Thank you for inviting me here today to remember the 14 young women murdered in Montreal 15 years ago for the crime of wanting to educate themselves and make good lives for themselves in this great country.

They say the quality most demanded of journalists is a ratlike cunning. I will tell you, without irony or guile or any desire to make the very posh Law Society of Upper Canada look fondly on me, that you should be very proud that you are honouring these women today.

Hardly anyone else has bothered, as far as I can see, and it makes me sick. An assistant in the federal Justice minister’s office, when asked what activities they were planning for the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, said, “Um, you’re sure it’s Monday?”

The names of the dead women are. 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.

“We make wreaths of adjectives for them,” wrote Margaret Atwood. “We count them like beads, we turn them into statistics & litanies and into poems like this one.

“Nothing works. They remain what they are.”

Atwood was writing about the agonies inflicted on women worldwide. It was a poem called, significantly, Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written, And she wrote it in 1981, eight years before Marc Lépine mashed those women up with bullets and a knife.

I can see some small improvements in the lives of Canadian women since then. One of them is gun registration in Canada and it may be that the reason we aren’t hearing much from the prime minister today is that he doesn’t want to annoy the so-called Conservative party by drawing attention to a law that may well have saved hundreds of women’s lives.

We just don’t know if those lives were saved. We can only assume, using logic, that they were. It’s another poem that can never be written.

Anne-Marie Edward was shot to death at L’Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. Her mother, Suzanne Edward, told me yesterday that at that time, there were approximately 1,400 gun deaths a year in Canada. The measures we now have in place “have produced incredible results,” she said “Therewere 842 gun deaths in 2002 in Canada. That is a saving of approximately 558 Canadian lives a year.”

I was trying to decide whether to write a cheering speech for you today or one of my all-time downers. I don’t know how you’d characterize this speech. It’s called “Global Swarming,” and I chose that title because I feel a pressure coming at women from all sides, not just in efforts to combine family lives with hugely demanding careers, but politically, in our own country and from abroad.

The pressure’s getting worse. Talking about it will help us all fight back.

Here’s my metaphor. As you may happen to know, or may have read in a recent New Yorker article, children with cystic fibrosis need to be hit. I mean it. They need to be struck in 14 places on their torso twice a day in order to loosen phlegm and make it possible for them to breathe. Now, thanks to a compassionate and inspired doctor who fiddled around in his basement, they’ve invented a sort of mechanized life jacket like a giant blood pressure cuff with 14 individual targets that does it automatically.

It thumps you. It compresses you. The vest is a hell of a lot better than your mum and dad beating you up twice a day, but it’s still pressure coming at you from all sides.

That’s a way of describing what women still face today.

Now, let me make my case for this analogy.

When I heard the Newfoundland Association of Public Employees, or NAPE, decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, I gasped. The court had actually said that Newfoundland women who had been promised back pay for the years 1988 to 1991 on their pay equity deal with the provincial government would not get it because the province couldn’t afford it now. Couldn’t afford it now? Said who? The province. Furthermore, the women’s union had to pay the government’s legal costs.

I was aghast at the lack of proof Newfoundland was made to offer the court, “an extract from Hansard and some budget documents,” as the intervenor LEAF puts it.

So, Newfoundland, you say you’re flat broke so the hell with the Charter?

Okay, then, said the court.

How shaming. How sick-making. What a juicy, bleeding precedent.

Those women had been waiting for years for a government to be made to keep a promise by our highest court. One woman had been counting on her $7,000. Let’s be honest here. For me, and for most actual members of the Law Society, that amount of money would decide whether, when we went to Paris, we stayed at the George Cinq or the Inter-Continental.

For that woman, seven grand meant a new lease on life. It might even have meant her escaping the blows of an enraged husband.

That’s pressure. Because when a government says it can no longer afford to keep a promise, an actual agreement on essentials, I suspect it will be something essential for women and children.

One reason this is happening is complacency on the part of men and women who fight for social justice. We thought we had succeeded and much would flow naturally from that success. And so women ceased to be loud.

The NAC chose poor leadership, and worst of all, they lost their government funding. Women aren’t loud any more.

A life-changing thing happened to me this year. I attended a three-day conference of female lawyers and women in the media out in the deep woods near Kingston.

