‘Beyond stunned’: Ecole Polytechnique shootings 30 years later
As remembered by a University of Saskatchewan grad
REGINA – Karen Nielsen was horrified as she watched news footage of paramedics wheeling shooting victims on stretchers out of Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal after she returned home from work 30 years ago.
She was “beyond stunned,” she recalls.
Nielsen, a news junkie, had started working in the engineering industry after earning her engineering degree from the University of Saskatchewan earlier in the year. On the evening of Dec. 6, 1989, events were still unfolding on television.
A man had walked into engineering classrooms at Ecole Polytechnique, separated the men from the women and opened fire on the women. He yelled out during the attack that he was antifeminist.
Fourteen women died in what is still the largest mass shooting in Canadian history. Twelve of them were engineering students.
When Nielsen saw the face of a young woman she recognized from a student engineering conference she had attended that spring in Halifax, she felt sick. The woman was part of a contingent of Ecole Polytechnique
engineering students and was talking to a reporter. She appeared to have been in one of the classrooms at the time of the shooting, but wasn’t wounded.
“In 1989, it’s not like we had huge networks of women that we all phoned each other and (said), ‘My god, did you see the news?’ We didn’t. We just were not that organized, and were so few and far between,” she said.
At work the next day, a supervisor mechanically read from a piece of paper, telling employees he was checking in to see if workers were okay based on the events of the day before in Montreal. Nielsen was sure someone from human resources had helped him prepare. Not wanting to raise red flags, she worked through her feelings on her own.
These days, there’s more discussion, more people reaching out to others in personal networks, and more resources for support than existed in 1989, she said.
Nielsen, raised in Turtleford, Sask., rose up the ranks to positions of leadership as an engineer in the oil and gas sector, and is now chief development officer at Seven Generations Energy based in Calgary.
The Engineering Deans Canada, comprised of deans of engineering schools around the country, wanted to recognize the 30th anniversary. University of Saskatchewan College of Engineering Dean Suzanne Kresta suggested they capture the stories of 30 female engineers who graduated shortly after the massacre.
The 30 stories, including Nielsen’s, are part of the 30 Years Later online project at 30yearslater.ca.
Kresta said the deans wanted to move forward and celebrate the achievements that followed and highlight that engineering is a “great place” for women.
“I think it’s important to break up the stereotype and the messages that sometimes get confusing for people that are not in the profession, because it is a great place for women. It’s a very welcoming place for women. So, it’s always very frustrating for us that are inside the profession to have those messages mixed up when it comes to this event,” she said.
Kresta said she was struck by the variety of careers and achievements captured by the project. They demonstrate the message delivered to high school students that they can be anything as an engineer, she said.
Kresta was in graduate school when the Montreal Massacre happened. She remembers getting to her office and a colleague asking if she had heard the news. She hadn’t. Her distraught colleague said, “It’s impossible, they’ve been shot, they’ve been shot,” she recalls.
“It was that singular moment that everybody has when something terrible happens.”
The day has multiple meanings for her. She defended her PhD thesis two years later, on Dec. 6. While Kresta says she isn’t one to dwell on the negative, the day always reminds her of how much has changed since then.
She graduated from the University of New Brunswick in the 1980s and earned her PhD at McMaster University in 1992.
“In hindsight, I think that those of us who were pioneers, who were the firsts, the hardest part was the isolation. When I was graduating, I did not know a single female engineer over the age of 30, and the guys said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I said, ‘Maybe we all evaporate at 30, I don’t know. We don’t exist.’ ”
Being able to see yourself in powerful role models is important for everyone, she said.
This week, the engineering college at U of S is celebrating its doubling of female faculty members from six of 85 in 2017 to 14 of 91 now. When she started working in the industry, three per cent of academics were female. The technology and social changes since then have been profound, she said.