National Post (National Edition)
Wrong kind of change
Canadians open to evolution, not revolution
Something always felt off about the trend of toppling statues, renaming streets and national self-flagellation in the name of washing the country clean of its sins. As it turns out, it feels off because most people do not support it. A 2020 poll found that 75 per cent of respondents were opposed to the “spontaneous” toppling of statues, while around half said they were against removing monuments and changing the names of streets and buildings.
Last summer, a mob tore down a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Hamilton, Ont. Hamilton's city council had voted to keep the statue before it was toppled, and the mayor now wants it reinstalled. Needless to say, activist groups are outraged. Yet nobody asked ordinary Hamiltonians what they think, and this trend has been consistent throughout Canada's anti-colonial crusade.
Take the renaming of Dundas Street. Toronto's municipal government has been obsessed with it since 2020, when anything dedicated to Confederate generals in the United States was being removed or renamed. Henry Dundas was an obscure Scottish politician who apparently played a role in delaying the slave trade's abolition in the British Empire in 1833.
For Canadian progressives, nothing irks them more than being outdone by their American counterparts. With no Robert E. Lee monuments to remove, they settled on renaming Dundas Street as a participation trophy.
It will cost over $6 million to rename Dundas Street, and the street's name will revert to Dundas once the pavement ceases to be within Toronto's city limits. Other municipal governments in the Greater Toronto Area have voted not to collaborate with this pompous little project. Nonetheless, Toronto's municipal government seems determined to carry out its public relations mission to show off to the rest of Canada.
Never mind the complaints of shop owners who incorporated Dundas into their business names, and never dreamt that city council would undertake such a monumentally wasteful initiative. Never mind the people who questioned why millions of dollars were being spent renaming a street when the resources and energy could be used to actually improve community infrastructure. Never mind a survey showing that 61 per cent of respondents disapproved of the name change when the cost was factored in. And never mind that, like SkyDome, people will keep calling it Dundas anyway.
Toronto's government recently put out its own survey to get an idea of how it can go about cleansing the city of colonial names and other allegedly offensive imagery. Don't hold your breath for the city to release any statistical data, because the results will certainly not show what the city wants them to. Instead, like other similar initiatives, expect the city to cherry-pick anecdotes, and move forward with esthetic alterations that will change very little in the lives of the communities municipal politicians claim to be improving.
Unfortunately for everyone outside the GTA, this dense philosophy of social justice has spread its fingers from coast to coast. A recent example is Victoria's Royal British Columbia Museum, which the B.C. government just announced was not up to modern safety standards, and must be rebuilt. Asbestos and seismic concerns are perfectly valid reasons to undertake such a goal, but the provincial government first tried to pass it off as something else entirely.
Back in November, the minister of tourism said the museum's First Peoples gallery needed revamping, as it had been built without sufficient Indigenous consultation. Fair enough. Then the minister moved on to claim a separate exhibit, a recreated early 20th-century town, was an offensive, non-inclusive exhibit that had to be cleansed through “decolonization.” The backlash was so harsh that the government backtracked and admitted the changes really stemmed from legitimate safety concerns.
The latest flashpoint is the Confederation Bridge, which Prince Edward Island's legislature is asking the federal government to rename. Advocates for such a move claim that Confederation, the 1867 creation of a more-or-less independent Canada, was something harmful.
Apparently, Confederation made Canada into something more harmful than the collection of expansionist, imperialistic British colonies it was prior. No consultations have been made with the public, in P.E.I. or elsewhere, about renaming the bridge, and there probably won't be any. Such esthetic alterations are clearly a top-down, elitist process, influenced by activists who make their living through Patreon donations, instead of working like everyone else.
In the city of Powell River, B.C., people want the city's name changed because its namesake was once the province's superintendent of Indian affairs. The local government is pondering whether to change the name, but hasn't committed to a referendum on the matter.
Governments seem very reluctant to gauge public opinion when it comes to removing statues and renaming public infrastructure — probably because they know such changes are only support by a small, but vocal, minority.
It is sometimes bewildering just how small-minded those who run our public institutions can be. In April, the Canada Council for the Arts released the following statement about the Group of Seven, the iconic Canadian landscape painters from the early 20th century: “Let's liberate the Canadian landscape from the Group of Seven and their nationalist mythmaking: By erasing Indigenous perspectives, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven painted a new nation into being.” The council was so intensely ridiculed that the statement was quickly removed.
Canadians are not averse to change, they're just mostly smart enough to not buy the idea that altering nomenclature, or leaving a pedestal empty, is important, or that such things will have any hope of affecting meaningful change. We should all hope our elected leaders come to realize how they discredit themselves by choosing this unwanted, undemocratic and out-of-touch path.