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Shrinking the Monument to the Victims of Communism not good enough, insist critics

Shrinking the Monument to the Victims of Communism not good enough, insist critics

As we know, Ottawa will soon boast another memorial, a Monument to the Victims of Communism - Canada a Land of Refuge, on Confederation Boulevard.

The memorial will take up a block next to the Supreme Court, but changes to the project announced June 25, 2015 show that the scale of the project has been revised “in keeping with design guidelines established for the site.” It will now occupy 37 per cent of the site, down from 60 per cent, and the overall height has been lowered by half. The changes also improve the accessibility of the site and ensure it is compatible surrounding buildings. There will be another round of changes before the design is finalized.

The site was allocated to Tribute to Liberty, the group spearheading the project, by Public Works and Government Services.

The Tribute To Liberty group claims that eight million Canadians or their descendants fled or were forced to leave Communist regimes for various reasons. Ludwik Klimkowski, chair of the non-profit organization driving the project, says that “unlike the victims of the holocaust, the victims of communism have never received any closure.”

Klimkowski says that “placing that memorial adjacent to some of the most important and pristine objects and buildings in our nation’s capital gives that rule of law and justice we so desperately desire.”

I’ve knocked on over 30,000 doors and this is one of the top issues that comes up. People are really, really unhappy about having the memorial there

—Catherine McKenna, Liberal candidate in Ottawa Centre,

No small part of the controversy swirling around this project stems from the proposed site. When shown design concepts, only 23 per cent of Canadians polled in May 2015 approve of the plan. The EKOS poll, conducted for iPolitics, found that in the National Capital Region, opposition was even greater, with 83 per cent opposing the location.

A recent letter signed by 17 former Canadian Bar Association presidents stated that they were “concerned by the decision to install a permanent political message on the very doorstep of the highest court in the land,” and that putting a such sculpture with a political message, controversial or not, in that location is ill conceived.

“Ottawa has been groomed to be Canada’s national capital city,” says Tonya Davidson, assistant sociology professor at Ryerson University. “The National Capital Commission (NCC) has a Confederation Boulevard that circles the parliamentary district and goes to Gatineau. And they deliberately think about where monuments should go to produce specific spatial narratives in the capital city. So it seems like this monument is incongruent with the symbolic grooming of the capital city that has been going on for 60 years.”

Catherine McKenna, Liberal candidate in Ottawa Centre, says that while the idea of the memorial is good, the location is bad. “There’s a long-term vision plan for the judicial and parliamentary precinct and it’s supposed to be reserved for a federal court building. For some reason, in a very non-transparent way, we’ve ended up with the memorial being placed there,” she said.

McKenna suggests that the project should be stopped and that the public should be consulted. “We can’t have this situation happen again where we have a memorial or large development on public lands in the nation capital region without consulting with anyone.”

“I’ve knocked on over 30,000 doors and this is one of the top issues that comes up. People are really, really unhappy about having the memorial there,” McKenna said.

The project has been given $3-million from the current Conservative government, with the Tribute to Liberty group still raising the rest of the funds to complete the project. The Ottawa site has an estimated value of $16- to $30-million.

Should the public have a say in this project? Tonya Davidson says yes. “The reason why it matters for this monument is the scale. People might object for many reasons... but there’s a big objection to how big it is, with a footprint larger than the National war memorial, and in such a prominent location.

Davidson also added that Canada already has a very prominent and meaningful war memorial that is close to this proposed monument. Originally designed to commemorate World War I, its meaning has expanded over the years to include other conflicts. There is also a Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, “so we already have monuments that can be used to speak to and commemorate different atrocities,” she said.

“The group behind this might want to consider an alternative site,” said McKenna, “because the last thing you want is people looking at the memorial and not feeling good about it.”