Humber Polytechnic’s North Campus staff and students were welcomed back to their first day on campus with the threat of a potential gun attack and lockdown at its Carrier Drive building.
The Sept. 2 incident turned out to be a false alarm.
Toronto Police responded to the threat, as the college implemented its attacker protocol to alert staff and students due to a threat at Humber’s Education and Training Solutions facility at 30 Carrier Dr.
Humber Polytechnic’s director of public safety and emergency management, Rob Kilfoyle, who has spent 13 years protecting Humber faculty and students, said the threat was limited to the building.
"What happened is someone issued a threat in writing to a partner agency, who then contacted us by phone to say, 'Hey, someone has made this threat.' And, you know, without a lot of information, they had suggested [to] send the police. And, you know, because there's going to be a shooting," he said.
“In the absence of confirmation or any information, we decided to put the school into the active attacker protocol. The threat was specific to 30 Carrier Dr.,” Kilfoyle said.
Kilfoyle said emergency alerts are distributed equally between Carrier and Humber College Boulevard because of a connected media infrastructure.
“We don't have the ability to just say only activate the messages over at 30 Carrier or only do them on the North campus,” Kilfoyle said. “It's all or nothing. Because in a real emergency, you want everybody to have the information and know what to do.”
Many students, educators, and staff on campus were informed by Humber’s Guardian app alert that said the incident was at the North campus.
Krysti Jaglal, a media communications student at the University of Guelph-Humber, was working at the Spirituality and Wellness Centre (SWC) when she heard the announcement about the active attacker alert.
“I was really nervous because I hadn't been in the Spirituality Centre before when an active attacker alert had happened,” she said. “One of my co-workers was there, and she was able to walk me through the steps of what we do if the attacker comes to our campus, and we have to close things up. It was definitely a nerve-wracking experience, especially for the first day.
“In the moment, we just tried to stay as calm as possible, and kind of keep running business as usual,” Jaglal said.
She said they stayed in the centre and waited a few extra minutes after hearing the updates until they knew everything had calmed down.
Since such alerts don’t happen often, it left some students and faculty members confused regarding what to do and how to react to the situation.
“We always take the priority of safety and our students first. And sometimes it doesn't always go as smoothly as possible. But at the end of the day, the systems worked,” Kilfoyle said.
“Would I do it again? I don't know. To be honest, it's one of those things where you think it makes sense in the moment,” he said. “But, as I hear now, people were confused and they don't know what it means,”
Milos Vasic, president of the Humber faculty union and a professor in Liberal Studies at Humber, said he was at North campus when the alert happened.
“I ran out into the hallways and at that point, all of the screens and monitors around the campus were saying that there was some sort of active attacker alert at Carrier,” he said.
Vasic said people were intrigued by what they were seeing on the monitors around school, where reactions ranged from people not caring to others almost panicking.
“We people, collectively, we kind of go to those extremes,” he said.
Vasic said he was concerned that Carrier is a very open space with visible classrooms containing glass walls.
“So if there is an active attacker, there's not necessarily a lot of places to hide. So that was the fear that was running through my head,” he said.
It was Vasic’s first time in an active attacker alert, as fire drills occur more often, and he said it was interesting to see how it played out.
“Collectively, we don't really have a lot of history with these sorts of drills. And now we're starting to do them, and things are getting better in the sense that we're learning what can go wrong in these drills,” he said.
“We're kind of stuck with less-than-ideal scenarios to learn what to do. And that's not really a dig at the administration or anything like that, it's just the reality of it,” Vasic said.
Kilfoyle said there will be different training methods in the future, and that they are working to improve the instructions with online training with the York Regional Police. However, the strike by full-time support staff has postponed the planned Sept. 23 drill.
“Are there things we do differently next time? Probably. But, you know, we always try to live and learn from those incidents,” he said.
Selena Ferreira, Ignite’s Student Advocate for Humber, who's also in her fourth year of the Criminal Justice and Social Science program at Lakeshore, said that students shouldn’t be concerned about the event as it isn’t a common occurrence, but it is important to stay informed to have the information readily available and not worry about it daily.
“Ignite, we prioritize the safety and well-being of students always. We want to make sure that everybody who is on campus, whether you're at North, Lakeshore, IGS, even if you're remote, you're staying safe,” Ferreira said. “It's really important that Humber students are aware of the procedure and the protocols in an emergency situation and what to do during that time.”
