A monumental controversy: History of the Memorial to Victims of Communism
Don Butler, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: March 6, 2015, Last Updated: March 6, 2015 4:00 PM EST
In the summer of 2007, Jason Kenney was touring Masaryktown, a private nine-hectare park in Scarborough owned by Toronto’s Czech and Slovak communities.
Kenney, named to cabinet as secretary of state for multiculturalism earlier that year, was walking with Pavel Vosalik, then the Czech ambassador to Canada, when the two came across a monument on the park’s grounds.
Titled Crucified Again, the monument depicts a tortured man crucified on a hammer and sickle, a stark symbol of Soviet oppression. It had been unveiled in 1989 to honour the millions who suffered or died at the hands of communist regimes throughout the world.
When Kenney saw the statue, his first thought was that it should be in a public park in Toronto where more people could see it, Vosalik recalls. The ambassador reminded Kenney that Ottawa, not Toronto, was Canada’s capital. “That’s the moment we started to talk about some place where the victims of communism could be commemorated in Ottawa,” Vosalik says.
Since that day in Masaryktown, the saga of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism has followed a winding and often secretive path en route to becoming the capital’s most contentious new landmark.
Immersed in politics from birth, the project has struggled to raise money from the eight million Canadians who proponents say can trace their lineage to communist countries. It has been assigned three different sites — two announced publicly and one emphatically not — and has provoked strong opposition to its size, design and prime location on Wellington Street. The Citizen set out to tell its story, relying on documents and interviews — both on the record and off — with people knowledgeable about the project’s history.
One of those is Zuzana Hahn, a Toronto artist of Czechoslovak heritage. Weeks after his walk through the park with Kenney, Vosalik approached Hahn to advise her of the government’s interest in commemorating victims of communism. When she expressed enthusiasm, Vosalik invited her to Ottawa to meet with Kenney and his staff.
They told her the government couldn’t “spearhead” the project, but would support the idea if there was sufficient interest in different ethnic communities. Hahn was OK with that. “I did not want this to become the pet project of the Conservative government,” she says.
In January 2008, Hahn and Josef Cermak, then president of Sokol Canada, a youth sports organization, formed a group backed by a coalition of ethnic communities to advocate for a memorial to communism’s victims. It became known as the Open Book Group, a name derived from a design Hahn had created for the memorial.
Kenney attended a meeting with Hahn’s group at the Polish Community Centre in Toronto in February 2008. “I think that was the highlight of my experience,” Hahn says. “I thought, ‘people can really pull together.'”
Along the way, Hahn recruited Charlie Coffey as her group’s honorary chair. Coffey, who had just retired as the Royal Bank’s vice-president of government affairs, is an Order of Canada recipient who had chaired the advisory council for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. He is also a high-profile supporter of the Liberal party — not an asset in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa.
Coffey says Hahn was “a very well-meaning person” with great ideas for the project. “But she needed a bit of help navigating the small-p politics amongst the ethnic groups and the big-P politics in Ottawa.”
In those early months, Hahn was in regular contact with Kenney’s office, particularly with his chief of staff, Tenzin Khangsar, who emailed her the National Capital Commission‘s guidelines for commemorations and advised the group to submit its proposal. In April 2008, she presented Kenney and his staff with a formal submission to the NCC.
That summer, Kenney’s staff organized a meeting in Toronto about the memorial project, attended by a wide range of interested people, including Hahn. “The upshot of it was they said, ‘We’re going to put together a group of people who are going to lead this project forward,'” Hahn says. Kenney’s staff invited those who were interested to submit their resumés.
Hahn sent along her name and those of other supporters, but heard nothing further. She later learned that a new group, called Tribute to Liberty, had been formed that August without her knowledge. Not only that, it had already submitted a proposal to the NCC. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell!'” Hahn says. “I was really, really upset.”
Hahn scrambled her team and put together a competing proposal, which she submitted to the NCC. The agency indicated it would likely support a commemoration if the two groups merged. They agreed to work together and submitted a joint proposal in June in Tribute to Liberty’s name, with the Open Book Group listed as “founding partner.”
But it didn’t take long for the partnership to unravel. Hahn says Tribute to Liberty ignored most of her group’s suggestions. “Eventually, they started ignoring us altogether. They basically cut us out of it.”
Coffey had become Tribute to Liberty’s honorary chair after the groups merged. But he soon resigned, dismayed by the treatment of Hahn and by what he perceived as the project’s politicization. “It started out as a very non-partisan group,” he says, “and suddenly was becoming very partisan. All those involved were friendly to the governing party.”
