Respectable organizations such as the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and others, have been co-opted by anti-memorial advocates to endorse their campaign to stall and eventually terminate the project. On Friday, two anti-memorial critics were joined by the RAIC to file a lawsuit to stop the memorial project by reversing the NCC approval.
Ignoring that the project has been developing for over five years, critics claim that “political expediency” is the driving force behind it.
Such crude polarization is amplified by irresponsible statements like those made by an MP who characterized the memorial as a “poisoned chalice” that should be rejected.
So hysterical has the anti-memorial witch-hunt become, that one critic has publicly alleged that a conspiracy exists to hide the NCC's vote on the project.
In their eagerness to smear the memorial, opponents have brandished confusing and contradictory criticisms about the location.
They simultaneously argue that the memorial will occupy too much green space and at the same time that a grey office block should be built on the space.
Despite the updated, smaller, design that both complements the green space and provides room for a future federal building, NDP critic, Paul Dewar, is still demanding that the NCC “should just say no” to the memorial.
While in Ottawa this may be dismissed as an act in the theatre of local partisan politics; to millions of Canadians, the anti-memorial campaign is hurtful and alienating.
The families of the victims, like my own, all have unique stories of pain and trauma.
They are not just faceless victims who were murdered by distant regimes in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.
They are the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who survived starvation, deportations, mass rape and genocide at the hands of communist regimes. They are first-generation Canadians who endured harrowing journeys as refugees and later overcame discrimination to help build the Canada we know today.
They are the millions of second and third-generation Canadians who inherited the burden of psychological trauma, and who are now being told by critics that their family's experiences and contributions aren't worthy enough to be memorialized in a place so close to Parliament Hill or even acknowledged at all.
Among those groups memorialized by the project are the 250,000-plus European refugees who arrived after the Second World War, and helped stabilize the Canadian economy by relieving critical labour shortages. Many were admitted with the provision that they would work in conditions that one newspaper characterized as “semi-servitude”.
About 20,000 Russian Jewish refugees arrived in Canada in the 1980s after their political and religious rights were crushed after another wave of repressive Soviet anti-Semitism.
Canada accepted hundreds of Tibetans who fled brutal genocide as well as 8,000 refugees who fled China after the communist regime in Beijing massacred thousands of students in Tiananmen square in 1989.
The 80,000 refugees who came to Canada after fleeing communist regimes in Vietnam and Southeast Asia will also be memorialized.
The Memorial to The Victims of Communism honours the memory of the victims and their contributions to Canada. It reminds future generations of Canada's empathy and kindness in providing shelter and safety for the more than half-million refugees who fled communist terror.
Let's not allow partisan politics to deny this and polarize our nation against that history.
Marcus Kolga (@kolga)
