British Columbia Federation of Labour

We gather today, December 6th, on the eighteenth anniversary of the mass murder of fourteen women at L'Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. On December 6, 1989, Marc Lepine shot and killed fourteen female engineering students.

He shot them because they were women. He shot them because they were women seeking a career in a field dominated by men. It's that simple.

Today we remember those women, but not just those fourteen. Today, we also mourn a society where women are murdered because of their gender.

We mourn a society where Aboriginal women 25 to 44 years old are five times more likely to die as a result of violence than other women the same age. We mourn a society where 66 percent of university-aged men admitted in a survey that they would rape a woman if they thought they wouldn't get caught. We mourn a society where poor women, some of whom have been forced into prostitution, can disappear from our streets and society doesn't notice.

How can it be in this day and age that society takes this for granted? How can it be that more than one in four women will experience sexual abuse and acts of violence in their lifetime?

Women are disappearing across the globe, especially women who dare speak out. In Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, women activists are being singled out because of one simple act - speaking out for women against violence, torture and rape.

Here at home, the government is more subtle. They simply cut off all funding to national and provincial women's organizations in an attempt to silence those who would speak out for women.

Stephen Harper's federal Conservatives stole the life out of our national women's organizations by refusing to fund advocacy work. Here in BC, the Campbell Liberals wasted no time in taking away advocacy funding for women's centres.

Now, instead of being advocates of change to help women improve their lives, BC women's centres have turned into fundraisers just to maintain the few programs they may have left. And that's only if they haven't yet closed their doors altogether

Is it any surprise that when women's voices are missing from our parliaments and legislatures, from our boardrooms and halls of power; that women are missing from our streets. So who is left to speak for those women who have no voice with the privileged in our society?

How do those women become visible? Women like those missing on the Highway of Tears and from the Downtown Eastside? Yes, today we mourn, but me we must do more than mourn. Canada and British Columbia need to be world leaders, not only on advancing rights for women. Today, let's not only mourn; let's move to end decades of inaction and end all forms of violence against women.

-30-

For more information contact: Jessie Uppal 604-220-0739.