I don't teach much, but in December 1989 I was teaching a history class at the University of Toronto. At 9 in the morning of December 7, 1989, I was to give the class its term-end exam.
I could not help saying something about how grim and creepy it felt, to come into a classroom to give an exam, after what we had all heard on the news the night before, about some damn guy who came into an examination at the Engineeering School at the Universite de Montreal and started shooting the women.
It was the visceral, barely-spoken growl of agreement that came back to me from the students, a sort of low moan expressing strongly-shared feeling, that really brought home to me what impact this awful news was having, was going to have. We had a minute of silence. Then I handed out the exam.
Montreal massacre, school of engineering, he selected just the women -- those are all keywords in the memory banks of a lot of Canadians now, particularly women and women students, but not them only. In the Toronto subway on December 6, there were young people offering white ribbons. It's part of Canadian history now, one of those events that has made the transition from event to cultural marker.
