The air in the second-floor classroom of the École Polytechnique smelled of chalk and winter coats. Just after 5:10 p.m., a man entered, ordered the approximately sixty students to stop their presentation, and commanded the men and women to opposite sides of the room. The man, Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, told the men to leave. He said he was "fighting feminism." He then opened fire on the nine women who remained. He moved through the building for twenty minutes, targeting women specifically. He killed fourteen women, aged 21 to 31, injured ten other women and four men, and then shot himself.
In his pocket, police found a three-page letter. It named nineteen Quebec women he considered feminists and blamed them for ruining his life. The letter included a list of the fourteen women he had just murdered, written in the present tense before the attack began. Lépine had been rejected from the engineering school the previous year. He framed his grievance as a political war against feminists who, he wrote, "have always ruined my life."
The immediate public narrative from authorities and some media framed the massacre as the isolated act of a madman. This interpretation was fiercely contested by women's groups and the victims' families. They insisted the violence was inherently political, a targeted attack on women in a non-traditional field. The debate centered the term "anti-feminist terrorism" in Canadian discourse.
The tragedy led to stricter gun control laws, including the Canadian Firearms Act and the creation of a national long-gun registry. December 6 became the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. The memorials list the names: Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte.