Three city councillors seek name change for Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, citing 'harmful legacy'
Megan Gillis, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Jun 02, 2021 • 30 minutes ago • 1 minute read
City councillors whose wards border the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway have asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for an Indigenous-led effort to rename the roadway along the Ottawa River.
“This is a small change that can make a big difference,” councillors Catherine McKenney, Jeff Leiper and Theresa Kavanagh wrote in a letter calling on the federal government to follow the example of Charlottetown, PEI.
City councillors there voted Monday remove a statue of Macdonald “and refuse to perpetuate the harmful legacy of Canada’s first prime minister and architect of the residential school system any longer,” the trio wrote.
The Ottawa councillors began by saying that parkway runs through their wards along the “Kìchì Sìbì” river on the territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe.
The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s discovery of the remains of 215 children buried at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. “makes clear that there is an urgent need to recommit ourselves to the project of reconciliation as a nation,” they continue.
“We are often recalled to the ways place names in our city perpetuate Canada’s genocide against Indigenous peoples; an obvious example of this phenomenon is the name of the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway.”
Originally called the Ottawa River Parkway, the route was renamed in 2012 by the then-Conservative government of Stephen Harper to honour Canada’s first prime minister.
City crews in Charlottetown took down the statue of Macdonald after council’s vote to permanently remove it from a downtown intersection as a response to recent revelations about Canada’s residential school system.
Council had been planning to improve signage and add an Indigenous figure to the Macdonald statue, but decided to remove it entirely following the discovery of the mass grave last week.
-with files from The Canadian Press
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...harmful-legacy
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