The gunman moved through the building methodically, targeting women specifically. After shooting nine women in the first classroom -- killing six -- he continued through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom. He killed Maryse Laganiere, a budget clerk, through the window of the door she had just locked. He killed Maud Haviernick and Michele Richard as they tried to escape. In all, fourteen women died: twelve engineering students, one nursing student, and one university employee. Another fourteen people were injured, ten women and four men. The youngest victim, Annie Turcotte, was twenty years old. The oldest, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, was thirty-one. After briefing reporters outside, Montreal Police director of public relations Pierre Leclair entered the building and found his own daughter Maryse among the dead, her body bearing stab wounds.

The massacre profoundly shocked Canada. The gunman's suicide letter, leaked a year after the attack, made his motives explicit: he blamed feminists for ruining his life and listed nineteen Quebec women he had intended to kill. Yet initially, politicians and media downplayed the anti-feminist nature of the attack. Political leaders spoke of 'victims' and 'youth' rather than 'women.' Television journalist Barbara Frum asked why people were 'diminishing' the tragedy by calling it an act against one group. It took thirty years -- until 2019 -- for the memorial plaque at the Place du 6-Decembre-1989 to be changed from describing a 'tragic event' to explicitly stating that the attack was anti-feminist and that fourteen women were killed. The reluctance to name what happened became its own chapter in the story.

Less than a week after the massacre, two Ecole Polytechnique professors created a petition demanding tighter gun control. More than half a million Canadians signed. Heidi Rathjen, a student who had been in one of the classrooms that day, organized the Coalition for Gun Control. Their work led to Bill C-17 in 1992 and the Firearms Act in 1995, ushering in stricter regulations. The long-gun registry created under these laws was eventually abolished by the Harper government in 2012, though Quebec won a legal fight to preserve its provincial gun registry data. The massacre also exposed failures in emergency response -- poorly trained security guards, communication breakdowns at the 911 call center, police who established a perimeter and waited rather than entering the building. Those lessons reshaped active shooter protocols across Canada and were credited with minimizing casualties in later incidents.

Since the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014, fourteen searchlights have been installed annually on the summit of Mount Royal. At 5:10 p.m. -- the time the attack began -- the name of each victim is read aloud, and a beam of light is projected upward into the sky. The anniversary, December 6, has been designated the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. The Order of the White Rose, also established in 2014, provides a thirty-thousand-dollar scholarship for female engineering graduate students, its selection committee chaired by Michele Thibodeau-DeGuire, the first woman to graduate from Ecole Polytechnique. Denis Villeneuve directed the widely acclaimed film Polytechnique in 2009. The fourteen women are remembered not as statistics but by name -- from Genevieve Bergeron, twenty-one, studying civil engineering, to Sonia Pelletier, twenty-eight, studying mechanical engineering -- each one a life cut short while pursuing the future she had chosen.