At a ceremony at the Toronto Stock Exchange’s Stock Market Place this morning, Barb Stymiest, CEO of the TSX Group, remembered the 24 Canadians who died in the attacks of 9/11.

“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,” said Stymiest.

Symiest said that worldwide remembrance ceremonies are a way of “declaring our fellowship with every other”. And that the attacks, “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,” she concluded.

Following Stymiest’s remarks, Eric Tripp, the vice chair of BMO Nesbitt Burns, read the names of the 24 Canadians who died a year ago today.