NCC reveals design for smaller Memorial to Victims of Communism
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: June 25, 2015 | Last Updated: June 25, 2015 8:31 PM EDT
Work on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism will begin this summer — only site decontamination for now, but a symbolic first shovel in the ground for a project with a lot of opponents.
But the memorial that emerged Thursday is much smaller than the 14-metre-high work that was condemned as too big. The details:
• The new proposal covers 37 per cent of the site west of the Supreme Court of Canada, down from 60 per cent. It is likely to shrink a bit more, to about 33 per cent;
• There will be five folded sheets of steel called “Memory Folds,” down from seven; and they will reach a height of eight metres, not 14.3 m.
• The foot bridge (Bridge of Hope) will be five metres high, down from 11. The proposed elevator inside it is gone.
• The whole project will be farther back from Wellington Street, “nestled” behind a natural earth berm that will reduce its impact on the street view, National Capital officials said at their board meeting Thursday. Extra trees will soften a view a bit more.
• Images will tell the story of people finding safety in Canada rather than portraying the Katyn Forest, where Soviet troops murdered thousands of Polish soldiers.
But the basic shape and theme remain the same. So too does the disputed site, because the NCC says it was asked by Canadian Heritage to oversee a design for that location, not to choose a site.
“It’s very customary to go through multiple iterations of a design” for a monument, said NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson, adding that the Memorial to the Victims of Communisn “is still very much a work in progress.”
In 2013, federal officials announced the choice of this site, NCC chair Russell Mills said, though he said there was little controversy at the time.
“The government ultimately has the right to decide where these monuments go. They can overrule the NCC if it comes to that.”
Mills called it “a better design, much less intrusive,” adding, “I voted against it primarily because I think it’s premature to start the decontamination before we have an actual approved design.”
The final design is expected this summer.
New Democratic MP Paul Dewar accused the Conservatives of adding five Tory-friendly directors to the NCC board. The new appointments were announced Wednesday — three taking effect now and two more on July 1.
“Last night they decided to play the old game of stuffing their friends into a Crown corporation to get their way,” Dewar said. He said this looks especially bad after the Senate scandal.
“It’s old patronage politics,” he said.
He called the decontamination work “the first step toward having this monument put in place.” Dewar said the long-range vision plan passed by Parliament doesn’t have room for this monument. The plan calls for another building in what is known as the Parliamentary and judicial precinct.
And he called the memorial a “monument to irony” because the government is using heavy-handed tactics to remember the victims of totalitarian states.
Catherine McKenna, the Liberal candidate in Ottawa Centre, attended the meeting and said that “they are still going forward with the memorial in a location that people don’t want,” and as for the smaller size, “I don’t know that that changes anything.”
She blames the federal government for not leaving the NCC the option of choosing a different site. “It (the NCC) is not able to act in an independent way.”
She said there has been no consultation with the public, and even the agenda for Thursday’s meeting was kept secret until this week.
Kristmanson vigorously rejected suggestions of packing the board with Tories.
“We’re in an election season and many things are being said that defy reality,” he said. “Mr. Mills and I had met with Minister (Pierre) Poilièvre about three months ago to say that we have had members in over-hold on our board (i.e., serving past their terms’ end) for more than a year, in some cases more than two years.” There were also gaps in expertise, gender and language. “There’s no stacking of the board.
“When the chair and the CEO don’t vote the same way on a motion, it shows we have a healthy organization,” he said.
(Mills voted against starting site remediation; Kristmanson voted for it.)
Left unresolved is the question of what happens if a future government wants to put a building on the memorial site.
The NCC’s planners have already been looking at this. One option, they said at the meeting, is to wrap the new building around the east side of the memorial, so that the footbridge of the monument would form a terrace adjoining the new building.
But they say that the scaled-down plan unveiled Thursday is also small enough to fit on a smaller piece of land a little to the west of the currently planned site.
One NCC director spoke out against the choice of memorial site.
“There must be a building built on this some day,” said Norman Hotson, an architect from Vancouver. He said the whole memorial feels as if it were “plopped into a convenient location.”
The three newest board members — Basil Stewart of Summerside, PEI; Victor Brunette of Gatineau; and former Cumberland Mayor Brian Coburn — all voted to go ahead with site decontamination.
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