SAINT JOHN, N.B. — On Canada Day 2006, Canadians were shocked by images of several young men urinating on the National War Memorial in Ottawa. Public outcry inspired the creation of Bill C-217, which criminalized the vandalism of war memorials and cemeteries.
The law's protections were widely applauded, but that applause may be premature given that public institutions also have proven susceptible to historical amnesia.
In 2009, for example, the National Battlefields Commission cancelled a 250th anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in the face of public opposition in Quebec. In 2011, Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., demolished a nationally registered war memorial library to make way for a performing arts centre. In 2012, federal bureaucrats preparing for the 110th anniversary of the Boer War recommended downplaying Canada's role as "sensitive" and potentially divisive.
Meanwhile, the New Brunswick Museum's board recently proposed building a storage facility over a portion of Saint John's Riverview Memorial Park, one of Canada's oldest war memorials and the province's only monument to 700 soldiers of the Boer War. The park's defenders view this as desecration, while museum supporters argue it is merely asserting its stewardship over an aspect of provincial history.
In each of these cases, local arguments have obscured a larger national issue: the degree to which public institutions are impeding understanding of our common history. This is caused by political correctness, opportunism and overweening faith of groups in their own cultural leadership.
The cancellation of the re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham seems a misguided concession to political correctness. As historian Desmond Morton noted in 2009, the proposed re-enactment was based on the latest scholarship and had been expected to improve public understanding of the roles played by previously undervalued participants, such as French colonial troops and Aboriginal allies. Its cancellation short-circuited an important public conversation.
The expansion plans produced by Mount Allison University and the New Brunswick Museum exhibit a different dynamic: opportunism. Building over historic sites sometimes represents the path of least expense for developers, even when those developers bear the mantle of cultural leadership.
Mistaking memorial space for vacant space can have serious consequences for the reputations of public institutions. Riverview Memorial Park, for example, contains an early cenotaph and century-old trees planted in memory of fallen soldiers and community members. The New Brunswick Museum's proposal to build in the park would see the statue moved and trees replaced by an artifact storage facility. (The work is dependent on courts or the provincial government removing deed covenants designed to protect the park in perpetuity.)
After two months of heated public discussion, the museum's board announced in March that it will investigate alternatives.
Many people I have spoken to no longer trust governments, universities and museums to act as disinterested guardians of our national past. They aren't conspiracy theorists; they're just aware of the gap between institutional intentions and institutional actions. It says something about how poorly we have managed our historical assets.
Why do these institutional failures and the falling away of public faith matter from a policy perspective? Because historical amnesia robs us of something important: an awareness of where we come from, the complexity of our past and the richness of our collective experience.
Consider the Second Anglo-Boer War, which was added to Canada's National War Memorial in 2014. The Boer War is regarded by many today as a bit of foreign adventuring that enriched British crony capitalists at the expense of Africa itself. To downplay its importance to Canada, though, one would need to ignore some important lessons.
The Boer War prefigured the conditions, weapons and tactics that Canadians would face in the First World War and established our volunteer soldiers as an effective military force. Canadians' performance under fire had a profound impact on future allies, including Sir Winston Churchill. Among the Canadian volunteers were former Mountie Sam Steele and physician-poet John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields.
Unless historians can convince community and opinion leaders of the importance of remembering such details and the context they represent, we will continue to see significant aspects of Canada's history relegated to the archives, while monuments are moved or destroyed.
We need a national policy on monuments and memorial spaces that is rooted in awareness of the complexity of our history. This policy must opt to preserve historic monuments and discuss divergent historical experiences, rather than paving them over or pushing aside events of the past that have become politically unpopular today.
— Eric Marksisis a former journalist, Rhodes Scholar and contributor to the Canadian Inventory of Historic Building. He lives in Saint John, N.B. This article first appeared in Inside Policy, the magazine of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
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