Stephen Harper has snatched land long designated for a building to be named for Pierre Trudeau (father of Justin Trudeau, leader of the rival Liberal Party), and redesignated it to host a Stalinesque statue memorializing ‘victims of Communism.’
Not that Trudeau, Sr was any paragon of virtue — he’s the only leader in Canadian history to declare martial law and use it as cover to illegally raid the offices of his own opposition groups, allowing the secret police to get membership lists, internal correspondence, and other material without a warrant or evidence.
In an open letter to Stephen Harper, Barry Padolsky urges the prime minister to find a “more appropriate” location for the memorial, to be built on a 5,000-square-metre property on Wellington Street, next to the Supreme Court of Canada.
That site had long been designated as the future location of a new building for the Federal Court of Canada, called the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Judicial Building in government planning documents.
Padolsky says the Trudeau building — or another comparable structure — is the missing piece in a planned “judicial triad” that would include the Supreme Court of Canada Building and the Justice Building on its eastern flank.
Ottawa architect says government ‘stealing’ site for communism memorial [Don Butler/Ottawa Citizen]
(Image: trudeau-300, Charles LeBlanc, CC-BY-SA)
(Thanks, Dave!)