IN POLITICS FROM START
“It was the minister’s decision,” he said. “We were shown different options but we are a committee and the committee’s made up of multiple thoughts and ideas.”
All these machinations were happening out of public view, more than a year before any announcement that the victims of communism memorial had been allotted the Supreme Court site. Even the NCC appears to have been kept in the dark. According to a November 2013 staff report, it learned of the site change when Public Works sent the NCC a letter on March 4, 2013 requesting a land use change to allow a commemorative monument on the Judicial Precinct site.
In an email last August, a spokesman for Canadian Heritage said the Supreme Court site was selected for the victims of communism memorial “due to its close proximity and thematic links to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Peace Tower, Parliament Hill and Library and Archives Canada.”
For decades, the site had been reserved for a new justice building to complete a “judicial triad” centred on the Supreme Court, mirroring the parliamentary triad of the Centre, East and West blocks. A commemoration there had never been contemplated; the site wasn’t even on the NCC’s lengthy inventory of possible sites for future monuments and memorials.
By all accounts, the NCC was unhappy about the land-use change, but had little choice but to agree. While the National Capital Act says the NCC must approve changes to the use of public lands and new “buildings or other work” erected on them, it also says the federal cabinet can give approval if the NCC balks. Faced with that, the NCC’s directors meekly signed off on the memorial’s new site in September 2013.
The public first became aware of the memorial’s new site in August 2013, when Kenney and Chris Alexander, the minister of citizenship and immigration, announced $1.5 million in funding at the Supreme Court site.
With the cost of the memorial rising steadily and Tribute to Liberty still struggling to raise money, that was quietly doubled to $3 million last year.
The federal government launched a two-phase design competition for the new memorial last March. In August, designs by six qualified proponents were reviewed by a seven-member “jury of experts” that included Ludwik Klimkowski, an Ottawa financial advisor who took over as chair of Tribute to Liberty in October 2012, and prominent conservative commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, whose sister, Senator Linda Frum, is a major donor to the memorial project.
The Citizen asked Canadian Heritage, which assumed responsibility for commemorations from the NCC in 2013, why Frum was chosen for the jury.
It wasn’t until the government announced the winning design in December that people really started to pay attention.
In an email, the department said his “wide experience and reputation” made him an appropriate choice.
Contacted by the Citizen, Frum said he couldn’t recall ever being given a reason for being invited onto any of the juries or prize committees on which he’s served. “One is simply asked, and then answers yes or no,” he said in an email. “I’ve written often on communism and its remembrance, and I suppose it was these writings that prompted the invitation.”
The government apparently departed from the practice of allowing bureaucrats at Canadian Heritage to make jury selections. According to Canadian Heritage spokeswoman Catherine Gagnaire, the department prepared a list of potential jury members and presented it Heritage Minister Shelly Glover, who made the final selections.
Despite periodic news stories in the Citizen and other media, the memorial project was largely off the public’s radar until Barry Padolsky spoke up. Padolsky, who has run an architectural, urban design and heritage consulting practice in Ottawa since 1969, was mightily troubled by the government’s decision to toss out decades of planning and end any possibility of completing the long-intended judicial triad.
Padolsky’s open letter to Harper last September imploring the prime minister to rethink the memorial’s location attracted media coverage, but it wasn’t until the government announced the winning design in December that people really started to pay attention.
Prominent Toronto architect Shirley Blumberg had a lot to do with that. A member of the selection jury who was not impressed by the winning design from Toronto’s ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture, Blumberg went public with her concerns about the chosen site in an interview with the Citizen soon after the announcement of the winning design.
More recently, Blumberg has focused on what she called the lack of transparency in the selection of the site. “There was no public consultation about giving this site to the monument,” she says. “I think that’s the most egregious part of this whole affair. This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship.”
Since then, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Ontario Association of Architects, the Canadian Institute of Planners, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, Ottawa Centre MP Paul Dewar and the Liberal party, among others, have piled on. Even Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin expressed concern last fall about the appearance of some of the competing memorial designs.
Throughout the barrage, Klimkowski has remained resolute. In a recent interview, the Tribute to Liberty chair called the controversy “wonderful. I embrace that because it really shows the democratic state of our country.”
With eight million Canadians tracing their origins to current or former communist countries, the events commemorated by the memorial are an integral part of Canada’s story, Klimkowski argues, and deserve a prominent location.
Unlike Nazi leaders, he says, no communist leaders have been prosecuted for their crimes. “The fact that (the memorial) is next to the two most important buildings is giving us that closure and that justice.”
Voytek Gorczynski, head of the winning design team, says he didn’t anticipate the controversy over the memorial. But he regards some of the criticism, such as Blumberg’s complaint that the memorial design is “visceral and brutalist,” as a compliment. “That was the idea behind it, to make it visceral.”
For Zuzana Hahn, though, the fact that the memorial has become “a hated thing” for some people is painful.
“It wasn’t meant to be like that,” she says. “It was meant to be an inspiration. It was meant to be someplace where we questioned things and were inspired by things, not this dreary thing which is completely devoted to dead people.”
“I put five years of my life into this, and so have several other inspired people,” Hahn laments, “and it just breaks my heart.”