In all, more than 3,000 souls perished last September 11th, on a morning that began very like this one but ended in incomprehensible horror.
Most of those who died that day worked in our industry, the financial industry.
They died, indeed, because they worked in our industry.
The two towers of the World Trade Center were the very symbols of global financial markets.
And so they became the targets of terror.
And the terrorists succeeded. They brought down the towers. They destroyed the symbols they loathed.
And many, many of our friends, our colleagues, our compatriots died.
Some 24 Canadians were among the dead.
It is fitting and proper that we should remember them in this place.
This place, the Toronto Stock Exchange's Stock Market Place, is our Canadian symbol of our connection to global financial markets and to the two towers that fell.
For that connection, we, too, drank of the bitter cup of fanaticism.
And nearly every other country on the planet shared in it.
It is also fitting and proper, therefore, that other countries, each in its own way - in Paris and Amsterdam, in London and Frankfurt, in Tokyo and Milan - should honour their murdered compatriots.
In so doing, all of us, each in our own way, are declaring our fellowship with every other.
We are all declaring fellowship, especially, with the country whose list of victims is the longest of all, the people of the United States.
And so the terrorists succeeded in bringing down the symbols.
They succeeded in reducing the symbols of a global industry to a pile of twisted metal and concrete and ashes.
But they did not win.
Rather what they created was a powerful impulse to forge from the ruins they had created an even more powerful symbol.
It is a symbol built - not on great towers scraping the sky - but on the shared experience of people.
That is the importance of what is going on here today around the world and throughout our industry.
We are joined today in sharing a bitter memory, in sharing the grief felt most acutely by Americans but by people in every country, in remembering the victims of terror.
But we are together, too, in our determination to preserve, sustain and rebuild what terror tried to take away.
And that shared determination is not something terror can destroy, like another tower. It is something terror can only strengthen.
Let me call now on Eric Tripp, the vice chair of BMO Nesbitt Burns, who will read the names of the 24 Canadians who died a year ago today.
Eric…
