December 6 and the struggle against violence against women
Special Resolution of the 41st Convention of the Communist Party of Canada
Meeting in Montreal on the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women, in memory of the massacre at the École Polytechnique de Montréal 36 years ago today, this 41st Convention of the Communist Party of Canada commemorates the deaths of the 14 women shot that day by a man motivated by misogynist rage.
This meeting also honours the 14 others who were injured and the other survivors and the families of all those affected who have transformed the commemoration, truly honouring those who died by struggling to do something about violence against women and mobilizing to demand increased gun control as a component of the struggle to curb violence. We pay tribute to this important contribution to the efforts to reduce the violence which so many women in Canada experience.
We express our condemnation of the intensified violence experienced by women from racialized communities most particularly Indigenous women and girls whose historic victimization has continued to this day as recorded by the Commission on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
We also condemn the growing intensity of violence against trans women.
We recognize that violence is rooted in social structures and culture pervasive in capitalism and that we must struggle against that culture but more importantly, against the source of that culture by fighting for the rights of women and gender diverse people to work, decent wages, equal opportunities, education, reproductive choice, affordable housing and public services, which constitute the tools for autonomy and protection for women and gender diverse people.
The Communist Party of Canada fights for world where the dignity and safety of women and of gender diverse persons is safeguarded, where work is safe and pay is equal to men and where everyone can live free of the threat of violence. We renew this commitment as our way of paying tribute to the dead, the survivors and all the families, all victims of misogynist violence at the École Polytechnique de Montréal – as well as the many others, before and since, across Canada.