Reconciliation Bridge signs were briefly up, until mayor stepped in
Calgary’s mayor says roads employees were “so moved” by council’s Jan. 23, 2017, vote to rename a downtown bridge that staff stayed late to make signs with the new moniker — Reconciliation Bridge.
The very next morning, the signage was installed, replacing large green and white signs reading Langevin Bridge.
“I was so touched by their beautiful gesture,” Mayor Naheed Nenshi said in a tweet last summer. “Then I made them take it down.” Daorcey Le Bray, communications adviser to Nenshi, confirmed Wednesday the signage on the span over the Bow River briefly read Reconciliation Bridge in the immediate wake of council’s 14-1 decision to strip Langevin from the structure’s name a year ago.
“We respectfully asked that they (roads staff) take that back down because we wanted to wait until we had a formal ceremony for the naming, and then the sign would go up,” Le Bray said.
Advocates who pushed to remove Hector-Louis Langevin’s name from the bridge in 2015 expressed frustration earlier this week that the large signs on the connection between 4th Avenue and Memorial Drive still say Langevin, 344 days after council voted to immediately rename the span Reconciliation Bridge.
Langevin was a Father of Confederation — whose ministry funded the bridge’s initial construction — and an architect of the residential school system, which the 2015 national Truth and Reconciliation Report called an act of “cultural genocide.”
Council’s widely celebrated decision to rename the bridge came as other cities across the country faced mounting pressure to remove names associated with past injustices, including Langevin Block in Ottawa.
The fact Reconciliation Bridge signage was briefly installed on the 108-year-old Calgary structure a year ago — and has sat unused for nearly 12 months since then — stunned Tsuut’ina Nation spokesman Kevin Littlelight Wednesday.
“I’m very surprised they were up and taken down and now we’re waiting for the ceremony,” Littlelight said, adding he respects the mayor’s decision to have the signs taken down.
“I’m very confident in the city and the mayor’s office that they have plans to put up the signs properly with honour and dignity.”
On an August evening, seven months after municipal politicians made national news when they voted to remove Langevin’s name from the bridge, Nenshi sent a three-part tweet in response to a question from a Twitter user about when the span would get a new sign.
“Sometime this autumn there will be a formal naming/blessing,” Nenshi said.
The mayor said that he had a “wonderful story” of how roads staff “were so moved when council changed the name they stayed late to make a new sign and installed it the next morning.
“I was so touched by their beautiful gesture. Then I made them take it down and wait for the formal ceremony,” he said, before finishing the tweet with a smiley face.
When that formal renaming ceremony will occur remains unknown.
While the city said last year a rededication ceremony would be held in the months after council’s January 2017 vote, that never happened.
Le Bray said in an email Tuesday that a small team is working on a formal, public event to be held sometime in 2018.
“I wish them the best to get this done and I do trust that they will do it,” Littlelight said of the formal ceremony and re-installation of the Reconciliation Bridge signage.