(It was quite strange, so rainsoaked and rural woodsy that it put us in mind of the movie Deliverance or perhaps the Blair Witch Project. I learned the only advantage I have ever found to working for The Globe and Mail; you are politely given a room with a shower. The lawyers themselves were not all so fortunate.)

The retreat was made possible by the Claire L’Heureux-Dubé Fund for Social Justice. We talked about why women are rarely among the talking heads on TV, why newspapers offer a wall of male commentary, why the smiling faces in Report on Business belong almost entirely to men with a snappy new job.

Only recently, the top 10 Canadians were chosen in a CBC contest. None was female. Five of the 10 presenters for each CBC show on the top 10 were women; the CBC was canny enough to know its viewership. But apparently Canada has no great women.

This was the theme of a novel called Unless, the last novel Carol Shields wrote before she died of breast cancer: In any list of the greats, count the women. They’re not there.

Yes, women attend law school in great numbers now. But check the lists of those honoured by law schools, by the law societies, those with the top jobs in the biggest firms, those who must be interviewed on television or a reporter will consider a legal story incomplete.

Women fill certain lists, like the list of the dead I just read to you. But lists of those at the top of their profession or their industry? Count the male names.

At the Claire L’Heureux-Dubé conference, we considered this. Women had disappeared from the landscape and when the hell did that happen? Was it backlash? Or was it indolence on our part, a willingness to congratulate ourselves too early as if we thought progress could not lap back on itself?

“I am shy,” one lawyer said. But she’s not shy. What happened to this woman in her legal career to silence her? Is there some point in a woman’s career when she has had the drive beaten out of her? I remember asking this question of one of Canada’s most powerful men and he said that the same thing happens to men. He said, “Heather, I have seen men get the shit kicked out of them.”

But he agreed with my next point. He wondered if some men were inevitably wiped out in straightforward competition and I wondered if some women are wiped out because they are targeted for being women.

I recently did a huge favour for another journalist I respect greatly. He is male, but he’s profoundly pro-feminist. I’ll do this for you, I told him. It’s humiliating for me, but women are accustomed to humiliation and I don’t think you have the cumulative grovelling experience to endure it without damaging your psyche.

And at some level, I am always laughing inside at how accustomed men are to being grovelled to. It bumps up even the most senior executive and is amusing to watch.

At the Dubé conference — aptly named a “retreat” — we asked ourselves about the retreat in women’s fortunes. What it meant was that when bad things happened to women, no women and few fair-minded men were there to protest. As has been proved in many scientific experiments, it isn’t losing the food ration that drives the rats crazy, it’s not knowing when they’ll get it. It’s the lack of control over their sustenance.

If the Supreme Court is stomping on us from the top, another threat builds from beneath and that is the most powerful nation on earth turned even more misogynist. This will infect women’s rights in a number of ways, all painful. If the second President Bush holds onto his Senate majority and the U.S. Supreme Court turns Neanderthal, women will lose and lose and lose.

My editors ask me to write about the news, but I’m just as intrigued by the what “if” as by the what “is.”

If American women lose their right to abortion and indeed to birth control, they will turn to Canada for help, and we’ll have to build another underground railroad. When the U.S. puts pressure on us, will we let those women across the border? Provinces like Manitoba, with a so-called NDP government, have only recently agreed to pay for abortions in private clinics. It’s a fragile thing. The federal government is too mealy-mouthed to push the provinces on women’s health care rights or on the stupidity of cutting taxes when child poverty has not been eliminated in Canada, not by a long Smith & Wesson shot.

American women will be travelling to Winnipeg, to Windsor, to Vancouver for abortions.

If our government tries to bully them, how many Canadian women with a public voice are left to defend their rights? What if Bush punishes nations that allow abortions, like Canada? What if he retaliates against them? Who will speak for us? We will be in as parlous a position as U.S. draft dodgers fleeing an illegal war. I have seen the death threats being sent to those young men who have come to Canada for shelter. They are facing political persecution; they are refugees. Will we turn them down?

Are pregnant American women going to be medically examined before a quick visit to Canada? Will Canada object?

Now that’s pressure. Wait till the fever travels. Wait until Canadian women are coming to you for legal help. But no, how many citizens can afford legal fees as they are now set? When does your Pro Bono work become Pro Boring and Pro Not Bloody Worth the Trouble?

I see the Law Society as becoming a great force for change, because you see, women have largely been silenced. There is a gap, and someone must fill it. Speaking as someone who is in an often-reviled line of work, I think this is a great opportunity for the legal profession to star in the next big thing: Human rights.

