Chris McDowell will always remember what she heard more than a decade ago at a talk by Suzanne Laplante Edward.
The speech, here in Vancouver, was a tribute to the Quebec resident's daughter, Anne-Marie, and 13 other women who were shot dead by Marc Lepine at the École Polytechnique in Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989.
"She had a slide show with 14 pictures of the women and she talked about their lives," recalled Ms. McDowell, a media worker at Douglas College in New Westminster. "At the time, the media wasn't talking about them, only about the murderer."
Ms. McDowell, now 50, went on to help found the permanent memorial to murdered women at Thornton Park in East Vancouver in 1997.
And today, on the 16th anniversary of the Montreal massacre, she is helping to launch a website that takes the remembrance of murdered and missing women into cyberspace.
The idea behind the Global Women's Memorial is to give people the opportunity to learn about slain women, linking permanent monuments and events across Canada and around the world that honour their memories.
"I felt very influenced by what Suzanne did," Ms. McDowell said.
So, Ms. McDowell began travelling around the country, visiting the memorials to the 14 women killed in Montreal.
"I thought: There ought to be a place where other people could see them," she said. And with that, the idea for the website, , was born.
The first main project of the site, set to launch today, will be a videotaped "speak-out" by 19 people affected by murders of women across Canada.
Ms. McDowell hopes to make the project international soon. And she is hoping to raise another $350,000 to keep the web project going.
"There are beautiful projects that remember women -- music projects, plaques, even just flowers being laid down because women are being murdered. People want to know these ideas, and this website is how we can make them visible," she said.
Cari Green, an award-winning filmmaker of documentaries such as Scared Sacred and The Corporation, co-produced the website.
"It will include women and men on the front lines, who work with women who have suffered violence," she said. "What you will see is the initial website, with the final website being in place next year."
The National Film Board provided $40,000 in startup funding for the website.
"We had been pitched a lot of projects to do with the upcoming Pickton murder trial," said the NFB's Rina Fraticelli, referring to the trial of Robert Pickton, the former Port Coquitlam pig farmer charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of 27 women.
"We were uneasy that many just recreated the horror and powerlessness. Chris's project really captured the extent and pervasiveness of violence against women without drowning in it."
In 2004 in Canada, 198 women were murdered, according to Statistics Canada.
What is unique about the web project, Ms. Fraticelli said, is Ms. McDowell's plan to provide an on-line template for people who want to set up their own web pages to remember slain women.
"It creates a grassroots forum that reveals the extent of violence against women and the community response to it," she said.