Stuff you can buy for three hundred thousand bucks: 35,294 foot-long tuna sandwiches at Subway, 600 gazebos from Home Depot, 7,300 copies of Liz Cheney’s new book, “Oath and Honour: A Memoir and a Warning’’, on Amazon (but don’t bother because it’s sold out, delivery unavailable until mid-February), 211 return flights to Paris and, since you’re going to be there, 300 decent tickets to one session of the track and field events at this summer’s Olympic Games.
And Dundas Square redux.
These are estimates, just as the lower-end guesstimate for renaming Dundas Square to Sankofa Square has been pegged at around $300,000. That’s just the piazza itself and a honking huge cost saving it is, given that the original price tag for the whole Dundas kit ‘n’ caboodle — street names, subways stations, libraries, signage, anywhere the dastardly D-word pops up — had skyrocketed to $12.7 million from an earlier projection of $8.6 million.
The cut-rate three hundred grand would come, purportedly, out of a Section 37 community benefits charge kitty, specifically funds allotted to local councillor Chris Moise — his ward’s share of money paid by developers for community benefits. Thus, taxpayers aren’t on the hook. Although, if there’s such a chunk of change sitting around to pay for worthwhile community redevelopment capital costs, I’d say just TNT-blast Dundas Square — ugliest, most uncomfortable paved urban expanse in Toronto — and try again. But esthetics have nothing to do with the endless interminable bickering over the appropriate cultural metamorphosis of the downtown gathering place.
Not to blind you with numbers, but of one figure we can be certain: 18.
That’s the number of times that the advisory committee tasked with culling a short list of replacement names for Dundas Square convened over the last two years. During the same period, upwards of 70,000 new condo units were built in the city. Construction of unsightly towers raced ahead while committee members pondered and reflected. (Note they’re not paid for their service.)
No wonder an exasperated Mayor Olivia Chow intervened a couple of weeks ago. As the Star’s Ben Spurr first revealed, Chow proposed the committee present just one (1) name, applying to the square, not the entire street shebang, which is where we’re now at: Sankofa. Three other names on the short list got ditched for the sake of expedience, which got up the nose of the committee’s chair and vice-chair, both of whom resigned, indignant that public consultation on the decision had been scratched.
Chow has been chastised in some quarters for ramrodding through the bureaucracy. We say: you go, girl. City hall is in a permanent state of deliberative stasis. Zipping across the clutter is laudable. There’s been entirely too much public tail wagging the dog in this matter, dating back to crafters of the original petition that got this internecine mess rolling, matched recently by another undo petition trying to roll the entire thing back.
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The three names that bit the dust all recognized Black historical personages who actually had relevance to Toronto: John M. Tinsley (born a free Black man in the U.S. who came to Canada in 1842, trained as a carpenter and millwright, and ran a successful construction company that employed men, newcomers who’d arrived here via the Underground Railroad), Chloe Cooley (held as a slave in Upper Canada in the late 1700s, her resistance to being resold across the Niagara River led to the first anti-slavery legislation), and Lucie and Thornton Blackburn (entrepreneurs and anti-slavery activists who founded Toronto’s first cab company).
Meritorious individuals worthy of boldface recognition, all. At the very least, they’re part of the city’s racial historical fabric, if the objective of rebranding Dundas Square was to acknowledge our historical past whilst facing up to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous history. The committee’s membership included Indigenous elders, Black scholars and business leaders from the Dundas stretch.
Yet they landed on Sankofa, which sounds kind of pretty but has precious little tangible resonance for Toronto.
All this by way of erasing Henry Dundas from the modern-day city, if not the record book. Because the 18th-century Scottish-born British parliamentarian may or may not have been a villain whose complicated legacy helped delay (that’s fact) the abolition of the transatlantic slave. Historians and activists are in disagreement about the calculated intentions of a politician who was personally an abolitionist. We’re not wading into that debate, with so much alleged misinformation coming from all sides.
A simple Google search, however, would have shown that Sankofa — the word — can be traced to a pre-colonial Ghanian tribe that itself trafficked in slavery.
We’re urged to ignore that troubling detail, spotlighting instead what Sankofa means in this particular context — a concept referring to “the act of reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past which enables us to move forward together,’’ as per the motion that approved by council on Dec. 14.
“The name means going back and going forward in a good way,’’ Moise tells me. “I’d rather focus on the word rather than where it comes from. Slavery has a complex history — it wasn’t black and white. Many people died during the transatlantic slave trade, many people died in Africa, because they would not comply with colonialism and slavery.
“I think we’re using a Eurocentric look at this — looking at it with a critical eye. I believe that the people on the panel, including Black expert scholars, felt that this name was appropriate for the times and I support that. We know that tribes in Africa, if they didn’t work with the Europeans, they would be slaughtered and enslaved themselves.’’
Moise stresses the “painful legacy’’ of Dundas. “He was the minister of immigration and slavery. He never stepped foot on Canadian soil but he had his proxies here who caused harm. Not only here but globally. Haiti…Jamaica…Guyana.
“We as Black people know our history and we know the generational harm caused by this man. People speaking up against the name change are those who don’t have … I want to say, direct effects of slavery. People of European background are the ones who have been the loudest and I’ve taken notice of that as well.’’
Total cost for the rebranding package plan is $2.7 million but Toronto Metropolitan University, née Ryerson — blandest name ever, changed two years ago to cancel Egerton Ryerson for his role as a primary architect of Canada’s shameful residential school system — has agreed to pony up $1.7 million to re-platform the Dundas subway station. If it’s named after the university. Muscle for money.
I think a lot of good people tried to get this really right. I think a lot of good people got it really wrong.