Although I remember someone who, with her partners, set up a law firm focused on human rights. It was called Matrix. Her name was Cherie Blair. Things went rather downhill from there.

At a time when Canadian drugs are being slandered by Big American Pharma — You should hear them. Oh, the Canadians stomp generic drugs like grapes with their bare feet and whittle them into little tablets, store them in petri dishes I don’t doubt — I do think we’re going to have to start making morning-after pills and RU-486 widely available, put ’em in vending machines because we can’t go backwards in women’s rights and indeed scientific progress, which is what the Americans will be demanding.

Pressure from on high, pressure from beneath. And the old constant, profound pressure around our hearts (our love for our families), our lungs (can we live and provide those billable hours?), our wombs (why don’t you have children yet?), an internal pressure that hammers away at us.

What will we do, run off on rescue missions to Venezuela? Ukraine? Zimbabwe? Canada needs us so badly. How wonderful that the Canadian government has raised its contribution to the U.N. Population Fund. According to the fund, as reported by the Toronto Star, the money that the current President Bush withheld from it could have helped prevent six million unwanted pregnancies, 2.4 million abortions, 14,000 maternal deaths and 200,000 child deaths.

The daily lives of women elsewhere in the world are deteriorating catastrophically. I may partly care about this out of speculative selfishness. Is there any nation to which I could flee if George Bush’s Gilead (as described in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) began sneaking into Canada? Hatred of women leaks, and that is why humans fleeing oppression need you. Lawyers are needed, not just for help but to pressure Canada on their behalf.

Here’s why. I will tell you one story, from Greg Grandin’s recent book, The Last Colonial Massacre, on the Cold War as it was conducted in Latin America: On December 5, 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. Reagan thought Montt was a heck of a guy. He had great personal integrity and was real big on democracy, saying those human rights types were giving him a quote “bum rap” unquote. And then Reagan left town.

The next day, Montt’s soldiers went to a village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. The tiniest kids were smashed to bits, the pregnant women were pummeled, rather like that cystic fibrosis jacket I described, until they miscarried. Then they tossed the women in a well, burying them alive. The place was a mess, apparently. It was littered with placentas and umbilical cords.

This is why the new theories of alternate empires appeal to me, Niall Ferguson’s Colossus or the British diplomat Robert Cooper’s thoughts on the possible glories of the EU. Let’s not rely on the American one. Life is much better for women in Europe, although admittedly I am only relying on statistics, on personal stories, on rumour really. That is why French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac wants “Old Europe,” as Donny Rumsfeld so insultingly called it, to form an alternative to the U.S. or the Chinese empires. Europe is a good place for women and the backward nations, like Portugal, that voted a few years ago to ban abortion will have to toe the modern line set by the European Union.

I know you may be thinking that these faraway nations have little to say to you as modern Canadians. But I see a stricken South America, to me, encapsulated by Guatemala, and our obligations are clear.

Let us turn to violence against women and children in Canada. According to the most recent stats from the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, half of Canadian women have been sexually or physically assaulted at least once, over a quarter by a spouse. 98 per cent of sex offenders are men and 82 per cent of the survivors of these assaults are girls and women. We know that only 10 per cent of sexual assaults are reported to the police.

I can tell you that if I were raped, I would never tell the police. They’ll only make it worse. I don’t stand a chance in court, being a feminist who writes occasionally self-revelatory columns. I sometimes look at a crowd of women and wonder, how many of you here have been raped and never spoke of it? I am in awe of your courage. I don’t know how you survive day by day. But I shall never hear your stories.

In the Eighties, I was told by my erstwhile boss that I wouldn’t be put on permanent staff unless I slept with him. I got up and left the building, never to return. I was very young, but even then, I knew that a woman who complains does not stand a chance. It wasn’t worth the effort or the further degradation.

I’m relying on people like you, in the legal profession, to help women who think the way I do.

I want to take note of a particular statistic: Worldwide, as many as one in four women are physically or sexually abused while pregnant. In Canada, 21 per cent of women abused by a partner were attacked during pregnancy. I cannot see that we approach the American fact: The number one cause of death among pregnant American women is murder. But a woman is never more vulnerable than when she’s pregnant.

I know that men and women in the legal profession are highly aware of the special pressures on women at that time. I salute the Law Society for having an Equity Initiatives Department.

