) and injured fourteen others, ten women and four men.
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968; aged 21), civil engineering student
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967; aged 22), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968; aged 21), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960; aged 29), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964; aged 25), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966; aged 23), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967; aged 22), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961; aged 28), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968; aged 21), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969; aged 20), materials engineering student
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958; aged 31), nursing student
Perpetrator
Marc Lépine, né Gamil Gharbi, was born to a French-Canadian mother and an Algerian father on October 26, 1964. His father, a mutual funds salesman, did not consider women to be the equal of men. He was physically and verbally abusive to his wife and son, discouraging tenderness between the two. When Gamil was seven, his parents separated; his father ceased contact with his children soon after. His mother returned to nursing to support the family, and because of her schedule, the children lived with other families during the week. At 14, Gamil changed his name to "Marc Lépine", citing his hatred of his father as the reason for taking his mother's surname. Lépine attempted to join the Canadian Army during the winter of 1980–1981 but, according to his suicide letter, was rejected because he was "anti-social". The brief biography of the shooter that police released the day after the killings described him as intelligent but troubled. He disliked feminists, career women and women in traditionally-male occupations, such as the police force. He began a pre-university CEGEP (college) program in Pure Sciences in 1982, but switched to a three-year vocational program in electronics technology after his first year. He abandoned this program in his final semester without explanation. Lépine applied to the École Polytechnique in 1986 and in 1989 but lacked two CEGEP courses required for admission. He completed one of them in the winter of 1989.
Suicide letter
On the day of the massacre, Lépine wrote three letters: two were sent to friends, and one was found in an inside pocket of his jacket. The police revealed some details from the suicide letter in the days after the attack, but did not disclose the full text.
The media brought an unsuccessful access to information case to compel the police to release the suicide letter. A year after the attacks, the three-page statement was leaked to journalist and feminist Francine Pelletier. It contained a list of nineteen Quebec women whom Lépine labelled as "radical feminists" and apparently intended to kill. The list included Pelletier, fellow journalists Lise Payette and Janette Bertrand, union leader Monique Simard, politicians Monique Gagnon-Tremblay and Lorraine Pagé, sports commentator Danielle Rainville, and six police officers whom the gunman knew from their playing together on an amateur volleyball team. The letter (without the list of women) was subsequently published in the newspaper La Presse, where Pelletier was a columnist.
In the leaked letter, Lépine wrote that he was rational and blamed 'feminists' for ruining his life. He outlined his reasons for the attack including his anger towards feminists for seeking social changes that "retain the advantages of being women [...] while trying to grab those of the men." He referred to Denis Lortie, a Canadian Armed Forces corporal who had killed three government employees and wounded thirteen others in an armed attack on the National Assembly of Quebec on May 8, 1984.
Search for a rationale
The massacre profoundly shocked Canadians. Government and criminal justice officials feared that extensive public discussion about the massacre would cause pain to the families and lead to more antifeminist violence. As a result, they did not conduct a public inquiry, and Lépine's suicide letter was not released. In addition, although an extensive police investigation into the perpetrator and the killings took place, the resulting report was not made public although the coroner used it as a source in her investigation. The media, academics, women's organizations, and family members of the victims protested the lack of a public inquiry and paucity of information released.
The gender of the victims, as well as Lépine's oral statements during the massacre and in the suicide note, have resulted in the event being seen as an antifeminist attack and as an example of the wider issue of violence against women. Initially, however, politicians and the media downplayed the antifeminism of the attack. Political leaders such as Robert Bourassa, Claude Ryan, and Jacques Parizeau spoke about "victims" and "youth" rather than "women" or "girls". The television journalist Barbara Frum pleaded against interpreting the massacre as antifeminist or as violence against women. She asked why people were "diminishing" the tragedy by "suggesting that it was an act against just one group?"
As predicted by the shooter in his suicide letter, some observers saw the event was the isolated act of a madman. A psychiatrist interviewed the gunman's family and friends, and examined his writings as part of the police investigation. He noted that the perpetrator defined suicide as his primary motivation, and that he chose a specific suicide method, namely killing oneself after killing others (multiple homicide/suicide strategy), which is considered a sign of a serious personality disorder. Other psychiatrists emphasized the traumatic events of his childhood, suggesting that the blows he had received may have caused brain damage, or that he was psychotic, having lost touch with reality as he tried to erase the memories of a brutal (yet largely absent) father while unconsciously identifying with a violent masculinity that dominated women. A different theory was that the shooter's childhood experiences of abuse led him to feel victimized as he faced losses and rejections in his later life. His mother wondered whether her son might have suffered from attachment disorder, due to the abuse and sense of abandonment he had experienced in his childhood.
Others framed the killer's actions as the result of societal changes that had led to increased poverty, powerlessness, individual isolation, and polarization between men and women. Noting the gunman's interest in violent action films, some suggested that violence in the media and in society may have influenced his actions. Following the shootings at Dawson College in September 2006, Globe and Mail columnist Jan Wong controversially suggested that Lépine may have felt alienated from Quebec society as he was the child of an immigrant.