Nearly 50 years ago, Anne McGrath was a 17-year-old student at St. Pius X High School in Ottawa when a fellow student entered a classroom with a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire.
Today, McGrath is a longtime political strategist and deputy chief of staff to former Alberta premier Rachel Notley, as well as a former national director of the NDP.
But this week, as Tumbler Ridge mourns its own mass shooting, she says she has felt like that teenager again.
“Whenever there is something like this that happens, and it happens all too often now, actually, it brings up a lot of memories that are hard to deal with,” she said in an interview Sunday with Global News. “So it’s definitely been a rough week.”
She was in the classroom next door when the shooting unfolded. At 17, she didn’t understand what was happening.
“I thought maybe a war had broken out,” she said. “I had no idea if there was one shooter or several or if people were shooting from the outside.”
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McGrath described the 1975 shooting as one of the first of its kind in Canada. She said a classmate had raped and killed another former classmate earlier that day before riding to the school, kicking open the classroom door and opening fire. The spree ended when he turned the gun on himself.
Students returned to school the very next day.
“When it happened to us … we went back to school the next day,” McGrath said. “The messages were to kind of move on, to put it behind you, to not dwell on it.”
There was no lockdown protocol, no widespread trauma response and no immediate counselling support, she said. Students were expected to carry on, even as they were severely traumatized. One injured student later died in hospital weeks after the shooting.
Watching what is happening now in Tumbler Ridge – counsellors brought into schools, the building temporarily closed, public officials acknowledging trauma – McGrath says the contrast is striking.
“When I look at what happens now, I look at Tumbler Ridge … I see counsellors being brought in, I see the community,” she said. “It’s just completely different … than it was back 50 years ago.”
Still, she says, the long-term impact of surviving a shooting does not disappear.
“It comes up in waves when something like this happens, for sure.”
McGrath was also present during the 2014 Parliament Hill shooting and says people who experience violence often carry lasting reactions.
“You do have this experience … where you have a kind of a reaction to things like a car backfiring or a door being slammed,” she said. “I either overreact … or I completely don’t react.”
McGrath says the focus now should be on giving students space to grieve.
“I think the main thing is to take the time … to process it and to be compassionate with yourself and the people around you,” she said.
“There will be some students who want to talk about it all the time. There will be others who only want to talk to certain people. There will be others who won’t want to talk about it at all. You have to be generous … with yourself and with the people around you.”
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