I don’t wish to be rude, but I know the legal profession is not always held in high esteem, partly because of that dreadful phrase, “billable hours.” Your efforts to achieve equity within the profession are wonderful; I urge you to expand them. Your profession can only be seen in a sunnier light and you will all win then.

I will not despair on this day that we ask ourselves to “remember and take action on violence against women.” And that is because, as the Canadian Research Institute points out, violence is not biological in men. If it were, all men would be violent and they are not. I would not like men, and I like them tremendously. I would not love men, and I do.

Violent men were unwanted children. Marc Lépine was beaten by his father until blood spouted from his nose and ears. Studies of serial killers reveal tales of torture by parents, almost all fathers, that reveal an inventiveness regarding cruelty that rivals Quentin Tarantino’s.

The way to prevent violence is to care for our most disadvantaged children so that they are not undernourished, beaten, isolated at school and left to quietly turn to hate the only people they see as weaker: girls and later, women.

You may not approve of my repeating this but I don’t care. Dr. Henry Morgentaler was right to say that if the Canadian crime rate has gone down, it was because more women, thanks to him, had safe abortions. Don’t call that eugenics; call that putting the love of children ahead of everything.

“Every child a wanted child” is the phrase that will save us from further generations of violence. Those guns are registered, but they haven’t vanished. Hardly.

After I wrote a column in Saturday’s The Globe and Mail about today’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, a former deputy minister of welfare from another province emailed me. He told me a story of how he was called before Cabinet and told to tighten up on welfare because he was, quote, making it too easy for women to leave home, unquote.

Here is what he wrote to me yesterday.

“My reply was to the effect that I was surprised at the charge, saying: ‘I have to reject the accusation, because it is not possible to make it easy for women to leave home; in fact, the only way to get them to leave home is to make it impossible for them to stay. You can demean them, and shame them, and embarrass them, and still they won’t leave. When that doesn’t work, you can try beating and abusing them, but still they won’t leave. Then you start abusing their children, and that’s when they leave. We are not making it easy for women to leave home, for it is never easy — but we are making it possible, and I’ll make no apologies for that.’

“And then I added this: ‘The men who come to you to complain about us helping their wives to leave home have not told you the full story; they’re getting to you ahead of the story, because every one of them has beaten his wife. Otherwise, the wives would not have left.’

“I couldn’t resist adding at one point that ‘perhaps the only reason many of us here have wives to go home to this evening is that it very hard for them to leave.’ No one smiled, except me.”

End of story.

What this fine man’s recitation makes clear is that women need money to leave and it is often a group of male politicians who will decide whether they will get it. Women need money to protect their abused children. Decades later, we will all pay the price for those children having been beaten.

That’s why women must have fair treatment in the workplace, which is what the Law Society must fight for. And I’d like to see more fearless women lawyers, members of your society, running for election. The decline in the number of women MPs is hurting this country badly.

We may never again see 14 women murdered en masse. Or maybe we will. In 1998, 67 women were murdered by spouses or ex-spouses, boyfriends or ex-boyfriends. They died one at a time. Many of them predicted their own deaths. They died alone.

I will close by reminding you, once again, that you have done an extraordinary thing today. The federal and provincial governments who are scarcely marking this anniversary are essentially ignoring the chain of deaths that took place on December 6, 1989. They show their contempt for Canadian citizens, voters, young women and even for parents, because nothing is stronger than the love of your average parent for your average kid.

My stepdaughters hate it when I get maudlin but I’m always reminding them of my standing offer: You can have whichever of my organs that comes in twos, you know, kidneys and lungs. And you can have a chunk of my liver, which apparently grows back, or is that a myth. No pressure, kids. Just saying, I’m here should you need me.

Think of your own children. Think of sending them off to university, without you there to be their bodyguard. They’ll be fine. But there are reasons for our fears. I ask you to fight ever more fiercely for fairness for women in the workplace and to guard our gun control laws, which are under attack to this day, to this moment. They are precious, like our daughters.

In conclusion, I want to thank the team of people at the Law Society’s small but devoted Equity Initiatives Department, particularly Equity Advisor Josée Bouchard and Community & Policy Advisor Rudy Ticzon.

You do invaluable work and you create esteem for the legal profession in Ontario.

I congratulate you. And I thank you so much for listening to me today.