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It has been 27 years since the Polytechnique massacre, but for Heidi Rathjen and other gun control activists, time appears to be moving backward.

Rathjen was holed up in a classroom on Dec. 6, 1989, when Marc Lépine went on a shooting rampage through École Polytechnique, killing 14 women at the engineering school. She has since become an activist for tougher laws on gun ownership.

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Speaking to the Montreal Gazette on Monday – the day the university handed out its Order of the White Rose scholarship – Rathjen said despite her efforts and those of the families of the victims, gun laws in this country are actually more lax than they were before the shooting.

“In many respects, the law today is weaker than it was in 1989; in fact, it’s weaker than it was in 1978, and it’s weaker in some respects than (gun control laws) in the United States,” said Rathjen, who said gun-law advocates have been disappointed in recent years since the rollback of the long-gun registry by the Conservative government in 2012. That registry was set up in 1995 in response to lobbying efforts spearheaded by the families of the victims of the massacre.

Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said in September his government is in the process of drafting new legislation on gun control, but Rathjen said the government needs to act with urgency to honour its election pledge to enact stricter gun control laws.