Certainly Tribute to Liberty didn’t lack for connections to the Conservative party. Philip Leong, a Macau-born banker who was Tribute to Liberty’s founding chair and honorary patron, is a friend of Kenney and an admirer of Stephen Harper, who he calls a “great leader.” Leong ran unsuccessfully for the Canadian Alliance, one of the precursors of the current Conservative party, in the 2000 federal election.
Alide Forstmanis, who soon became Tribute to Liberty’s chair and remains its treasurer, had been president of the Latvian National Federation in Canada. She was also a longtime Conservative who ran unsuccessfully for the party nomination in Kitchener-Waterloo riding in 2007. Another early director, Wladyslaw Lizon — then president of the Canadian Polish Congress — was elected as a Tory MP in Mississauga East-Cooksville in 2011.
From Leong’s perspective, Tribute to Liberty was the best vehicle to move the memorial project forward. It included a wider diversity of ethnic groups, a more unified voice, a stronger board and was “connected to the government’s direction,” he says. “That doesn’t mean Tribute to Liberty was competing or excluding other people.”
The NCC’s board approved the general concept of a commemoration to victims of communism in September 2009. But the directors suggested modifying the title “to be more inclusive of those who have suffered under oppressive regimes in general.”
That was a non-starter for Tribute to Liberty, which wouldn’t agree to any change that would lessen the significance of the monument as a memorial to victims of communism. The NCC and Tribute to Liberty ultimately settled on calling it “A Monument to Victims of Totalitarian Communism: Canada, A Land of Refuge.” (Since then, the monument has become a memorial and “totalitarian” has vanished entirely from the title.)
The following summer, the NCC allocated a site for the memorial at the Garden of the Provinces on Wellington Street near LeBreton Flats. In Tribute to Liberty’s summer 2010 newsletter, Forstmanis waxed lyrical about the serenity and beauty of the site and its symbolic links to the Supreme Court of Canada building to the east and the Canadian War Museum to the west. Even Kenney issued a statement calling the chosen site “a fitting location.”
But not everyone was satisfied, it would seem. Some time after the NCC announcement, the memorial was shifted to a new location across from the war museum — the site now allotted for the new National Holocaust Monument, another favoured project of the Conservative government.
Exactly why that happened is unclear, but a 2009 story in the National Post suggests one possible explanation. The story quotes from a letter Stephen Harper sent to Kenney in 2008. In it, the prime minister warmly endorsed the idea of the monument and suggested that it belonged near the war museum.
Whatever the explanation, Tribute to Liberty was more than happy with the new site. It was much bigger than the Garden of the Provinces location, Forstmanis says, and it was a good fit thematically with the war museum. But the memorial’s itinerant wanderings weren’t over yet.
According to Forstmanis and other knowledgeable sources, the sponsors of the National Holocaust Monument were originally offered the Wellington Street site between the Supreme Court of Canada and Library and Archives Canada now allocated to the victims of communism memorial.
But the Holocaust memorial’s development council rejected the site, apparently because Scott Paper’s large smokestack across the Ottawa River in Gatineau was clearly visible, belching smoke, in the background. Some council members evidently felt that was an inappropriate setting for a monument to Holocaust victims.
Consequently, the government shifted the victims of communism memorial to the site near the Supreme Court in May of 2012 and transferred the Holocaust memorial to the war museum site. “We actually accommodated their wishes, and now we’re getting the flak,” says Forstmanis.
Asked about the site switch, Rabbi Daniel Friedman, chair of the Holocaust monument’s development council, said only that former cabinet minister John Baird ultimately decided where the monument should go. “It was the minister’s decision,” he said. “We were shown different options but we are a committee and the committee’s made up of multiple thoughts and ideas.”
All these machinations were happening out of public view, more than a year before any announcement that the victims of communism memorial had been allotted the Supreme Court site. Even the NCC appears to have been kept in the dark. According to a November 2013 staff report, it learned of the site change when Public Works sent the NCC a letter on March 4, 2013 requesting a land use change to allow a commemorative monument on the Judicial Precinct site.
In an email last August, a spokesman for Canadian Heritage said the Supreme Court site was selected for the victims of communism memorial “due to its close proximity and thematic links to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Peace Tower, Parliament Hill and Library and Archives Canada.”
