Ottawa's Communism

From the G & M:
"A walk down Wellington Street: Exploring Ottawa’s contentious communism memorial"

 

Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court of Canada … and the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. Strange as it sounds, that will be the sequence along Confederation Boulevard in Ottawa if the capital’s newest memorial goes into the ground this year as planned. The monument could be the second largest in Ottawa, almost matching the National War Memorial in scale, and its planned site lies adjacent to the Supreme Court. It has raised a vigorous debate in the capital and in design circles because of its location, its design and even the process that is bringing it into existence. The memorial is imagined as a tribute to tens of millions of people, including those who fled communist countries for Canada. It’s proponent is a non-profit group called Tribute to Liberty. Members of the Harper government have publicly supported the memorial project since 2010. In the past two years, the government has also moved responsibility for selecting the sites and designing commemorative projects away from the National Capital Commission and into the hands of two federal ministries. The winning design for the Monument to the Victims of Communism, which is by the Toronto architect Voytek Gorczynski and ABSTRAKT Studio, has two building-sized pieces: an elevated viewing platform and a jagged, sculptural form that bears a large-scale photograph. The image in the first version would have reproduced a photograph of corpses in a Polish forest – victims, bloodied and lifeless, of Stalin’s secret police. Ludwik Klimkowski, a Polish-Canadian financial adviser who leads Tribute to Liberty, says the memorial belongs next to the Supreme Court. “In communist countries, there is no rule of law. There is no justice,” he says. “By resting it next to the Supreme Court of Canada, people who come to commemorate – and to appreciate what Canada has done – will get justice.” Tribute to Liberty represents a bloc of ardently anti-communist Canadians with roots abroad. Its board largely has personal connections to eastern Europe and its literature is focused on the repressive regimes of the Soviet Union and its puppet states.

 

 

^ Every country around the world had to deal with communism in one way or another - some still do (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba.) Some became communist dictatorships and repressed their people while others became havens for those who escaped. Canada's need a communism memorial for its role in helping countries like the US to counter-react the spread of communism and for taking-in anti-communists. I have been to Ottawa and it, like Washington DC, is the focal point for the national memorials and monuments of Canada (and the US.) The crimes of Communism need to be remembered just as much as those of the Holocaust of the Armenian Genocide. ^

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/architecture/victims-of-communism-memorial/article23529193/