When you live in a large city, you find naming streets and places more difficult as time goes on. Proposed names have to be researched. Maybe not to the extent that the Roman church checks out its saints but you have to be wary of later embarrassments.
But I am sure many of us are sick and tired of this constant witch hunt for people in the past who might have made a mistake in judgement. I think this particularly relates to heroes such as Egerton Ryerson (1803 to 1882) and Sir John A. Macdonald (1815 to 1891).
I think those people running Ryerson University failing to charge the nincompoops who tore down Ryerson’s statue did far worse than anything Ryerson did in his lifetime. Defacing that statue was a criminal offense. Ryerson did a lot of good in his lifetime. He created Ontario’s public school system. He also helped design the residential school system and Sir John A. Macdonald signed off on it. And ‘Metropolitan Toronto University’ is a stupid name. I will just continue calling it ‘Ryerson.’
John A. and old Egerton did what they thought was a good thing at the time. They might not have been aware of a weakness among the Roman church’s celibate clerics. They failed to recognize the harm they were doing in separating the children from their parents and they failed to protect the children from their minders.
And it is hardly the worst mistake in Sir John A. Macdonald’s lifetime. He was not only a drunkard; he was also a conservative. Yet, he contributed a great deal to the founding of this country and deserves our respect for that.
But we need to do something about this naming problem. Maybe we would be better off if we just numbered streets and avenues. And you should only sell naming rights once. I miss a place called SkyDome in Toronto. The same for the O’Keefe Centre.
I remember one time when our council member in North York was telling us that a nearby nature walk was to be named after his mother. I told him that it would be wrong because she was still alive. He was even more annoyed with me when I said she still had time to rob a bank.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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