Montreal accused of ‘breaking faith with veterans’ as city’s Vimy Park is to be renamed for Jacques Parizeau

Montreal accused of ‘breaking faith with veterans’ as city’s Vimy Park is to be renamed for Jacques Parizeau.

June 22, 2016 12:58 PM ET

MONTREAL – City council has voted to strip the name Vimy from a Montreal park commemorating the landmark First World War battle and rename it in honour of the late Parti Québécois premier Jacques Parizeau.

After news of the proposed change sparked an outcry across Canada last week, Mayor Denis Coderre hastily announced that the city would find a new “public space” to honour the 1917 battle at which more than 3,500 Canadians died taking Vimy Ridge in northern France.

A combative Coderre denied that the removal of the Vimy name showed a lack of respect for veterans and accused critics of the name change of trying to exploit the issue for political gain.

“It’s not whether you are for or against Jacques Parizeau,” he told council before the vote Tuesday night. “It’s not whether you are for or against the veterans of Vimy.”

Coderre mentioned that he has visited the memorial at Vimy Ridge, that he attends Remembrance Day ceremonies every year and that during his career in federal politics he faced off against separatists. “I fought 30 years to save my country too,” he said.

Sterling Downey, one of two opposition councillors to vote against the name change, said he was saddened that it never occurred to anyone during the 11-month renaming process that removing the Vimy name “might actually insult somebody.”

When the change was approved in principle by Montreal’s executive committee and became public last week, veterans groups and historians were shocked. The Vimy Foundation, an educational charity, said the move, coming a year before the battle’s centenary, showed “historical amnesia.” Former Liberal MP Bob Rae called it an insult and the Royal Canadian Legion was flooded with calls and emails from angry members.

City Councillor Marvin Rotrand, who along with 50 others voted in favour of the name change, said the majority of the correspondence he received opposed any recognition of Parizeau, who fell just short of winning a majority in the 1995 sovereignty referendum. Rotrand said many people felt Parizeau’s referendum night speech blaming the loss on “money and ethnic votes” disqualified him from the honour.

“The life of a politician is longer than one day,” Rotrand said, hailing Parizeau as an architect of such provincial institutions as Hydro-Québec, the Quebec Pension Plan and the labour movement’s Solidarity Fund. Parizeau died on June 1, 2015.

During the public question period at this week’s council meeting, Norma O’Donnell questioned why the city thinks a politician is more deserving of recognition than the “true Canadian heroes” who fought at Vimy. She was not won over by the mayor’s promise of another public space to commemorate Vimy.

“It was there to honour our fallen soldiers, and that should be an honour never stripped from them,” she said in an interview.

Politicians in the borough of Outremont, which initiated the request, and in the Coderre administration failed to appreciate the emotional impact of renaming the park, which has been called Vimy Park for more than 80 years. “Should we have done this differently? Maybe,” Coderre said.

Outremont chose that tribute for Parizeau because he lived across from the park for more than 30 years. A plaque in the park honours his first wife, the writer Alice Parizeau.

Norman Shelton, president of the Royal Canadian Legion Quebec Command, said the legion would be satisfied with a new Montreal park containing a proper dedication to those who fought in Vimy. He faulted the city for not giving any thought to the impact of the change, which he said was felt right across Canada.

“It was just incredible. It never stopped,” he said of the response. “My branches were sending me emails like you wouldn’t believe.”

Jeremy Searle, the other dissenting councillor, quoted the poem In Flanders Fields, as he voiced his opposition Tuesday. “If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields,” he read.

“I consider the proposition here to be breaking faith with the veterans,” he said.

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