Pedestrians cross the intersection at Yonge and what was once known as Dundas Square in Toronto on Sept. 20.Sarah Palmer/The Globe and Mail
Toronto city council is truly a marvel. Last week, in the course of one session, it voted to name a stadium after a former mayor who made the city an international laughing stock, to remove the name of a long-dead Scottish politician from two subway stations and to name a public square after a Ghanaian folk saying no one had ever heard of. A solid day’s work, all in all.
Let’s start with its decision to name a stadium in the suburb of Etobicoke after Rob Ford. Mr. Ford (you may have heard of him) brought disgrace on the mayor’s office after he was caught on video smoking crack cocaine. He denied it for months, claiming he was the victim of a smear campaign, then abruptly admitted that he had used the drug, “probably in one of my drunken stupors.” The many scenes of the Ford drama – the ugly slurs, the drunken rants, the lewd remarks – put Toronto in the headlines all over the world.
And now city council wants to put his name on a sports stadium? Of all the people they could honour with such a gesture, the late Mr. Ford seems the least deserving. We usually name public buildings after admirable figures whose example we hope others will follow. Nathan Phillips Square. Jack Layton Ferry Terminal. Nelson Mandela, Terry Fox and Roberta Bondar public schools. What sort of message does Rob Ford Stadium send?
Council’s vote on Henry Dundas is equally puzzling. After the global reckoning with racism that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, Toronto council voted to remove the Scot’s name from Dundas Street, a prominent crosstown roadway. The ballooning cost, put at nearly $13-million, gave them second thoughts about renaming the whole street. But last week they decided to push ahead with taking his name off Dundas and Dundas West subway stations, as well as the Jane/Dundas library and Yonge-Dundas Square. A nice compromise, you might think.
Who needs the Beer Store or LCBO?
Except that the case against Dundas was shaky in the first place. Some say that his role in watering down an anti-slavery resolution in the British Parliament delayed the abolition of the slave trade for years. Others insist that he introduced an amendment calling for a “gradual” abolition because he knew that, as written, the resolution was headed for failure. The revised motion passed 230–85, the first vote for abolition in British history.
Three former mayors of Toronto have asked council to reconsider its decision, arguing that Dundas was “a committed abolitionist” who “was doing the best he could under challenging circumstances at that time in history.” Council covered its ears and ignored them. At last week’s meeting, Mayor Olivia Chow called Dundas’s actions “horrific.” She seemed to see no contradiction at all between cancelling Henry Dundas and honouring Rob Ford in the same week.
If that was confusing, then the new name choice for Yonge-Dundas Square was downright mystifying. With little notice, councillors voted to call it Sankofa Square. The motion put before them by councillor Chris Moise explained that sankofa is a concept, with roots in Ghana, referring “to the act of reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past which enables us to move forward together.”
A nice idea. Except that that word is unknown to 99.9 per cent of Torontonians and has no relation to the city or its past. This week the chair of the square’s board resigned over the decision, saying that the vote robbed the board and the public of an opportunity to say what they thought about it. Meanwhile, a petition against the renaming pointed out the inconvenient fact that the word sankofa comes from West Africa’s Akan people, who “were themselves avid slave traders.” Oops.
There is one further footnote to this embarrassing story. Toronto Metropolitan University has agreed to pay the city $1.6-million for the right to put a new name on Dundas Station. TMU Station, hardly music to the ears, is one option.
TMU itself went through a name change only last year. It used to be called Ryerson University, in honour of the 19th-century educator Egerton Ryerson, who laid the foundations for Ontario’s system of public schools. Protesters defaced and toppled his campus statue in 2021, claiming that he was a principal architect of Canada’s residential schools for Indigenous children. In fact, say his defenders, he had no direct role in founding the residential schools, even if his ideas influenced the actual founders. A friend of Indigenous peoples, Ryerson learned to speak Ojibway, lived among the Mississaugas of the Credit as a missionary and defended their land claims.
Like Dundas, in other words, he appears to have been falsely accused, the victim of an age that puts historical accuracy second to political orthodoxy.