Andrew Cohen, April 27, 2010

Op-ed by Andrew Cohen (on the Wellington Street Proposal)

Views from Andrew Cohen

Published in the Ottawa Citizen, April 27, 2010

Apsley House sits on Piccadilly on the southeast corner of Hyde Park. It is a romantic pile, the home of the First Duke of Wellington, the celebrated soldier and statesman of 19th-century Britain.

Its glory is the Waterloo Gallery, groaning with portraits. It always dazzles. Here the Duke and his generals would gather for a banquet every June 18 to mark their epochal victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

You could just imagine it; these bemedaled, bewhiskered old warriors, raising their crystal glasses of Claret, revisiting their incandescent moment. Maybe they wondered how this "close run thing," as Wellington once said of Waterloo, might have gone the other way.

Here is history at full flood. Apsley House deserves its pride of place in this storied country. This is how proud peoples display their past, in art and architecture, in monuments, memorials and museums. It reminds them where they came from.

As an emblem of empire, Wellington, who was born Arthur Wellesley, was honoured in the colonies. The capital of New Zealand is named for him, as is a town in the Western Cape of South Africa, and Wellington County and the Village of Arthur in Ontario.

And so then we come to Ottawa and Wellington Street. Ceremonially, this is the most important thoroughfare in Canada. It is home to the National Library, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Bank of Canada, the Confederation Building, the National Conference Centre, the Chateau Laurier. Above all, it is home to Parliament.

Wellington never saw colonial Canada, which became independent 15 years after his death in 1852. Nor did he appear to have any association with British North America other than, perhaps, fostering a fondness among us for Wellington boots. So why should our grand historic boulevard, adorned with the temples of our experience, bear the name of Wellington? How does that speak to us? What does it say about us?

Rethinking Wellington Street, Bob Plamondon, an imaginative author and historian, proposes that we rename it in honour of Sir John A. Macdonald. His point is that it is more important to honour a founding father than Wellington (a reactionary parliamentarian who, incidentally, opposed the reform movement of the 1830s).

Besides, as Plamondon notes, Macdonald is largely invisible in our national capital. He has a modest statute on Parliament Hill. He is remembered in the name of the city's airport and a bridge over the Ottawa River - both of which he shares with Sir George-Étienne Cartier, an important figure but not the colossus who helped create and establish Canada as prime minister over 18 feverish years and six majority governments.

There is little else of Macdonald in Ottawa. For example, he isn't prominent in the Museum of Civilization; there is no Macdonald in toga in the main foyer like George Washington at the Smithsonian. Nor is his former residence in Ottawa open to the public, unlike that of Sir Wilfrid Laurier on Laurier Street.

Earnscliffe, as it is known, was sold to Britain in 1930. It is home to Britain's High Commissioner, who has graciously honoured the memory of Macdonald. Still, it would be a coup for Canada to reacquire that residence and make it a museum to Macdonald and his contemporaries (after the current occupants, the elegant Anthony and Clare Cary, depart at the end of their term).

Of course, that won't happen. But renaming Wellington Street for Macdonald is possible (though, as Randall Denley observes after surveying city bureaucrats, this is unlikely because "there is no such thing as a simple idea in this city." Actually, there is no idea at all in Ottawa.

Yet it would be a natural step for a country that has been vigorously asserting itself in political, social and constitutional ways since Vimy Ridge in 1917.

Oh, the critics will howl. One is my learned colleague, Dan Gardner, who excoriates Plamondon for his "very bad suggestion," which has "nicely illustrated the perverse relationship Canadians have with Canadian history."

Perverse is slavishly saluting a British general of the Napoleonic Wars -- not a monarch, not a governor-general, not an ally or an admirer (such as Sir Winston Churchill, who knew Canada well). It is the insecurity of an adolescent nation trapped in its neo-colonialism.

Would the Americans do this in Washington, where streets are named after states? Or, the Italians in Rome? Or the French in Paris?

Honouring our own isn't disowning our past. Let us remember that other street names in Ottawa -- Elgin, Buchan, Minto -- honour figures who, though British, are part of our story. In Montreal, let it be said, it was a mistake to change Dorchester Boulevard to Boulevard René Lévesque.

The Duke of Wellington? Let us be content to remember him with a good ale, in a good pub, every 18th of June.

Andrew Cohen is president of The Historica-Dominion Institute. These views are his own. E-mail: andrewzcohen@yahoo.ca