Speak Up
Speak Up
Delegating at council can be an important way to 'have your say'
If you read last week’s Council Round-up you may have noticed that Kitchener Council was scheduled to discuss an engagement process for the Queen Victoria statue in Victoria Park. That meeting happened on Wednesday (you can see the staff report here and watch the meeting here). You can read a Twitter summary of the meeting but council voted in support of an amendment by Councillor Singh to have an artist create an artistic ‘response’ to the statue in the park. They also voted in support of staff’s recommendation to begin an engagement and education process about the statue. Councillor Marsh proposed a ‘contrary’ motion that would have seen the statue removed during the engagement process, but since the main motion passed, her motion was not tabled.
I was one of several delegates that spoke to this issue at Wednesday’s meeting. Thanks to all of the delegates who took time (in the middle of the day no less!) to speak to this issue. You can read my delegation below, but I wanted to also use this opportunity to encourage you to consider delegating and/or writing your local councillors on an issue you are interested in or concerned about. In fact, this motion still requires final council approval which happens on June 20th, so if you feel passionate about this, that is one opportunity to delegate. I’m always happy to help people navigate the delegation process, so if this interests you, but you’re uncertain about the next steps, feel free to connect with me.
Good afternoon council. Before I speak specifically to the Queen Victoria statue, I want to share a bit of my experience growing up. When I was a kid, I sometimes attended Sunday School where I heard many different Bible stories, about Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, and many others. Likely some of you are also familiar with these. Storytelling is an important and effective method for passing along a community’s beliefs and values. However, as a grew older, I learned more about those stories, stories that were actually filled with violence, pain, and terror. The only reason those were shared in Sunday School was because they had been sanitized, completely removed of all of the parts that adults assumed would be inappropriate to share with children. But, as an adult, having learned the truth behind those stories, I can no longer hold on to those sanitized versions simply because they make me feel more comfortable than reality.
I think that very much parallels my experience in learning about ‘Canada’s history’ - a history that included only passing references to Indigenous Peoples who stewarded this land long before any European settlers arrived. There was little information in my school curriculum about the Indian Act, treaties, and Residential Schools. Any information that was shared was, much like those Bible stories, sanitized and removed of anything that might make us settlers feel uncomfortable.
Thankfully, as an adult, I am learning more about what imperialism and colonization really meant for Indigenous people on this continent. And, we have a responsibility to not retreat back to those sanitized stories of our childhood. That’s why I’m in support of taking action on the Queen Victoria statue in Victoria Park. It seems to me that by leaving the statue in the park, and continually cleaning up the red paint, that we are memorializing a sanitized history. We are putting the Queen on a literal pedestal and our solution to concerns around the existence of this statue is to place a sign beside the statue. It’s an odd thing to basically say, here is a thing that we know is hurtful, but we’ll add a sign to acknowledge that we are at least aware of that. I think we have a responsibility to do much more. But knowing how to move in that direction can feel intimidating.
It seems to me that we almost need some sort of 12 step program for settlers to help us take action. So, I took a look at the well-known ‘12 steps’, and I think we could update that for us settlers.
For instance we must:
Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admit the exact nature of our wrongs.
Make direct amends to people we have harmed wherever possible
Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.
Carry this message to other settlers, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Perhaps that’s a light-hearted way to look at this serious issue but I do think there is some value in those steps. And, we need to listen to individuals and communities who are most impacted by this statue and then, this is key, actually act upon those conversations. I think our governments do a decent job on providing opportunities to hear from residents, but our record for following through on that needs improvement.
In a recent piece in the Toronto Star, Ken Coates wrote, “Canada is desperately overdue for a rethinking of the many people and events we memorialize. Names and monuments should not be fixed for all time.” I agree.
I appreciate that staff say, “This engagement process will prioritize the voices of Indigenous, Black and racialized community members.” However, we have already been through this process with Wilmot. Do we really expect our results in Kitchener to be so drastically different from Wilmot that we need to engage in a year-long process ourselves - or can we learn from our neighbours’ experiences?
If we do proceed with a year-long process on this, I assume the statue will remain for that entire time. If that’s the case, I think we need to stop cleaning up the paint. Let us sit with the discomfort of paint on that statue. Or, as an alternative option, hire an Indigenous artist (or a series of them) to work with the statue over that period, encouraging us to reflect on the impact of colonization.
I want to end with a reminder of what we want to avoid, the continued memorializing of a sanitized history that is meant to serve as a comfort to some in our community while causing harm to others. In a recent Globe and Mail article, author Tanya Talaga says the following:
The truth has been buried so deep that it failed to make it into decades’ worth of textbooks, classrooms and university lecture halls. An entire history of the colonizers’ treatment of Indigenous peoples, and the truth about broken treaties, was erased. This denialism, over the years, served to ensure that generations of lawmakers, teachers, politicians, journalists and lawyers weren’t raised to know what happened, which led them to further perpetuate the myth that nothing did.”
Have you delegated at a council meeting before? If so, what advice would you share with someone considering taking this step? If not, what are some things that would make it easier to allow you to do so?