Just rename everything after Wayne Gretzky.
Canada’s biggest city has reached the conclusion it can no longer bear to live with the embarrassment of a relationship with Henry Dundas, a Scottish politician who died 310 years ago and after whom a long strip of pavement and several ancillary entities are named.
A report by Toronto city staff has advised removing Dundas’s name from an important city roadway in favour of something more suitable (perhaps “Climate Change Boulevard” or some other appellation?) and more in keeping with — to quote the report — “the values of equity and inclusion that the City of Toronto upholds.”
Dundas lived and died in Scotland long before Canada as a country was a thing. It’s not evident he ever showed much interest in the place, or gave it much thought. A skilled and accomplished political figure, according to the Britannica encyclopedia he was among Scotland’s most powerful people and — “notwithstanding his provincial dialect and ungraceful manner” — rose to the highest offices in Britain as well. The honour of having his name applied to a dirt trail in a frozen outpost of a distant colony was the idea of his friend John Graves Simcoe, who’d been named lieutenant-governor of muddy York and its surroundings. Presumably Dundas was informed of the tribute, though — given he’d held virtually every top job in Britain outside prime minister — it may not have been the biggest accolade of his life, and having it revoked three centuries later may not have him spinning in his grave.
It’s important to Toronto, though. Toronto is a very sensitive place that always likes to be seen as doing the right thing, in as polite and cheerful a manner as possible. If Toronto had been a child in Dundas’s time, it would have been neatly groomed, carefully dressed, nails clean, always at the supper table on time with hair combed and its napkin on its lap, ready to say grace.
Still, there are questions to be asked. Like, for instance, if Dundas Street is no longer tolerable, what about entities named after other long-dead figures whose crime in being born prior to Canada’s great historic awakening makes them unacceptable to modern sensibilities? A big one would be Yonge Street, which is even longer and more famous than Dundas Street, running almost 1,900 kilometres from the Toronto lakefront, through countless smaller Ontario burgs and outposts, to Rainy River at the Ontario/minnesota border.
If Henry Dundas held questionable views on the slave trade, a point on which there is some contention, George Yonge was a waste of space so monumental he was dismissed by one historian as representing “incompetence, ignorance, and the very worst impulses of colonial British aristocracy.” Dundas insisted he was no friend of slavery, but argued that banishing it from British territories overnight would simply drive it to other locations, and that gradual elimination was more likely to succeed. Yonge, on the other hand, proved so consistently incompetent he was eventually hustled off to the Cape Colony in today’s South Africa, where he quickly established a reputation for greed and corruption, and helped organize a scam enabling him to seize slaves from passing ships and sell them as his own.
Or how about Wellington and Wellesley streets, both running east-west off Yonge in the city’s core, both named after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who may have defeated Napoleon and saved the nation, but went on to become so unpopular as a politician — as prime minister he staunchly opposed extending the vote to the working classes and other such riff-raff — that mobs twice lay siege to his London home, hurling rocks through the windows.
Face it, Toronto’s past, thanks to its history as part of a British colony, is jammed with the names of colonialists, imperialists, aristocrats and hoity-toity jumped-up local versions of distant sniffy poobahs. Victoria Street, Queen’s Park and Queen Street all honour a monarch so archly regal she couldn’t be bothered to show up in India even after it had been seized in her name and was in the process of naming her its empress. If you hate all the offshoots of a past that intrude on modern rectitude, you’ve got to dump the Wellingtons, the Victorias and the Yonges, along with the Ryersons, Jarvises, Baldwins, Osgoodes and other locals who either failed to recognize they lived in a time that wasn’t as enlightened as 21st-century Toronto, or didn’t do enough to revolutionize thought when they had the chance. That whole Family Compact crowd that ran Upper Canada in the decades before Confederation was just one big fan club for imperialist nabobbery, itching for a semi-regal title to call their own.
It’s all gotta go, and we’re going to need new names for the whole kit and caboodle. Simple, innocuous, unblemished replacements that can stand the test of time, meaning, first of all, no politicians, and preferably no one human, given that humans are prone to imperfection and thus unsatisfactory for praise and recognition. Oak Street, Pine Street, Elm Street, that sort of thing should do. Or, even easier: Main Road 1, Main Road 2, Side Road 3, like they do in rural areas where no one gets all that worked up about statues and such.
Once Toronto is done we’ll have to move on to other crime spots. The town of Dundas, of course, will have to go. Ditto London, Ont., named after World Headquarters for the British slave trade and all its grubby appurtenances. Ottawa is an absolute cesspool of honours dedicated to figures from a hateful past: Elgin, Albert, Wellington, Gladstone ... I don’t know who Catherine Street is named after but if we look hard enough maybe we can find something to disqualify her, too.
It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but good works never are. If we stick to it, though, we may some day be able to look back on a Canada cleared of anyone who had anything to do with anything, other than maybe Wayne Gretzky, though there are still a lot of people in Toronto bitter at that 1993 playoff result, when he really should have been called for high-sticking.
DUNDAS LIVED AND DIED IN SCOTLAND LONG BEFORE CANADA ... WAS A THING.