Should Wilmot get a Mulroney statue?
What does the passing of former prime minister Brian Mulroney have to do with Wilmot Township? Everything.
As we remember the late prime minister, who led Canada from 1984 to 1993, it reminds us how complicated he was.
Mulroney was deeply committed to making Canada a better country, and used his personal charm, connections and bargaining skills to get a free-trade agreement with the United States. He stood against apartheid in South Africa and signed groundbreaking environmental agreements.
But by the time he got to the end of his leadership term, he had also brought in the much-hated Goods and Services Tax, presided over a miserable recession, and failed to bring the country together, with the collapse of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. Two regional parties, the Reform in the West and the Bloc Québécois in Quebec, formed. Canadians were fractured and very unhappy.
By the end of his leadership, Mulroney was so intensely loathed across the country that only two Conservative MPs survived the 1993 election, out of 156.
So should there be a statue of Mulroney at the Prime Ministers Path in Wilmot? What kind of context would be needed to explain his mixed legacy?
And is Wilmot council the best organization to decide?
Wilmot, of course, owns the statues of five prime ministers that were removed from the Prime Ministers Path in Baden, and placed into storage in 2021. This was after the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, was repeatedly defaced with red paint.
Three years later, township councillors must decide what to do next on this deeply divisive issue.
They do so knowing that a lot more red paint could be thrown on a lot more statues, if the public had access to them.
Many of Canada’s former prime ministers did things that were acceptable in their time, which we see as evil today.
John A. Macdonald, who built Canada, also played a central role in the creation of its residential schools.
Those punitive institutions starved, abused and shamed the Indigenous children who were forced to attend. The damage has been deep, incredibly painful, and has lasted for generations.
William Lyon Mackenzie steered Canada through industrialization, much of the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Some say he was Canada’s greatest prime minister.
But he also deeply admired Adolf Hitler, writing in his diary in 1938 that Hitler would “rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people & if he is only careful may yet be the deliverer of Europe.”
As Wilmot Mayor Natasha Salonen pointed out recently, the shameful antisemitic policies of King’s government kept desperate Jewish refugees away from Canada as they tried to escape the approaching Holocaust.
When the statues of Macdonald, King and three others were removed from public view and placed into storage, the issue was so controversial that councillors couldn’t even find out at first what it was costing to keep them stored. That was because only a very few staff members had seen the invoices, in case the location became public and further damage might be caused.
Now “the temperature has come down a bit,” said Coun. Kris Wilkinson, and Wilmot’s elected officials are ready to decide how to proceed.
After all, the statues can’t stay in storage forever.
The township could hold a referendum, continue with the working group that had been hired earlier, or move forward with community conversations.
Wisely, their officials are beginning to land on the final option.
Wilkinson, who earlier wanted to look into a referendum, says he’s received feedback that this option would be expensive and could pit the people of Wilmot against each other once again.
“It would be divisive in nature, and not accomplish what we want to get done,” he said, in part because a referendum needs a simple question with a yes or no answer, and this problem is a very complicated one.
Wilkinson now favours the idea of calm, private conversations that include citizens and are led by a moderator.
And one of the things to consider would be: “Do we, as a community, want this project?” he said.
“Personally, I’m in favour of that, but my job as a councillor is to address everybody’s concern,” he said.
Salonen agrees that the most important focus is not the statues themselves, but the health and connectedness of the community.
“We really need to reconnect with the community, see where people are, have conversations where people can understand one another,” she said. “It really needs to be grassroots.”
With the understanding that not only Macdonald made problematic decisions, it’s clear that “this is a far bigger question than initially was tackled with the last council,” she said.
“How do we recognize our past collective history?”
And if it turns out this is too complex a decision to be made by Wilmot, too far from the mandate of a small municipality, that’s OK too, she said.
“I don’t care as much what happens to the statues,” Salonen said.
“It’s my community I don’t want to see destroyed over such a divisive issue.”