For decades, the site had been reserved for a new justice building to complete a “judicial triad” centred on the Supreme Court, mirroring the parliamentary triad of the Centre, East and West blocks. A commemoration there had never been contemplated; the site wasn’t even on the NCC’s lengthy inventory of possible sites for future monuments and memorials.
By all accounts, the NCC was unhappy about the land-use change, but had little choice but to agree. While the National Capital Act says the NCC must approve changes to the use of public lands and new “buildings or other work” erected on them, it also says the federal cabinet can give approval if the NCC balks. Faced with that, the NCC’s directors meekly signed off on the memorial’s new site in September 2013.
The public first became aware of the memorial’s new site in August 2013, when Kenney and Chris Alexander, the minister of citizenship and immigration, announced $1.5 million in funding at the Supreme Court site. With the cost of the memorial rising steadily and Tribute to Liberty still struggling to raise money, that was quietly doubled to $3 million last year.
The federal government launched a two-phase design competition for the new memorial last March. In August, designs by six qualified proponents were reviewed by a seven-member “jury of experts” that included Ludwik Klimkowski, an Ottawa financial advisor who took over as chair of Tribute to Liberty in October 2012, and prominent conservative commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, whose sister, Senator Linda Frum, is a major donor to the memorial project.
The Citizen asked Canadian Heritage, which assumed responsibility for commemorations from the NCC in 2013, why Frum was chosen for the jury. In an email, the department said his “wide experience and reputation” made him an appropriate choice.
Contacted by the Citizen, Frum said he couldn’t recall ever being given a reason for being invited onto any of the juries or prize committees on which he’s served. “One is simply asked, and then answers yes or no,” he said in an email. “I’ve written often on communism and its remembrance, and I suppose it was these writings that prompted the invitation.”
The government apparently departed from the past practice of allowing bureaucrats at Canadian Heritage to make jury selections. According to Canadian Heritage spokeswoman Catherine Gagnaire, the department prepared a list of potential jury members and presented it Heritage Minister Shelly Glover, who made the final selections.
Despite periodic news stories in the Citizen and other media, the memorial project was largely off the public’s radar until Barry Padolsky spoke up. Padolsky, who has run an architectural, urban design and heritage consulting practice in Ottawa since 1969, was mightily troubled by the government’s decision to toss out decades of planning and end any possibility of completing the long-intended judicial triad.
Padolsky’s open letter to Harper last September imploring the prime minister to rethink the memorial’s location attracted media coverage, but it wasn’t until the government announced the winning design in December that people really started to pay attention.
Prominent Toronto architect Shirley Blumberg had a lot to do with that. A member of the selection jury who was not impressed by the winning design from Toronto’s ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture, Blumberg went public with her concerns about the chosen site in an interview with the Citizen soon after the announcement of the winning design.
More recently, Blumberg has focused on what she called the lack of transparency in the selection of the site. “There was no public consultation about giving this site to the monument,” she says. “I think that’s the most egregious part of this whole affair. This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship.”
Since then, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Ontario Association of Architects, the Canadian Institute of Planners, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, Ottawa Centre MP Paul Dewar and the Liberal party, among others, have piled on. Even Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin expressed concern last fall about the appearance of some of the competing memorial designs.
Throughout the barrage, Klimkowski has remained resolute. In a recent interview, the Tribute to Liberty chair called the controversy “wonderful. I embrace that because it really shows the democratic state of our country.”
With eight million Canadians tracing their origins to current or former communist countries, the events commemorated by the memorial are an integral part of Canada’s story, Klimkowski argues, and deserve a prominent location.
Unlike Nazi leaders, he says, no communist leaders have been prosecuted for their crimes. “The fact that (the memorial) is next to the two most important buildings is giving us that closure and that justice.”
Voytek Gorczynski, head of the winning design team, says he didn’t anticipate the controversy over the memorial. But he regards some of the criticism, such as Blumberg’s complaint that the memorial design is “visceral and brutalist,” as a compliment. “That was the idea behind it, to make it visceral.”
For Zuzana Hahn, though, the fact that the memorial has become “a hated thing” for some people is painful.
“It wasn’t meant to be like that,” she says. “It was meant to be an inspiration. It was meant to be someplace where we questioned things and were inspired by things, not this dreary thing which is completely devoted to dead people.”
“I put five years of my life into this, and so have several other inspired people,” Hahn laments, “and it just breaks my heart.”
dbutler@ottawacitizen.com
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