Victims of Communism memorial downsized as Tories and Liberals spar over site
Don Butler, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: February 26, 2015, Last Updated: February 26, 2015 6:28 PM EST
The Conservative government fired back at the Liberals on Thursday for advocating a new site for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, as the head of the team that designed it disclosed that it has substantially downsized the controversial memorial.
Voytek Gorczynski, the head of ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture in Toronto, said he and his team are “reducing some of the elements” of the memorial as they refine the design.
The memorial will now occupy about half the 5,000-square-metre site on Wellington Street between the Supreme Court of Canada and Library and Archives Canada, Gorczynski said in an interview. It had previously filled about 60 per cent of the site, he said.
The memorial consists of two main elements. One is a series of parallel concrete folds, rising above 14 metres at their tallest point, covered with 100 million “memory squares” representing lives lost to communist regimes worldwide. The other, called the Bridge of Hope, is a large, triangular viewing platform.
While the design team has been unable to downsize the concrete folds very much, Gorczynski said the Bridge of Hope has been shortened by 20 metres and lowered by nearly two metres.
The changes were partly in response to criticism of the memorial’s scale, Gorczynski said, but also involved “fine-tuning the composition and balancing it out visually. We felt the Bridge of Hope was a little bit too big in relationship to the folds.”
He said the design team opted for a large-scale monument to symbolize and reflect the “magnitude of the crimes” committed by communist regimes.
Most of the controversy over the memorial has centred on its prominent location on Confederation Boulevard. Though some Ottawa Liberal MPs and candidates had raised concerns, the party had remained silent on the issue.
That changed Thursday. At a news conference, the party’s critic for Canadian Heritage, Stéphane Dion — flanked by Ottawa MPs David McGuinty and Mauril Bélanger and local candidates Catherine McKenna and Anita Vandenbeld — aligned themselves with those who want the memorial relocated.
Dion stressed that the Liberals support a monument, saying Canada has a “moral duty to remember these atrocities” and observing that the country has “immensely benefited” from immigrants fleeing communist nations.
But he said the chosen site had long been reserved for a new building to complete a “judicial triad” centred on the Supreme Court. That would not be possible if the monument is built there, he said.
The Conservative government swiftly counter-attacked. Heritage Minister Shelley Glover’s office issued a statement accusing the Liberals of effectively telling the eight million Canadians who trace their origins to communist countries “that they do not deserve a prominent site for their place of collective memory.”
Glover’s statement observed that Liberal leader Justin Trudeau knew where the memorial would be built when he wrote a letter supporting the project in February 2014. Trudeau and the Liberal party “will have to answer to those millions of Canadians whose families found refuge and liberty in our great country,” Glover’s statement said.
Bélanger said the monument as currently designed could be accommodated at the Garden of the Provinces, the nearly-as-prominent Wellington Street site originally allocated by the National Capital Commission.
McGuinty and Bélanger both said they have received many comments about the memorial from constituents. “Every point of contact has been negative,” McGuinty said. “When the entire city is saying, ‘What are you doing?’, there’s a problem.”
The Ottawa South MP called the government’s handling of the project “profoundly disrespectful” of those who suffered under communist regimes and the citizens of Ottawa.
“This is what happens when a government doesn’t come clean,” he said. “There’s no transparency. People have not been consulted.”
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