Ottawa paused today to honour victims of violence against women.
Dec. 6 is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Today marks the 24th anniversary of the Montreal École Polytechnique massacre, where Marc Lepine murdered 14 women inside an engineering school.
For the first time, the Heritage Building near city hall lit up in purple, a colour that represents violence against women. Flags were flown at half-mast outside of all city buildings throughout the day.
Dozens rallied around the Ottawa Women’s Monument at Elgin and Gilmour streets to grieve the women killed in the massacre. They also commemorated women who have been murdered in Ottawa in the past few years and the hundreds of indigenous women who have been killed or are missing.
Karen Riopelle attended the vigil in honour of her 23-year-old daughter who was murdered two years ago by Patrick Dunac.
“A violent act is not the victim’s fault,” Karen Riopelle emphasized. “(Dunac) was well-known by the police. The justice system failed him. If he had an alternative sentence and a chance to rehabilitate, maybe she wouldn’t have died.”
The vigil is “an opportunity to humanize women who have been murdered and give voice to what they suffered,” says Valerie Collicott, the policy and administrative coordinator at Women’s Initiatives for Safer Environments.
“We want to tell those who experience violence now that there are other women speaking up for you if you are not able yet to do that for yourself,” she says. “There are some women who don’t have that voice yet. We can fulfill our responsibility to stop violence against women with a collective voice.”
Volunteers named each of the 14 women killed in Montreal and gave a brief description of their studies, hobbies, and unfulfilled vacation plans post-graduation. Names of women killed by men in Ottawa were also mentioned.