Despite falling within the holiday season, Dec. 6 represents a decidedly grim chapter in Canadian history, since 14 women were murdered in a mass shooting on this date in 1989 at École Polytechnique de Montréal.
Two years later, the federal government passed legislation to officially designate Dec. 6 as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, which is still held annually throughout the country.
For the 29th anniversary of the original tragedy, a group of social work students from the University of Manitoba set up shop at the Thompson Regional Community Centre on Thursday to commemorate the victims and remind local residents that gender-based violence remains a persistent problem in our society.
These students started out this ceremony by telling the crowd that the perpetrator of the original massacre specifically targeted his victims because he believed they were feminists.
To further hammer home the enormity of this tragedy, each student took turns talking about each victim from a first-person perspective, highlighting their unique hopes and dreams before they were gunned down.
The group capped off this ceremony by lighting candles and placing a single rose next to the photo of each women, mimicking similar vigils that took place in cities like Winnipeg, Edmonton and, of course, Montreal.
To give this discussion broader context, the U of M, along with members of the YWCA Thompson, also set up displays to promote campaigns like the REDress Project, which shines a light on the estimated 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
To frame this conversation on a more local level, a recent report by Discourse Media revealed that Thompson had the ninth-highest rate of police-reported violence against women in the country between 2008 and 2015.
