Monday, December 6, 2021. The flashing lights splash the trees on both sides of Olmsted Road, which winds around Mount Royal. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s convoy slowly moves away from the Kondiaronk belvedere, from which 14 beams of light shoot up into the tormented sky, recalling the memory of the students killed by gunshots during the anti-feminist attack at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, 32 years earlier.
Gale forcefully, the head of the Canadian government left behind a white rose and the promise to support the fight against gun violence.
More than three decades after the tragedy of December 6, 1989, the leading figures of the group for the control of weapons PolySeSouvient, Nathalie Provost and Heidi Rathjen, ask only to believe Justin Trudeau, in particular when he promises to withdraw the weapons to operational military-style fire from the hands of Canadians in exchange for financial compensation.
“There is fatigue, frustration that sets in,” notes Heidi Rathjen, after years of battles for greater gun control in Canada during which many advances and retreats. “Even when you win, you lose”, said the witness to the killing of December 6, 1989, having in mind “broken electoral promises” and control measures “destroyed by regulatory cheating”.
“We can’t do this for eternity,” says Heidi Rathjen. However, “much remains to be done”, notes the coordinator of PolySeSouvient, while pointing out the upsurge in violence linked to firearms and the 18 feminicides that have occurred in Quebec since the beginning of the year.
The “adrenaline” having won Nathalie Provost on the day of the 32e anniversary of the anti-feminist attack at Polytechnique through interviews with journalists, interviews with people whose lives have also been turned upside down by a firearm, commemoration activities, including that in which she participated in the company of the first Canadian ministers, Justin Trudeau, and Quebec ministers, François Legault, is fading. “I’m coming back to neutral, as my father used to say,” she mentions in an exchange with The duty Thursday evening.
Nathalie Provost says she is “a little tired” of fighting to ban assault and handguns as well as large capacity magazines, 32 years after being hit by the projectiles of Marc Lépine, who had burst into his class of the École Polytechnique, carried by an anti-women hatred and armed with a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle, to kill as many women as possible. “I don’t find it easy. Then, at the same time, I have the feeling that the probabilities that we are approaching something real, then important, are so great there ”, affirms the survivor of the killing of December 6, 1989, near three months after the last federal election. “If the Canadians had elected Erin O’Toole, even a minority, I don’t know what I would have done,” drops Nathalie Provost. “But it’s not Erin O’Toole that’s in power, it’s a Liberal government [qui s’y trouve] with the Bloc Québécois and the NDP, with whom we can work, ”she continues.
The 55-year-old is no longer shy about telling policymakers their four truths, as she did with Justin Trudeau after reading Bill C-21 on guns tabled in the House of Commons in February last. Too bad if his frontal approach harms his ambitions, she said to herself. “You say you share the pain and suffering we are going through. This is wrong, Mr. Prime Minister. Because if this were really the case, you would have had the courage to follow your convictions to the end “, Nathalie Provost wrote to the Prime Minister” on a Sunday evening on [sa] kitchen table “. “If you continue with this bill, we will never again agree to receive you by our side when we mourn the deaths of our daughters, our sisters, our friends, during the annual commemorations”, she warned him. . “It took me an hour, an hour and a quarter to write it down. We had it checked by a few strategists who said “Phew, yeah, OK”, then we emailed it to the whole PolySeSouvient gang. The responses were instantaneous: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…” ”says Nathalie Provost.
The study of Bill C-21 came to a halt after the publication of the letter, at the bottom of which some 40 survivors, witnesses and relatives of the disappeared had affixed their signatures.
“It was not badly extreme, but necessary”, underlines Heidi Rathjen, while recalling that “the main measure for which [PolySeSouvient] is fighting, it is the ban on assault weapons ”.
Over the summer, the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Justin Trudeau, reiterated his pledge to neutralize military-style firearms in the country. ” Or [les propriétaires] sell these weapons to the government to destroy them or else we take care of rendering them unusable, ”he declared during the election campaign to the satisfaction of the signatories of the letter.
Nathalie Provost says she passed an “uncomfortable” Premier on the summit of Mount Royal last Monday. “I greeted him. He thanked us for welcoming him. I said, “Now we’re waiting for you to deliver the promises.” He replied: “yes”, ”she recounts.
PolySeSouvient spokespersons, Nathalie Provost and Heidi Rathjen – who met for the first time on the day they returned to the École Polytechnique, in September 1985 – say they are continuing to fight, especially because they are certain to echo the demands not only of the victims of gun violence, but of the majority of Canadians.
Competing with a pro-arms lobby accusing them of ‘whining’, the two volunteers as well as survivors and witnesses of gun violence who revolve around them such as Meaghan Hennegan (survivor of the Dawson College shooting, in 2006 ) and Boufeldja Benabdallah (witness to the aftermath of the attack on the Grand Mosque in Quebec in 2017), have the ears of the population, the media and politicians.
“The families of the victims have enormous credibility because they have nothing to gain. They have already lost everything, ”explains Heidi Rathjen.
“We do not give up, we continue, even if it is demanding,” says Nathalie Provost who also reconciles work, family and activism.
“We’re both tired. But we rely on each other, and on the other members of our small collective, and we are made incredibly effective, ”she points out.
Are you counting on a succession? “The succession, we prepare it, we prepare it”, indicates the former administrator of the Polytechnic School, while stressing that “you cannot force” other victims to go up on the front line.
That said, PolySeSouvient takes a very positive view of the involvement of the mayoress of Montreal, Valérie Plante, who has taken the fight against armed violence head-on.
Like her, the group continues to urge Justin Trudeau to abandon his idea of outsourcing the imposition of new handgun restrictions to provinces and municipalities and instead banning handguns from coast to coast. … As his predecessor Paul Martin promised more than 15 years ago.