Remembering Amber Czech: End Violence Against Women in Trades
Amber Czech: A Year Later, We Are Still Saying Her Name
November 11, 2026 | Gender Equality Coalition of Ontario
A year ago, a 20-year-old welder named Amber Czech went to work and never came home.
She was murdered on her jobsite by a male coworker.
Today, I think first of Amber's family. Of the empty space at their table, the birthdays and milestones she will never celebrate, and the future that was stolen from her. While the rest of us speak about change, they are living with a loss that no words, no memorial, and no amount of advocacy can ever repair.
And I think about the women in the trades.
Because for some of us, Amber's death touched something deep. Something we don't always talk about, but something we recognize.
We know that feeling.
We know the difference between a male coworker who doesn't think we can do the job and one who seems to hate that we are there at all.
Not because we can't weld. Not because we can't turn a wrench, operate equipment, or put in a hard day's work.
But because we are women.
Because we have entered a world some still believe belongs to them, and our very presence challenges that belief.
We know the look. The comments. The hostility that feels different from ordinary workplace conflict. That feeling in your gut that tells you this isn't about your work anymore. It's about you.
And so often, we push through it. We tell ourselves to ignore it, to toughen up, to prove ourselves one more time. Because that is what women in the trades have been taught to do.
When Amber was murdered, I felt grief, anger, and something else I still struggle to explain.
I have spent years encouraging women and girls to enter the skilled trades. I believe in that work. I believe in the opportunities, the careers, the independence, and the pride that comes from building something with your own hands.
But how do we keep telling young women to be brave enough to enter these workplaces when we have not been brave enough to change what happens inside them?
That is the contradiction we can no longer ignore.
We cannot celebrate recruiting women into the trades while accepting workplace cultures that make them feel unwelcome, isolated, intimidated, or unsafe.
And we cannot keep asking women to be resilient enough to survive environments that should never have been allowed to exist in the first place.
I think about all the things that get dismissed on worksites. The comments nobody challenges. The behaviour everyone has learned to work around. The woman who says something feels wrong and is told she's overreacting. The coworker whose hostility is excused because that's just the way he is.
And I think about how often we haven't even given women the words to explain what they are experiencing.
How do you report a look? How do you explain that someone's hatred feels different from someone simply not liking you? How do you tell a supervisor that nothing specific has happened today, but something about the way a coworker treats you makes you feel unsafe?
Too often, we expect women to produce evidence of harm before we are willing to take their concerns seriously.
We have to get better at recognizing what happens before the harm.
I cannot say what every person around Amber knew or what could have prevented her murder. But I believe that someone noticed something. Whether there were uncomfortable moments, comments, behaviours, or that same uneasy feeling so many women recognize.
I believe we need to take those feelings seriously, not because every uncomfortable interaction will lead to violence, but because we have spent far too long teaching people to ignore hostility until it becomes impossible to ignore.
We need to give people the language to identify it, the confidence to speak about it, and the tools to respond.
And we have to stop treating it as simply part of the job.
A year ago, I promised I would keep saying Amber's name. And I have.
But saying her name cannot be where our responsibility ends.
Amber's death is part the reason we are taking a different approach. To reshapes our women-in-trades work.
Changing Worksites, Not Women.
Those four words are more than the name of an initiative. They are a challenge to an industry that has spent decades asking women to adapt to worksite that were never designed to welcome them. And simply hope to survive.
Through this work, we want to address what has been allowed to go unnamed and unchallenged for far too long.
We want to help people recognize the difference between ordinary workplace disagreements and behaviour rooted in sexism, resentment, intimidation, or hatred. To understand how exclusion becomes normalized, how silence protects harmful behaviour, and why waiting for something serious to happen is not a safety strategy.
We want women to have the words to describe what they are experiencing. We want coworkers to recognize when something is wrong and understand their responsibility to act. And we want employers and unions to know what meaningful intervention looks like, rather than waiting until someone has been harmed.
Not another promise that things will get better. Something people can actually use to make them better.
Because safety is not just about whether someone has the right protective equipment or knows how to operate a machine.
It is also about whether they can come to work without fear.
Whether someone listens when they say something doesn't feel right, even when they struggle to explain why.
Whether the people around them are willing to speak up.
And whether the systems meant to protect them actually do.
We owe women more than an invitation into the trades.
We owe them the opportunity to build careers, earn a good living, take pride in their work, and experience what so many tradespeople know and love: dirty hands, clean money, and the pride of a hard day's work.
We owe them the chance to grow old in their trades, mentor the next generation, and come home safe.
I wish Amber had been given that future.
I wish her family were celebrating the woman she was becoming instead of marking the anniversary of her death.
And I wish we didn't need another memorial to remind us how much work remains.
A year later, I am still angry. I am still grieving. But I am also more determined than ever that our work must mean something.
I don't want Amber remembered only for the violence that ended her life. She was a young woman, a welder, someone who had every right to be there and every right to a future.
Her life mattered before her death became a call for change.
Amber Czech.
We said her name a year ago.
We are saying it today.
And we will keep saying it, not simply to remember what happened to her, but to remind ourselves of what we have a responsibility to change.
We will keep inviting women into the trades. But we will no longer accept that women must change themselves to survive them.
Changing Worksites, Not Women.
In memory of Amber Czech, November 11, 2025.
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