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The Editor’s Desk: (Not) thinking things through

Victoria city council shows how not to handle a delicate situation.
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At the end of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and his colleague Marcus Brody have delivered the Ark of the Covenant to government officials, and are trying to ensure that the Ark is kept secure and studied properly. Marcus asks where it is, receiving the vague answer “somewhere very safe”. When he presses the point about the need to research it, he is told that “top men are working on it right now.” Indy asks who, only to be told firmly “Top. Men.”

Cut to the final scene of the film, where we see the Ark being packed into an anonymous wooden crate and loaded onto a forklift, which then takes it into a vast warehouse filled with crates of all shapes and sizes, where the Ark is unceremoniously deposited. The implication is that the government had no intention of letting “top men” research it, and the Ark is destined to spend eternity gathering dust.

I was reminded of this scene last week, when the City of Victoria council voted to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from outside city hall. The statue was wrapped in layers of foam, loaded onto a flatbed truck, and taken away to an undisclosed location.

In the meantime, a plaque has been installed (and already defaced) at the statue’s former site. It explains that the decision to remove the statue was taken after consultation with the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, in light of Macdonald’s “complex history” as both the country’s founder and first Prime Minister on the one hand, and “a leader of violence against Indigenous Peoples” (Macdonald oversaw the implementation of the Residential School system) on the other.

The plaque states that the statue is being stored safely in a city facility. It also contains the information that the public will be kept informed as the city finds a way to “recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way.”

The question of whether or not the statue should have been removed in the first place has stirred up a good deal of debate, much of it somewhat heated. However, it strikes me that a good deal of the controversy could have been avoided if the City of Victoria had also had a definite end result for the statue already in place. It’s all very well to say that Macdonald is going to be “recontextualized” (by whom? top men?), but perhaps this recontextualization could have been done before the statue was removed, not after the fact.

Part of the problem seems to be that the decision to remove Sir John was made hastily and without public consultation; the lone Victoria council member who voted against the statue’s removal, on the grounds that there needed to be more discussion, says council was only informed about the proposed removal when they received the agenda for last week’s meeting a couple of days in advance. That the removal date for the statue had already been settled on and publicly stated, before the council meeting at which the vote was taken occurred, would seem to indicate that the result of the vote was a foregone conclusion.

Perhaps council felt that since the decision was being made in the middle of August, when relatively few people are paying attention to politics, there would be little fanfare. If so, then they’ve certainly been caught off guard by the attention their decision has received, and might well be wishing they had done things differently.

If you can’t be a good example, you can at least serve as a horrible warning, as the saying goes. Victoria city council stands as a warning to other groups that might be thinking of taking the same sort of action; that warning being “think it through”.

As for the statue’s fate? The cynic in me suggests there’s a strong possibility it’s going to share the same one as the Ark of the Covenant: conveniently forgotten in a warehouse somewhere. I hope I’m wrong, and that top men (and women) are working on the situation right now.



editorial@accjournal.ca

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