‘You become a bearer of hope’
Manitoba student awarded Order of the White Rose
Nathalie Provost was shot four times on Dec. 6, 1989, and miraculously survived.
Now 28 years later and back at Polytechnique Montréal to present the Order of the White Rose — a scholarship dedicated to the 14 women who died in the massacre — Provost said this time of the year is especially emotional for her.
“In 1989, for me, for my classmates, everything was possible,” Provost told a gathered crowd on Friday. “We didn’t imagine that these doors could be shut, but that’s what Marc Lépine did. He slammed the door in front of us. My classmates will never enter the country of their dreams. No diplomas; no career; no professional achievements; no great love story; no children; no flourishing talents.”
Provost, who is called the Godmother of the White Rose, said it gives her great joy to meet the recipient of the scholarship — a $30,000 prize given to a woman studying in a Master’s or PhD of engineering in Canada.
This year’s prize was presented to Ella Thomson, an electrical engineering graduate of the University of Manitoba. Thomson is a researcher in the field of biomedical engineering, and will start a PhD at Stanford University in California.
“Today, as you become a bearer of hope,” Provost said to Thomson at the ceremony, “you symbolize for me the best of what my classmates could have become.”
Speaking to reporters after the ceremony, Thomson said she was honoured, and though she was born years after the massacre, she said it still has much meaning for her. In fact, Thomson organized a ceremony to commemorate the victims at the University of Manitoba last year. “Even though the massacre was in Quebec, I think the engineering community across Canada and in the world has struggled in the past being inclusive for women in the field, so for me it’s important to hold a memorial anywhere in Canada to recognize both the horrors of the past and how far we’ve come,” she said.
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante presented the award to Thomson and said the Polytechnique massacre had a profound impact on her and her choice of career. “I was 15, and like many other young women at that age, I was asking questions about my future,” she said. “It was at that moment that I became conscious of the importance for women to assume their choices and not to be content to follow trails that had already been blazed. From that moment on, I understood that nothing could stop me, and that nothing was out of my reach.”