The National Capital Commission (NCC) has announced that Ottawa’s Sir. John A. Macdonald Parkway will be renamed Kichi Zībī Mīkan, a move that is being criticized as “another ill-advised act of moral cowardice.”
NCC board members approved the new name on Thursday. This came after the commission announced its intentions to rename the parkway back in January.
“The new name references the Algonquin name for the river — Kichi Zībī — and the original name for the parkway, the Ottawa River Parkway,” said the NCC in a press release.
“It also highlights the importance of the Ottawa River as a great and abundant river that has provided for peoples’ needs for generations, just as it does today. The river has served to build relationships, connect communities, and allow people to relate to one another.”
The NCC says Kichi Zībī Mīkan was “selected through an Algonquin naming and engagement exercise” and that the approach “aligns with the principles of the new NCC Toponymy Policy and is consistent with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action related to language, culture and commemoration.”
The road by the Ottawa River was initially known as the Western Parkway or the Ottawa River Parkway. It was then renamed after Canada’s first prime minister in 2012 under the Harper government.
However, in recent years, activists have called for the parkway’s name to be changed due to John A. Macdonald’s involvement in the formation of Canada’s residential school system.
Not everyone is, however, supportive of the name change.
Scholar, policy expert and Macdonald-Laurier Institute managing director Brian Lee Crowley told True North the renaming of the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway is “another ill-advised act of moral cowardice by people ashamed by the history of this fine country and ashamed of the name of the man who, more than any other single individual, is responsible for the fact that Canada exists at all as an exemplary modern liberal democracy.”
Crowley does not believe the name change can be justified as an act of reconciliation with Indigenous people, noting “As former Senator Murray Sinclair, the man who headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, noted some time ago, the renaming of existing things smacks of revenge.”
“The point is not to plunge our history into the black hole of memory, but to expand our historical self-understandings to include things previously ignored.”
Crowley also said that “it is not Canadians who should be ashamed of Sir John A. Macdonald, but the authors of this small-minded gesture who should be ashamed of themselves.”
The NCC will hold a formal renaming ceremony on September 30th, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
