Liberal Leader Mark Carney named the wrong university as the site of the 1989 Montreal massacre on Tuesday — and flubbed the last name of the survivor who is running with his party.
At a campaign stop in Musquodoboit Harbour in the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova, Carney made a nod to Liberal candidate Nathalie Provost but made two critical mistakes in the process.
“You want les défenseurs de la justice sociale, like Nathalie Pronovost à Montréal,” Carney said, calling Provost a defender of social justice.
He then repeated Provost’s name, making the same mistake and adding another.
“Nathalie Pronovost, who out of the tragedy of the shootings at Concordia, became a social justice activist and she’s put her hand up and she’s running for us.”
The shooting happened at Polytechnique, the engineering school at the Université de Montréal.
Carney said he apologized in a call to Provost soon after, but Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet was quick to seize on the blunders, the day after Carney had made another Quebec-related gaffe in turning down an invitation to TVA’s Face-à-Face debate.
“Ms. Provost will run her campaign, but she should inform her leader of who she is, what she did and what happened because it is one of the saddest, most dramatic wounds in the history of Quebec and I think Mr. Carney should know that,” Blanchet said.
He also posted about the incident on X, saying the Bloc had supported Provost’s years of efforts to get the Liberals to change gun laws.
Provost is the Liberal candidate for a suburban riding outside of Montreal, Châteauguay-Les Jardins-de-Napierville. Her candidacy was leaked to French-language media last week, days before Carney asked for an election.
She is well known in Quebec and across the country for her years of lobbying for stronger gun control, alongside fellow massacre survivor Heidi Rathjen.
The two survivors were honoured on Parliament Hill in February 2024 for their group PolySeSouvient’s work.
During a campaign stop in Halifax on Tuesday Day 3 of the election campaign, Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney made a nod to his party’s candidate Nathalie Provost, who survived the Polytechnique shooting, but he got the name of the school wrong by saying Concordia — and also flubbed Provost’s last name.
Provost was shot four times at Polytechnique when she was 23. She even spoke up to the gunman before he shot all nine women in Provost’s classroom. The gunman killed 14 people as well as himself and injured another 15. He said he wanted to fight feminism.
Name mistake was a ‘typo’: Provost
In an interview in French with CBC News Tuesday afternoon, Provost said she herself struggles with people’s names.
“For someone to butcher my name by adding two letters does not offend me because it’s something I could have done,” she said. “It’s just a typo.”
The mistake he won’t make twice, though, Provost said, is getting the place where the worst mass killing of women in Canadian history happened wrong.
Provost said she believes Carney was abroad at the time of the massacre, but that she also believes he was affected by it, just like every other Canadian.
“He got the essence of who I am,” in his remarks, Provost said. “I am a woman committed to gun control because I was the victim of a shooting. All that is true.”
Provost noted she was the one who reached out to the Liberal Party in the first place.
