Petition asks city of Toronto to rename Dundas Street

Thestar.com
June 11, 2020
Ted Fraser

A petition urging the city of Toronto to consider renaming Dundas Street has garnered nearly 3,800 signatures online as of Wednesday afternoon.

Andrew Lochhead, a Toronto-based artist who created the petition, said in an interview with the Star that he was inspired by calls to remove a monument in Edinburgh, Scotland, which also honours Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.

Edinburgh’s ‘Melville Monument,’ located in the city’s New Town district and erected in the 1820s, towers nearly 40 metres.

Lochhead says he was reading about the Melville Monument debate in The Guardian when he realized the connection to Toronto, and decided to draft a petition.

Henry Dundas’s legacy, reads the petition, is “highly problematic.” Over the course of his life, Dundas “actively participated in obstructing the abolition of slavery in the British Empire” and his actions “cost tens of thousands of lives, if not more,” says the petition.

“If we truly wish for our public street names and monuments to reflect our values and priorities we must consider engaging the public in the process of excising those names which are no longer worthy of our honour or respect,” it says. “Names such as that of Henry Dundas.”

Mayor John Tory was asked about the proposed name change on Wednesday morning during a flag-raising ceremony. The mayor said that, before this week, he was unaware of “why Dundas Street was called Dundas Street” despite studying Canadian history in university “a long time ago.”

“What I think is important is that, as we go ahead addressing the very legitimate issues people may have about that name or many other names in the city, we go about it all in a very thoughtful, considerate way.”

Tory said he’ll be looking at what the city can do, “knowing that there are justified sensitivities” in such a situation.

Later Wednesday, Tory said he has tasked senior city staff to report within 30 days on potential changes to city policies.

“We do have a street naming policy and a process to rename streets,” Tory said, “but I think in light of the context in which this particular street name has arisen, a broader and more in-depth examination and discussion is warranted.”

A separate petition calling for the removal of a statue of Egerton Ryerson, Ryerson University’s namesake, has attracted nearly 3,500 names as of Wednesday morning. Ryerson was a supporter of the residential school system in Canada, which aimed to forcefully and often violently assimilate Indigenous children into “Canadian” culture.

Lochhead says that he’s encouraged by the support for the name change. “I’m really excited to start a conversation around renaming the street,” he said. “I hope it will bring about real change.”

Public conversations to change street names in Toronto have happened before. Heritage Toronto’s plaques coordinator Chris Bateman said Jarvis Street is one of many that come to mind. It was named after a family that owned slaves and lobbied against the abolition of slavery.

“Toronto has a history of naming things after people, and it’s an interesting practice because it happened in the 1790s when this area was being colonized,” said Bateman, noting the practice still happens today.

“Over time, these street names become symbolic of injustices in the past, and not teaching anybody anything. That’s why there needs a public education component to this process.”

The city has a policy on the process of renaming streets, which involves an application to city council through its engineering and construction services.

Bateman said Toronto has changed street names in the past. He cited Blue Jays Way downtown as one of the more recent examples, which replaced an extension of Peter Street. The renaming happened in 1993 in honour of the Jays winning the World Series.

There has also been a practice of adding a subtitle to the existing street name, he said. That’s how a portion of University Avenue is named after Nelson Mandela, and last year city council unanimously voted to name a stretch of Bremner Boulevard Raptors Way following the team’s championship season.