Time to put the brakes on monument

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism is well on its way to becoming the most controversial public monument in the capital.

When major architecture and planning institutions are railing against the proposal, when most local MPs and the mayor of the city are willing to publicly denounce the project, when even the Supreme Court’s chief justice feels it necessary to express her concern over proposed designs, then you know there’s a problem.

Here’s what’s not a problem: the concept that there should be some sort of memorial to the 100 million who perished under Communist regimes. It’s natural — and justified — that survivors or family members of those victimized and enslaved under undemocratic rule would want a memorial to mark that suffering, to honour those who were felled by tyrannical regimes. That’s the point of monuments: to remember.

“Victims of Communism” is, however, a slightly vague phrase, in that it doesn’t conjure up one specific event. That imprecise definition has made it easier to hurl insults at the monument. Let’s be frank: If it was the plan for the National Holocaust Monument that was causing us such distress instead of the one honouring the victims of Communism, we’d be having a much harder time lobbing criticism at the project. Who wants to sound even remotely as if they’re against a Holocaust memorial?

The thing is, though, that the majority of people who oppose the Memorial to the Victims of Communism don’t necessarily oppose the idea of a memorial per se.

But they are, in growing numbers, against its scope, design and, in particular, location near the Supreme Court of Canada — a piece of federal land that has been set aside for decades in long-term plans for federal court building.

As the Citizen’s Don Butler explains in his exhaustive and excellent piece on how the memorial ended up at its current proposed location, Minister Jason Kenney has championed this project for years. There’s nothing specifically wrong with that — and it shouldn’t be a surprise, given how the Conservatives see themselves as a “monument government” — but there are a number of troubling elements about this memorial’s journey (including the Conservative government’s increasing funding of the project).

In 2010, both the Tribute of Liberty — the group behind the monument — and Kenney were waxing poetic about a site in the Gardens of Provinces site set aside by the National Capital Commission for the memorial. Three years later, the minister for public works asked (or ordered, as the case may be) that the NCC approve a land-use change request to allow the memorial to be built near the Supreme Court. What happened? If, as government officials have told the Citizen, the memorial was moved from the Garden of the Provinces because the Victims of Communism wanted a more prominent location, then that’s a problem. And if the monument was moved, as some have suggested, because the prime minister thought the memorial needed a more prominent location, that’s a problem, too.

The way we plan the Parliament Hill district shouldn’t be changed at the insistence of a lobbying group, no matter how valid its aim, nor by the whim of a sitting government. This monument will put an end to long-term plans to build a judicial triad of the Supreme Court, the Justice Building and a future federal court building.

Suddenly, that federal court is out of the plans, with no public consultation and little apparent thought to what the proposed memorial would mean for Parliament Hill district. This monument is massive and sombre. Is it appropriate for the district? (Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin cautioned against the potential “bleakness and brutalism” of the proposed designs.)

The current Conservative government may have no plans to build a new federal court, but a future government might decide to move ahead with the project. Why should this government block those ambitions?

And if the government of the day truly believes no one will ever build a federal court, that we need a new long-term vision for our judicial district, then it must launch a proper process involving the public about how that land should be used.

It would be a mistake to build the Memorial to the Victims of Communism as conceived, in the spot where it’s been announced. With vocal criticism mounting by the day, the memorial will be resented by too many citizens. And that’s definitely not the point of a monument.