PAY UP FOR MEMORIAL
The squabbling over the eight- storey Mother Canada war memorial project planned for Cape Breton Highlands National Park is frankly getting embarrassing. The project involves building a giant statue of a woman holding her arms outstretched in a symbolic reach across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.
The multi- layered squabbling has involved the location, the name — the Vimy Foundation says it’s already in use — and of course most contentiously, the funding.
Mother Canada is the brainchild of the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation, a private group that is asking for extra public funding through the $ 150- million Canada 150 Community Infrastructure Program.
In 2014, the foundation garnered more than $ 865,000 in donations, but had to spend $ 877,000 on such things as an environmental impact study because the project also requires a parking lot. The critics are legion. They have complained about Mother Canada compromising the national park’s ecological integrity, described the memorial design as “vulgar and ostentatious” and complain the original intention was that the project would be entirely privately funded, but now has received $ 100,000 in a grant from Parks Canada. For the first part to be complete in time for Canada’s 150th birthday in two years, the foundation needs $ 25 million.
We don’t see a problem with federal money being injected into the project. After all, this is about the soldiers who fought for our country. And because it is about them, Canadians from across the country should be willing to donate some money to the cause. Canadian military personnel come from cities, towns and rural areas across Canada and death, the great leveller, did not distinguish among them geographically when they fell in battle.
The memory of Calgary’s own Capt. Nichola Goddard, among far too many others from this province who were killed in action, should be enough to spur Albertans to dig deep to help make Mother Canada a reality. Goddard, the first woman combat soldier to be killed in Afghanistan, lost her life at age 26 in 2006 during a firefight with Taliban insurgents.
To quibble over a memorial for people who unhesitatingly gave their lives for this country is petty and mean- spirited and dishonours their memories. There are very few projects whose funding doesn’t meet some sort of watershed where more help is needed. Let’s see private donors, including the corporate sector, step forward. But if help is not forthcoming, the federal government shouldn’t hesitate to step in. To do any less — and to carry on these very public spats over such a worthwhile cause — is unbecoming to Canada.